The book starts slowly, almost throttled in its cradle, with 21 pages of unrelieved homage to four mentors, most notably Jack B. Weinstein, the federal district judge in Brooklyn who presided over the Agent Orange case, and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, whom the author served as chief of staff.
The penultimate pages of "On Vanity" are an homage to Rome (and perhaps to himself, since he quotes in full the papal bull that made him a Roman citizen).
Reading the productions of this motley crew of Regency-sparked Frankensteins, one remembers the reflection of Lizzy Bennet's sardonic father: "For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?" For that reason, it's surprisingly gratifying, while turning the pages of P. D. James's homage, to find oneself laughing not at the characters but with them.
To some of his colleagues at the Lockheed Martin Corporation, Charles Thomas Burbage seems to have come right out of the pages of "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe's homage to the test pilots who broke the sound barrier and took the United States into space.
Perhaps warming to this theme, a bit later he confides that the closing pages of The Children Act contain an explicit homage to James Joyce's greatest short story, The Dead.
Inside the Ark, Margaret discovers peculiar rites of homage.
We climbed them as an act of homage.
So it's a kind of homage, in gratitude.
It's impossible not to see in these pages an homage to another magic realist, Gabriel García Márquez, and his benighted inventor, José Arcadio Buendía, who dreams of transforming the backward mountain village of Macondo into a model of progress.
It would be the greatest form of homage.
