I used to wonder how it would have been to be a reader in the era of serialized fiction, when Dickens could keep an entire culture hanging on for the next installment, and ships arriving in America might be hailed, before anything else, with questions about how things fared with Little Nell.

This brings a whole new meaning to the concept of paparazzi.

... This territory thick with mobbed-up construction sites and toxic waste dumps turned out, unaccountably, to be a wonderland.

What began as the story of a potential healing became the description of the last stages of an incurable sickness. The images themselves darkened, as if the sun were removing itself permanently from northern New Jersey.