But the second half is the story of his retelling of that story, first in stray passages in his journalism, then in the articles that became the "Confessions," and later in many remarkable extracts from his autobiographical work.
And yet, apart from the restrained, intelligent, beautifully constructed opening pages and a few stray passages thereafter – a melancholy twilight walk in Manhattan; some billowing curtains settling into place at the closing of a drawing-room door – Gatsby as a literary creation leaves me cold.
(Although intonation strayed in certain soft passages, such lapses could be forgiven. Mr. Licitra said he could not hear the orchestra at such moments. Neither could I).
Regular slight trimming as well, you don't want it straying up to your nasal passages or caught in your teeth.
The bishops promptly backtracked on the document, rewording passages that seemed to stray too far from traditional teaching. .
The late 1980s and early 1990s offered grim passage, with toddlers hit by stray bullets and mothers and even an elementary school principal slaughtered in the cross-fire of gangbangers.
With ballooning brass lines and flashy double-time passages, Mr. Bashore's arrangement strayed far from the humble simplicity of its source material.
But while the novel does stray occasionally towards portentousness, it is saved by passages of extraordinarily evocative, intensely imagined descriptive writing, and an authorial deftness that infuses both plot and character with wit, humour and intelligence.
In this passage, never straying from the specific, Johnson moves from the banality of a child's toys and a happy family scene to the awfulness of the sickness that's become a familiar part of that scene: "And the child's toys, a posting box I remember being one of them, of plastic, different colors, and a big push toy, train was it?
It incorporated a goal from Samuel Eto'o against his former club and, in brief passages, the gathering sense that Chelsea were straying dangerously close to being caught by persistent opponents.
In one of my favorite passages (and one of the very few that strays from the creek), Gardner recalls a family vacation to North Carolina's Outer Banks, where he and a friend took his daughter, then a teen-ager, and two of her peers for a run on the beach.
