Written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_24.genericization.md`. Here is the completed audit document.

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# Audit: Regression-to-the-Mean / Genericization — Chapter 24 ("First Snow")

id: genericization_regression | owner: claude | tier: risk
trigger: sample:every-4th-chapter (24)

## Diff basis

- Pre-revision: `output/revision_snapshots/chapter_24/chapter_24.0001.20260704T234922Z.auto.md` (27,334 B — first auto draft, before any repair pass)
- Post-revision: `output/chapters/chapter_24.md` (23,268 B — current committed text; byte-identical to snapshot `0034 … after_positive_prose_round3_repairs`)
- Arc diffed: 0001 → 0034 (raw-gate, Claude-tic r1, dialogue-doctor r1, comedy-doctor r1–4, positive-prose r1–3). ~15% cut. Worked paragraph-aligned through all 37 changed hunks.

Reference frame: reading guide §2/§4/§5, Ch24 chapter card, voice cards, `output/tics.md` rows for `24 draft`.

## Critique-stance finding, stated up front

The revision arc for this chapter runs **against** the regression signature, not with it. Regression = *less specific + more exaggerated* (the portrait fades while the caption shouts "important"). This diff does the opposite: it strips significance-language, aphorism, announced-arc caption, and dialogue-diagnosis, and in several places **sharpens** a vague figure into a concrete painter-eye fact. I went looking, skeptically, for the "shout louder while the portrait blurs" move and did not find a single instance of significance-language *added* anywhere in the diff. The handful of genuine specific→generic lexical trims are motif-density and register management with no compensating inflation, and none touch the book-rooted specifics.

Book-rooted preserve-list (task-binding) — all eight intact in current text, none genericized in revision:
`After Class` (8×) · two underpaintings (label ln23 + Ruth ln51) · blue/cobalt dish (ln35–43, 79) · opening-night after-hours list (`Park, J. – Brennan, T. Last slot`, ln115) · faced-in Week-3 study (ln91–105) · CHECK-OUT clipboard/columns (ln85) · dirty rinse-water jar w/ cobalt lid (ln155, 161) · $800-by-Thursday (ln155, 161).

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## Category verdicts

### 1. Concrete details — HELD

Every named object, number, and idiosyncratic physical fact survives the cut. The riskiest concrete diff I examined, and the strongest candidate for a REGRESSED flag:

- PRE (¶ ln29): *"He'd have built Sam **a paragraph** a month ago: pentimento, the record of getting a thing wrong on purpose, the sermon. **Instead he let four words carry it** and went to top off a water jar that didn't need it."*
- POST (ln29): *"He'd have built Sam **an explanation** a month ago: pentimento, the record of getting a thing wrong on purpose, the sermon. **Now** he went to top off a water jar that didn't need it."*

Two real losses here: the specific noun "a paragraph" flattens to "an explanation," and the clever count "let four words carry it" (≙ "It's meant to lean") is gone. This is the one place the chapter trades a sharp particular for a duller one. It is **legitimate, not regression**, for three reasons: (a) "paragraph" as Theo's unit-of-over-explanation is a controlled motif, and the revision keeps its two strongest hits intact at ln73 (*"I had the paragraph loaded … carrying paragraphs around in my pocket all night"*) while thinning it from 4 uses to 2 — density management, not fade; (b) no inflation replaces the cut (the two-sided test needs *more exaggerated*, and the replacement is plainer); (c) "four words" is self-admiring cleverness the reader can still perform against the visible line. Same pattern, same ruling at ln141 (*"the paragraph she could watch him not reaching for"* → *"the answer …"*).

Counter-evidence that this category is genuinely held, not rubber-stamped — a concrete-detail **gain** at the collectors' beat:
- PRE (ln111): *"the Hallorans **parked wherever collectors go to wait for permission to want a thing**."*
- POST (ln111): *"the Hallorans **standing by Odile's office door with their gloves still on, not touching the wrapped drawings**."*
A generic art-world witticism became specific physical blocking (gloves on, not touching). Specificity up, not down.

