Audit written to `output/critiques/claude/chapter_14.positive_prose.md`. Full audit text follows.

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# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 14: Catalogs

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | tier: risk
source text: `output/chapters/chapter_14.md` (revised), cross-checked against `output/drafts/claude/chapter_14.round_01.md`
standard of comparison: `premise/READING_GUIDE.md` §2 (warm/precise/lightly comic; plain-speech floor; feelings through object/action before naming; Odile alone licensed for high-density memorable lines), voice cards in `output/style_and_voice.md`
mechanical input: gate report 0 open / 66 WATCH; tic audit's surviving risk noted at lines 85, 103

Cold read, skeptical stance. The revision repaired most of the raw draft's narrator-philosopher glosses ("the gap had started charging rent," "dressed as a logistics question," "the case closed itself" are gone), but the chapter still carries portable fake-dating furniture, three narrator thesis-stamps, an Odile-grade maxim in Theo's mouth, and a repeating placement-figure no grep will catch.

## 1. Portable paragraphs

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "They looked like a couple. They looked, more to the point, like a couple who had stopped noticing the camera, and that was the problem with it as evidence: it was good." (line 13) — This is the fake-dating genre's stock midpoint beat — the cover photo too real to be cover — delivered as an anaphora-plus-epigram; it could appear unchanged in Christina Lauren's *The Unhoneymooners* or any fake-relationship contemporary, because everything before the period belongs to the trope, not to this book. The book-specific matter (the dropped brush at the bottom edge, the missed kiss and caught two seconds) is already in the preceding sentences and does the work alone. — ORDER: Cut the second "They looked, more to the point" sentence and the "that was the problem with it as evidence" verdict clause. Keep Theo on photographic fact; if a judgment must land, let it be the flat two words "It was good." standing alone, or let the thread's matter-of-factness (nobody asking if it was real) carry the verdict it already carries at line 15.

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "June read the way she painted: fast past the parts that didn't matter, dead stop at the parts that did." (line 105) — A balanced character-trait caption ("she did X the way she did Y") portable to any novel with a painter protagonist — it could open a paragraph of Tracy Chevalier unchanged — and it is made redundant by the next two sentences, which show the exact behavior (skips the essays, goes to plate lists and back matter). — ORDER: Delete the caption sentence; open the paragraph on "She skipped the essays entirely" and let the literal reading behavior carry the characterization it already carries.

PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH — "For a second they both held it. His hand stayed under the seam until her grip settled. Then the weight was hers, all of it, and his hands were empty." (line 143) — The shared-grip-then-empty-hands handoff is the genre's standard symbolic transfer of a meaningful object; the closing cadence ("all of it, and his hands were empty") could close a chapter of Josie Silver's *One Day in December* unchanged, and "all of it" is the underline telling the reader the weight is metaphorical. — ORDER: Keep the literal blocking (hand under the seam until her grip settles — that is real tote physics and real Theo) and cut "all of it, and his hands were empty"; end the beat on a literal fact of the handoff (the strap, the list of her shoulder, the slack in the canvas) and let the stockroom-gap paragraph at line 155 carry the emptiness, which it does better.

Strongest counter-candidate considered: "He squared the stack, eased the paper slip down flush so it wouldn't tear in transit, and added the one she'd set aside at her elbow so the run stayed complete." (line 135) — checked as possible generic competent-man-packing prose per the focused handoff hunt; it passes because every clause is welded to this chapter's props (the orphaned paper slip from line 87, the set-aside catalog, the complete run that will include the acknowledgment volume) and the care-arming-harm engine is enacted, not named: he is meticulously completing the instrument of his own exposure. No other novel can host the sentence without importing the props.

## 2. Summarized pressure

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "Neither of them said anything else about Tuesday, because she seemed to want it that way, and because the alternative conversation had no agenda, no end time, and no chairs." (line 33) — The first post-kiss conversation's central pressure — the talk they are both not having — is reported from managerial altitude and resolved into a polished tricolon; the reader is told the avoidance is mutual and witty instead of being made to live the moment Theo swallows it. The jar/cuff beat above it is the lived deflection (June's, and it lands); Theo's half of the avoidance never gets its on-page instant. — ORDER: Cut the explanatory "because... because..." machinery. Replace with Theo's restraint tell from the packet — he starts a sentence about Tuesday and converts it mid-breath to a practical line (the way he already does at line 55 with "I was trying to account for... No. I cut it down."), or cut directly to June's "Mara sent it," letting the unanswered subject be visible as a gap rather than narrated as one. The "no chairs" joke may survive only if it moves into dialogue.

