An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

Not every novel that wants to be a tragedy gets to be one.

I readily admit it is easy to make of horses what we will. Silent, in some ways reserved, they allow us to train them, and to project our ideas upon them; to ride and drive them, and to make them symbolic, perhaps to a greater degree than any other species.

If novels and stories are bulletins from the progressive states of ignorance a writer passes through over the years, observations and opinions about horses are all the more so, since horses are more mysterious than life and harder to understand.

The only siblings I have are half-siblings. My nuclear family would have been an extra-suffocating threesome. Instead, I have an interesting brother and sister, in-laws, and darling nephews.

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox.

Respect and fear are two different things.