### 2. Images and figuration — HELD

Riskiest figuration diff (odd image → stock gesture):
- PRE (ln57): *"**Ruth nodded like a receipt**, said, 'It's the best thing on the wall,'"*
- POST (ln57): *"**Ruth nodded once**, said, 'It's the best thing on the wall,'"*

"Like a receipt" is the more idiosyncratic image and "nodded once" is stock, so on the figuration axis alone this is a downgrade. Ruled **legitimate**: (a) the simile is semantically opaque (a receipt does not nod), i.e. cleverness over image; (b) the clerical/ledger register is over-subscribed in this exact chapter (ledger, CHECK-OUT form, records, "itemize") and has been under standing thinning orders across the book per `tics.md`; cutting a decorative clerical simile is register hygiene, not a faded portrait; (c) no inflation added.

Held because the strange, scene-grown images that carry the chapter were **kept or sharpened**, not swapped for stock:
- PRE (ln19): *"the dark she'd built up until **the room needed a way out of itself**."* → POST: *"the dark built up until **the doorway cut a hard edge through it**."* — a psychologizing figure became a concrete optical fact (June's painter-eye). Anti-regression.
- Underpainting-metaphor gloss *"a room remembering an earlier version of itself"* (ln19) cut — compliant with reading-guide §4 cap (metaphorical underpainting ≤ once/act); the literal pentimento fact (*"the first drawing surfaced under the last one"*) is retained.

### 3. Character texture — HELD

No character was flattened into likable competence or generic villainy. The two nuance-bearing cuts I weighed hardest:

- PRE (ln43): *"and Mara, **who two months ago would have translated that into a warm paragraph about how Luis always understood a space**, closed her mouth and let the dish sit there saying exactly what Luis wanted it to say and nothing extra."*
- POST (ln43): *"and Mara **had already opened her mouth. She closed it** and let the dish sit there, exactly where Luis had wanted it."*

The pre-text names Mara's specific arc (she over-narrates Luis); the post shows only the gesture. Ruled **legitimate**: the excised clause is announced-arc narration (reading-guide §5 bans captioning care moves), it re-invokes the Mara-cites-Luis motif that `tics.md` logged as capped ("no return to Mara-cites-Luis translation"), and the *behavior* — she starts to over-host, catches herself — is fully preserved. Texture shown, not told.

- PRE (ln127): *"reaching through a ledger instead of a sentence was **the last move of a woman who had never once said a true thing straight when she could arrange an object to say it for her**."*
- POST (ln127): *"**she had put the proof on a page instead of in a sentence**."*

The Odile character-thesis is cut to a plain contrast. **Legitimate**: it is narratorial poaching of Odile's aphoristic register (her quotability is capped; the voice card reserves the epigram voice for her), and the trait is *enacted* in the same scene — she turns the binder to the page rather than speaking it. Crucially, the reveal is **not** softened toward sympathy: *"no apology after it,"* *"I'm retiring, not dead,"* and June's refusal to absolve (*"It still wasn't yours to run"*) all survive. Same test passed at ln137, where *"a small woman folding the cardigan closer"* → *"folding the cardigan closer"* removes a frail-mentor size-cue (a genericization *risk*) while keeping the specific garment/gesture.

### 4. Dialogue particularity — HELD

The only substantive dialogue rewrite runs toward *more* particularity, not less:
- PRE (ln7): *"Sam Rivera, who took it black and **said the radiator sounded like it was trying to leave the building**, and she was laughing"*
- POST (ln7): *"Sam Rivera, who took it black. The radiator knocked. Sam tapped the cover once and said, **'Air in the east riser,'** and she was laughing with the cup still only half full."*

A general comic paraphrase became a direct, voice-marked line — an installer's technical diagnosis in his own mouth — plus concrete stage business ("tapped the cover once," "cup still only half full"). This serves the plain-speech floor (§2) and Sam's voice card (concrete room/space competence). Riskiest dialogue *loss*: Theo's *"'Like the room can hold it,'"* (ln69) was cut; ruled legitimate because the retained lines (*"They know we didn't start clean. Nobody needs the rest."*) are plainer and more direct, and *"the room can hold it"* was the more abstract of the two. No fumbling, voice-marked line was polished into an interchangeable well-formed one.

