“A hit. A very palpable hit.”

Bell’s friend at the Graybar Building is quoting Shakespeare, of course; and for no other reason than he likes to quote Shakespeare. There are no glosses on Hamlet in this book (in spite of its focus on father-son relationships). There are, however, multiple characters who are simply very literate, and who quote their favorite authors for the sheer fun of doing so.

To start with, there’s Bell himself, whose best friends in the army were “Brother Lead and Sister Steel,” borrowed from Siegfriend Sassoon’s The Kiss; then there’s Walton, taking his cue from Kipling’s Danny Deever, using the terms “color sergeant” and “Files-on-Parade” to describe Bell’s job for Rockefeller; then there’s Pooch, whose “chiz, chiz, moan, groan” invokes Geoffrey Willans’s (and Ronald Searle’s) Molesworth, in a conversation that also includes a self-comparison to Paddington Bear.

By happenstance alone, those are all British authors, but American writers appear, too; sometimes in ghost form, sometimes on the page. If people wish to recall Sal Paradise as they read the story of Sal Pacinetti, they can do so; if they wish to recall the name of another famous ad-man (“We keep them clean in Muscatine”) in the name of Chandler Scott Peterson, they can do that, too. If they take actual notice of Buckminster Fuller and Alvin Toffler in these pages, they are correct. And we can end this line of inquiry in Hell’s Kitchen, at midnight, where “it felt fine for them all to be tight together, and for Kahn to be nowhere in sight.” Words that echo Hemingway in not just diction, but also theme; because even though Hemingway never wrote about Bertie Kahn, he wrote about Robert Cohn, instead, in a book called The Sun Also Rises-- his title, a direct quote from Ecclesiastes.