"Nothing would ever get me to leave here."

from The Plot Against America (207), Philip Roth

Since about three it had been squalling steadily, but abruptly the wind-driven downpour stopped and the sun came blazing our as though the clocks had been turned ahead and, over in the west, tomorrow morning was now set to begin at six p.m. today. How could a street as modest as ours induce such rapture just because it glittered with rain? How could the sidewalk's impassable leaf-strewn lagoons and the grassy little yards oozing from he flood of the downspouts exude a smell that roused my delight as if I'd been born in a tropical rain forest? Tinged with the bright after-storm light, Summit Avenue was as agleam with life as a pet, my own silky, pulsating pet, washed clean by sheets of falling water and now stretched its full length to bask in the bliss.

A nine-year-old love rhapsody for his home-street; it's more grown-up and luscious than anything, there's nothing nine-year-old about it. This is the power of Roth's prose, ebbing and flowing between childhood and grownupness, between the pungent rapture of New Jersey rain forests and silky, pulsating pet-lives concerning no puppies, no kittens, no scaly reptiles at all.