I think this is the best sentence in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland so far:
“Not knowing what to say, I got up and stood next to him, and for a while we surveyed, twenty-two floors down, the roving black blooms of four-dollar umbrellas.”
It makes me think of the poem that invented imagism. And it is raining today–has been since I woke up at 6 and killed a silverfish on the bathroom floor and thought, “At least the window sill isn’t covered in water and at least it wasn’t a cockroach.”
Little Stories 