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "and they both circled it for a few minutes. She said *after class* could mean six p.m. or eleven p.m. and those were different paintings. He said the chairs got stacked in fours, in case the chairs mattered. Neither of them put a pencil to anything... and he found that he was fine with unsolved. Unsolved meant more Thursdays." (line 63) — The first post-kiss collaboration — the scene where two people negotiate sharing one canvas — is compressed into indirect speech, and June's sharpest craft observation in the chapter (six p.m. versus eleven p.m. are different paintings) is paraphrased away from her; then "Unsolved meant more Thursdays" stamps the meaning of the non-resolution as an epigram. The chapter card forbids solving the joint piece; it does not forbid living the circling. — ORDER: Dramatize one exchange of the circling. Give June the six p.m./eleven p.m. line in her own mouth (it is exactly her register: one clean observation), let Theo answer with the chairs fact aloud, and end the beat on the untouched pencil — a literal object fact — instead of the "more Thursdays" gloss. The reader should infer that he wants the Thursdays from his failure to push for a decision.

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "The unspoken parts were in the hand that found the shelf without counting, in the Novembers of boxes." (line 85) — The narrator locates the secret for the reader after the prose has already dramatized it: "his hand went to the third one the way it went to light switches in his own apartment" two sentences earlier IS the unspoken part, shown. This closing sentence is the generic competent-man-in-dread move the focused check hunts — name where the dread lives instead of leaving it in the action — and it double-spends "Novembers of boxes," which recurs four lines later at line 89 ("every November he had spent carrying boxes for her"). — ORDER: Delete the sentence entirely. The paragraph ends on "He could say that." — a flat, true, insufficient alibi — which is stronger and already implies everything the cut sentence states. The November/boxes image appears once, at line 89, where it belongs.

SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE — "He told himself the showcase had made Odile generous, and knew it was the wrong explanation even as he used it. The wrong one let him keep working." (line 103) — The first sentence is legitimate Theo interiority (delayed recognition is his card's rhythm); the second sentence decodes the rationalization mechanism for the reader — it states the chapter's engine, logistics as shelter, in so many words, summarizing the pressure of his suspicion about Odile's motive instead of leaving him inside it. — ORDER: Cut "The wrong one let him keep working." The hard cut to the next paragraph — June reading, Theo picking up the legal pad and drafting pickup confirmations — already shows him taking refuge in work; the reader must catch him doing it, not be told he is.

Strongest counter-candidates considered (per the focused hunt on "public documents" / "he was helping" / the final inventory failure): the rationalization run at line 91 — "Public documents. Sold at the front desk for fifteen dollars, reviewed in print, shelved in libraries... There was nothing in a public document that wasn't public. June wanted label language. The catalogs were where the label language lived. He was helping." — passes because the pressure is performed in real time, not reported: the fragments are the math being run, the tautology ("nothing in a public document that wasn't public") is audible self-soothing, and the flat "He was helping." lets the reader hear the lie without the narrator flagging it. And the inventory failure at line 155 — "He got the first three and the faded one and then lost the thread. He knew where every key in this building lived. He could not have listed what had just gone out the door." — passes because the failure is enacted before the contrast (he attempts the list, retrieves three years plus the faded one, loses the thread), and both halves of the closing antithesis are literal facts, not emotion labels; the competence/failure contrast is earned by the dramatized attempt two sentences earlier.

## 3. Polished dialogue

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "Labels are not apologies." (Theo, line 71) — A four-word maxim, Odile-grade in density, in the mouth of the character whose voice card says he never produces polished aphorisms about care; the packet offered this line as an Odile option and it migrated to Theo, who is here too articulate about June's shame — he answers her exposed admission ("the label's going to be a refusal with my name under it") with a resolved epigram instead of a fumbled offer. Under pressure, Theo's card says he lists facts and converts feeling to logistics; the under-pressure version withholds the maxim and stalls into the practical. — ORDER: Strip the maxim from Theo. Either give him a started-and-converted line ("It's not a refusal, it's— I can pull examples.") or move the maxim to Odile, who enters on this exact beat and is the only character licensed to carry it; June's "That's roughly what I was saying" then lands on Odile's line instead of Theo's.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "It's just facts, but the facts are *chosen*. You can hear somebody deciding six p.m. mattered." (June, line 125) — Workshop-clean craft insight, fully theorized on first contact, with italic emphasis doing lecture-hall work; this is the chapter's thesis about labels (and the book's thesis about honest seeing) arriving pre-resolved in the mouth of a character whose card says she compresses when exposed and says the true thing sideways. The line would survive unchanged in any art-mentor novel — it is the discovery as a teacher would phrase it a week later, not as a lapsed painter would fumble it at the moment of finding. — ORDER: Keep the discovery, strip the formulation. Let her read the label aloud, read it again, and compress — something at the scale of "Six p.m. He picked that." — with the abstraction withheld; Theo's existing reply ("Choose the facts") must then be cut or roughened too, since it currently echoes her thesis back as a second polished beat.

