This is a deeply affecting book, and despite its gritty prose, colourful language and hardboiled trappings, a tender one, its sustained undertow of tenderness and melancholy giving it a surprising delicacy.
What we behold is a young artist trying to make sense of his world by laying bare contemporary language and its trappings.
Taking the challenge head-on, recent versions of expressivism, flying the banner of "quasi-realism," have taken as a central project explaining, on non-cognitivist foundations, how and why moral language has all the trappings of being cognitivist and realist.
In an interview with The Guardian, Johnson said he was put off by Trump's "campaign to reality TV and large crowds and divisive language and all the trappings of a good show for those who like that kind of approach, and that's what happened in the 1930s in Germany".
But neither of these magnificent trappings comes close to the language used in the press release.
The vastness of the landscape, a population of immigrants with different cultures and languages, a federal bureaucracy that lacks the magisterial trappings of monarchy — this is a country that needed something to unite it, and, however improbably, Ozersky convinces us that the hamburger has done just that.
Whether we find this borrowed style effective must largely depend on how far we can accept the artifice and how seriously we can take the Gothic trappings -- for the trappings and the language go very closely together, the one seeking to validate the other.
Many in this new generation of nationalists shun the trappings of old-fashioned white supremacy, appropriating the language of multiculturalism to recast themselves as white analogues to La Raza and other civil rights organizations.
His prose is heavily metaphorical yet coolly ironic; it traffics in the language of scholarship, myth and history, and until now has forsaken the conventional trappings of narrative.
Cloaking creativity in the language of commerce seems anathema, but this was electroclash baby, it was all about the trappings of wealth and playing around with the concept of affluence.
