From time to time she looked out at the lights on the rippling black water, reflections from the New Jersey shore, saying nothing, revealing nothing. There was no phone, very little furniture, none of the habitual detritus of everyday life — magazines, books, CDs, discarded clothes — but the apartment was described in minute detail: hairline cracks in the high ceiling, every crevice in the old-fashioned kitchen, the monstrous dead roach on the stark white bathroom floor. Dale Martineau’s prose was unadorned, without rhetorical flourishes, cinematic in its method of setting a scene; more like a director, Loretta thought, closing the book and remembering that he taught film studies, than a novelist. At first the style had reminded her of Bret Easton Ellis, without the trademark violence, but as she turned the pages and nothing happened another comparison came to mind, those Sixties art movies in which someone set up a camera and left it rolling, regardless of whether there was anything to record.