### 5. Inflation accompanying the fade — HELD (cleanest category)

This is where regression would announce itself, and it is conspicuously absent: **zero** significance-language added across the diff. Instead the revision systematically *removed* the "shout louder" layer. Proof:

- PRE (ln153): *"and thought, without meaning to, that **snow is the cheapest lesson in value a painter ever gets. It only reads against the dark.** Over the lit storefronts you couldn't find it at all."*
- POST (ln153): *"Over the lit storefronts she couldn't find it at all. It was falling there too; the glare swallowed it. **She had to look where the street went black.**"*

The on-the-nose painter-thesis (a significance statement dressed as insight) is deleted; the concrete perception that *implies* it is kept. Same move at the close:
- PRE (ln155): *"an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem, **and the snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there and got her wet, which is what snow does to a person who's made exactly the choice June made, and was right to make, and is going to be cold about it anyway until spring**."*
- POST (ln155): *"an eight-hundred-dollars-by-Thursday problem. **Snow found every place the sweater wasn't and melted there.**"*

The earned-stay thesis (restated *through* weather — precisely the §4 banned move) is stripped; the material fact ($800, sweater-not-coat, melting snow) stays. And the chapter's single largest cut is a de-inflation, not a fade:
- PRE (ln101): *"… **The seeing had been true the entire time the telling wasn't. Both of those.** She'd gotten good this fall at carrying two true things at once, Asha's cracked-open phone call and her own clean relief … **It was only the record that the looking had been real, hung in a stockroom facing a wall …**"*
- POST (ln101): *"He had looked at her like this, carefully, at value, with no need for her to turn around, **while he was deciding for her what she could stand to know.**"*

Note the one specific casualty here — the "Asha's cracked-open phone call" backward-callback — because it is the best available REGRESSED candidate. It fails the test: it was not swapped for something *more important-sounding* (the replacement is shorter and plainer), the load-bearing painter-particulars ("at value," "no need for her to turn around") survive, it is a Ch09 analogy not a plot load, and Ch24 is the terminal chapter so there is no forward continuity hazard. Cut of clutter under an explicit de-purpling order (criterion 6), not regression.

### 6. Legitimate-edit check — PASS (no flag survives it)

Every cut I examined maps to an explicit revision order, a reading-guide ban, or a `tics.md` repair, verified against both:
- "whole" family removed (`whole apartment/confession/architecture/thing`) — Claude-tic repair, `tics.md` ln413.
- Weather-as-feeling thesis lines cut — reading-guide §4 ("weather as on-the-nose emotional underline"), `tics.md` ln414.
- *"That was the sentence"* (ln43) and Priya delivery-caption (ln45) removed; *"Plain, no cushion under it"* (ln129) removed — §2 zero-tolerance dialogue-diagnosis, `tics.md` ln415.
- *"painted side keeping its own counsel"* (ln91) removed — previously-repaired portrait-thesis caption (`tics.md` ln360).
- Announced care-moves cut (Theo *"making himself necessary so quietly it read as standing still,"* Mara *"would bring food to a house fire,"* Sam *"leaving it one person wider,"* Theo *"held the door … by keeping it shut, the version of door-holding he was learning"*) — §5 "never caption them"; each behavior is enacted elsewhere in the same chapter.

No flagged loss is a loss of *value-bearing* specificity once checked against the guide.

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## Book-specificity verdict (task focus)

Does this ending belong to *Eight Tuesdays* specifically, or could it be any warm art-class romance? **Specifically this book — and the revision widened that gap rather than closing it.** The generic-ending vocabulary an editing model would drift toward is exactly what got deleted:
- Found-family: no "these people had become her family"; every payoff is welded to an owned care-move and a named object (empanadas + blue-dish routing, Luis placing the dish four inches, too-milky coffee + April, off-level flyer tape, "Air in the east riser," Ruth's two-word read).
- Romance: closed-door, consent-specific ("his hands staying where they were"), dry ("she liked him so much in that second it was faintly annoying") — no swoon abstractions.
- Art-healing: the portrait beat is pure craft (value, half-step, shoulder out of shadow, quarter-face) and the stay is costed in $800/Ridgewood/Kessler, not "art saved her."
- City/snow: Orchard Street, freight door, the L, Ridgewood — and the snow reads *against the dark* as optics, not "the city that never sleeps." The single most generic-prone line (snow-as-life-lesson) was the one cut.

## REVISION ORDERS

None. No category REGRESSED; there is no pre-revision specific to restore and no compensating inflation to strip (category 5 added none).

Two lexical trims are logged as **watch-only, not orders** (no restoration warranted): `paragraph → explanation` (ln29) and `paragraph → answer` (ln141) — acceptable motif-thinning while the "paragraph" motif remains intact and concentrated at ln73; and `nodded like a receipt → nodded once` (ln57) — acceptable clerical-register hygiene. If any *future* touch re-expands significance-language or re-thickens the clerical simile register around these points, re-open.

## OVERALL: HELD
