How to Land a Sentence in One Sentence: Robertson Davies’s FIFTH BUSINESS

I freaking adore Robertson Davies, and Fifth Business is still as captivating as when I first read it—as captivating and as slippery: take this pretty standard Daviesian sentence, not even that showy or periodic, just like low-key prosy; I’m a sucker for any bit of prose that goes on and on, like this one does, and the key is often in some kind of poetic turn near the end, a stinger or a punchline to whatever embedded joke the writer is setting up, and the joke here is all the insistent dullness both in what’s actually going on (the husband is away, the children are off to school, so the house is empty), and then you have all the dreary qualifiers (“lifeless,” “demoralized,” “undemanding”) as well as in the thudding consonance of the B’s (“Boy” & “both” & “barrack” & “became”), all of it just deliberately blah, and then you end with this unexpected reaction to all the blahness, the wife being “afraid of them,” an effing brilliant and funny lil coda.