POLISHED-DIALOGUE — "I'm bagging them like nine pounds of someone's career." (Theo, line 141) — A symmetrical retort-quip completing June's "bagging them like produce" setup; the volley is portable banter that any assistant character in any art-world romance could speak unchanged, and the wit launders the line's one genuinely loaded word — "someone's," which is Theo not saying "my aunt's" — into a punchline the reader receives as banter rather than concealment. The evasion should cost him fluency, not fund it. — ORDER: Break the parallel shape. Either he doesn't answer the produce jab and keeps squaring the stack (restraint as action), or he answers flat and literal ("They're heavy. Spines crack.") — and if "someone's career" is kept, it must arrive stripped of the rhythm that makes it a joke, so the dodge is audible as a dodge.

Strongest counter-candidates considered: "*Untitled (Stove)* is a title wearing a fake mustache." (June, line 111) — a quotable quip in a conversation already carrying flagged polish, but it passes: it is a visual joke (her card: visual nouns instead of feeling words), Theo answers it with a flat filing fact rather than a counter-zinger, and the deflection is legible as deflection per the plain-speech floor. Also checked the exit volley "Six p.m. chairs or nine forty chairs?" / "Both. I'll count both before Tuesday." (lines 149–151) — banter-shaped but built entirely from this chapter's furniture (the stacked chairs, the two times-of-day from the joint-piece circling), and Theo's reply is a literal commitment to a literal task, repaired in revision from the raw draft's too-neat "We'll choose the facts." It passes.

## 4. Figurative where literal

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "his own face turned toward her as if the room had slipped out of range" (line 13) — A soft camera-domain figure glossing what the photo shows, immediately made redundant by the literal statement one sentence later ("a couple who had stopped noticing the camera"); the figure decorates where a photographic fact would carry the dread better, since Theo is examining the photo as evidence. — ORDER: Replace with one literal fact of the image — where his eyes are relative to the lens, the angle of his head, what his hands are doing — and let the reader conclude the room had disappeared for him. (Note: the surrounding epigram is already ordered cut in §1; execute these together.)

FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL — "if you knew where it lived" (line 5) / "the catalogs were where the label language lived" (line 91) / "where the labels lived in neat gray columns" (line 105) / "where every key in this building lived" (line 155) — Four placements of the same figure: things "living" in locations. Once is Theo's spatial-inventory idiom; four times in one chapter is a texture tic the mechanical gate cannot see, and it dilutes the one instance that earns the figure. — ORDER: Keep exactly one — the keys at line 155, where the idiom is closest to natural speech and the sentence is doing climactic work. Literalize the others: the ghost "was still there if you knew where to look" (line 5); "the label language was in the catalogs" or simply cut the clause (line 91); "where the labels ran in neat gray columns" (line 105).

Strongest counter-candidate considered: "the oldest one's top edge gone the color of weak tea where fifteen summers of window had reached it" (line 87) — figurative twice over ("weak tea," the compressed "summers of window"), but it passes: the color comparison is exact rather than atmospheric, the cause is the literal sun-aging of a specific object, and the figure increases precision instead of replacing it — the test this section exists to apply. Also checked "faint as a watermark" (line 5): passes for the same reason, and the print-domain vehicle is native to a chapter about catalogs.

## Chapter verdict

LLM-CLEAN-FOUND — 12 findings, orders above. Concentrations: the flyer-photo paragraph (two orders, lines 13), the kiss-aftermath avoidance beat (line 33), the joint-piece circling (line 63), the stockroom dread caption (line 85), the Odile-motive gloss (line 103), the label conversation (three dialogue orders, lines 71/125/141), the handoff close (line 143), and the placement-figure repetition (four sites, one survivor). The chapter's strongest material — the rationalization run at line 91, the bagging mechanics at line 135, the failed inventory at line 155 — passes the focused hunts and must not be disturbed by the repairs around it.
