The High Style of the Hater

He was, by that point, settled into his middle-aged frame: not so much stout as softly rounded off, a slow gravitational sag sloping all his angles into rondure. A kind of carriage — a word whose antique tang I imagine he’d have relished — that he would jokingly allude to in his fiction and with which he’d afflict his not dissimilar protagonists. (A fact-checker for the New York Review of Books once inquired of his university if he was, in fact, “fat.” Not when I started the book, he quipped.) A sedentary physique, let’s say instead. His biggest book begins with the words “Life in a chair,” and you could still see a chair’s shaping effect when he stood to lecture, which was, more or less, his paying job. A large round head with strikingly alert eyes, owlish when the glasses he wore around his neck were put on; he could pass, maybe, for an unbearded, still youngish Santa but for a colder glint to the eyes, something Calvinistically forbidding, not easily given to pity.