Intelligent, effortless fiction at its best

E than Canin is one of those renaissance-man writers who seems to know everything. He knows how a Wall Street quant can “turn a remarkable profit in the nanosecond it took a cesium 133 atom to oscillate a bare handful of times between energy states”. He knows that the unfilled space at the top of a plastic bottle is called “ullage”. He knows about “the quartzite underpinnings of the Allegheny foothills, which mark ...