To follow up on my post quoting Michael Chabon's love of similes (Michael Chabon -Champion of Similes & Metaphors) blogger Eric Rosenfeld quotes one of the triple tropes that the editor of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union didn't feel compelled to streamline:
He rides down in the elevator feeling as if he has stepped out from under the onrushing shadow of a plummeting piano, some kind of jazzy clangor in his ear. The knot of his gold-and-green rep necktie presses its thumb against his larynx like a scruple pressing against a guilty conscience, a reminder that he is alive. His hat is as glossy as a seal.
Rosenfeld admired the similes but did express "a little simile fatigue." Imagine how he would feel about my favorite example of unrestrained comparative excess comes from Donald E. Westlake’s The Fugitive Pigeon which works not only because it’s genuinely funny but because it successfully links all the extensions to the play on the character’s name:
“(Up till then I’d assumed that Gross was the man’s name, but it was his description.) He looked like something that had finally come up out of its cave because it has eaten the last phosphorescent little fish in the cold pool at the bottom of the cavern. He looked like something that better keep moving because if it stood still someone would drag it out back and bury it. He looked like a big white sponge with various diseases at work on the inside. He looked like something that couldn’t get you if you held a crucifix up in front of you. He looked like the big fat soft white something you might find under under a tomato plant leaf on a rainy day with a chill in the air.
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