Huh. Okay, let me see if I can find a representative passage, that is simultaneously very well written, and annoyingly full of platitudes.

Her talent was as a poetess. She had published anonymously a slim volume of poems called Between Timid and Timbuktu. It had been reasonably well received.

The title derived from the fact that all the words between timid and Timbuktu in very small dictionaries relate to time.

But, well-endowed as Mrs. Rumfoord was, she still did troubled things like chaining a dog’s skeleton to the wall, like having the gates of the estate bricked up, like letting the famous formal gardens turn into New England jungle.

The moral: Money, position, health, handsomeness, and talent aren’t everything.

Malachi Constant, the richest American, locked the Alice-in-Wonderland door behind him. He hung his dark glasses and false beard on the ivy of the wall. He passed the dog’s skeleton briskly, looking at his solar-powered watch as he did so. In seven minutes, a live mastiff named Kazak would materialize and roam the grounds.

“Kazak bites,” Mrs. Rumfoord had said in her invitation, “so please be punctual.”

Constant smiled at that—the warning to be punctual. To be punctual meant to exist as a point, meant that as well as to arrive somewhere on time. Constant existed as a point—could not imagine what it would be like to exist in any other way.

Six paragraphs, some witty remarks, a throwback to a remark (like a good comedy routine), and several observations that sound like they could be made as part of a valedictorian speech if written by ChatGPT.

“To learn my teachings, I must first teach you to learn.” No, wait, that was the Sphinx from Mystery Men. ;)