The prose moves with a jazz rhythm: syncopated, sometimes messy, always alive. Sentences are short when the action tightens, long and languid when Roy lingers over a memory he doesn’t want to forget. There’s an intimacy in these pages that borders on intrusive; the chronicle refuses to let Roy be purely heroic or purely defeated. He’s practical and sentimental, abrasive and solicitous. He keeps receipts as a way of parsing days. He loses people and finds other fragments in their stead. The portrait is not neat. It’s insistently human.