# Positive Prose Audit — Chapter 21 ("Prying Loose / Faced to the Wall") — Round 1

id: positive_prose_audit | owner: claude | chapter: 21 | round: 1
Inputs: `output/chapters/chapter_21.md`; READING_GUIDE §§1, 2, 5, 6, 8; voice cards (Theo Brennan, Odile Marchetti, June Park); CHAPTER CARD - 21; quality_gate_report (WATCH: tells-2.1-hands-body x16, reddit1-repeated-descriptor x15, trailing-participle x5); codex performance_check / specificity_test / interchangeability_test.

Note on prior audits: all three codex passes returned clean, but the interchangeability test quotes a soup line ("not eating it would have been a performance with an audience of zero") that is not in the current chapter text ("He ate the soup because it was there."). Those verdicts were rendered against an earlier draft, at least in part. This is a fresh cold read; it dissents on fourteen lines.

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## 1. Which paragraphs feel portable to another novel?

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "He waited for anger to come and do the work, and it did come, but it came the size it actually was instead of the size he needed." — Free-floating emotional metering with no object, no stockroom, no Theo in it; it could appear unchanged in *The Midnight Library* or any contemporary novel of male self-reckoning. — ORDER: Keep the beat (undersized anger is why he begs for absolution instead of raging) but weld it to the scene: cut the abstract sizing sentence and let the size register in the accusation list itself — he starts the list of what he did (tape, labels, installation shots) and hears it come out at inventory volume, not fury volume.

`PORTABLE-PARAGRAPH` — "It did not flatter her or prove anything except that on a Tuesday in October a woman had paused in a doorway and a man had seen it." — The "a woman... a man" generalizing cadence is the stock verdict-sentence of the artist-redemption novel — it could close a restoration passage in *The Goldfinch* unchanged — and it grades the painting's ethics that the next two sentences already prove. — ORDER: Cut the verdict sentence entirely; "The door stayed half open. The unpainted cheek stayed unpainted." is the whole content of the deleted line and must stand alone as the paragraph's close.

Checked and passing: "He ate the soup because it was there. Then he worked, because the building didn't stop needing things just because he had opinions about needing." — considered as portable; survives because "opinions about needing" is Theo's need-inventory vocabulary in the book's lightly comic register, and the sentence resolves immediately into named tasks (frame stock, humidity log).

## 2. Where does prose summarize pressure rather than make the reader inhabit it?

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "The shame arrived while he was still lifting out the third volume, late and riding in on the task." — Names and timestamps the emotion from managerial altitude before the paragraph earns it; the shame already lives two lines later in "his thumbs kept checking the headcap anyway because they didn't know what else to be." — ORDER: Cut the topic sentence (or strip it to the physical onset) and open the paragraph on the 1994 in both hands; the thumbs line is the shame and needs no advance announcement.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "She had built a route whose entire point was that no message from him would be required at the end of it. The text he wanted to send was not information. It was a foot in a door." — Narration re-derives the consent logic the loan sheet already dramatized ("*8 rtn'd 12/4, via R. Kim / S. Rivera.* Not via J. Park.") and caps it with a stock door idiom; this is the text-consent stress point and it fails by over-explaining Theo's progress to the reader. — ORDER: Cut the whole explanatory run — "whose entire point was," "not information," "foot in a door" — and keep only the formed reflex-text in italics plus the two literal actions (clipboard back on nail, phone left in coat); the refusal must be visible as behavior, not argued.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "because at least asking plainly was one honest act available to him this morning" — The narration captions the plainness of the ask before the ask lands, crediting the character's honesty on his behalf. — ORDER: End the sentence at "and he asked for it anyway." — "I need you to tell me it wasn't my fault" carries its own exposure without a virtue footnote.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "he narrowed the angle until the geometry said what the night had said, which was that she had not decided yet" — The trailing clause states the "maybe" a third time (after "the angle undecided" and "It had been a maybe"); third telling is explanatory shorthand riding on top of finished work. — ORDER: End at "what the night had said." — the carpentry (the reveal, the switch plate, the strike plate's vertical gleam) is doing the inhabiting; trust it.

`SUMMARIZED-PRESSURE` — "He knew what the old version of the evening did next. The old version wrapped it, ran it across town, held it up like a receipt: *look what I made, look how well I saw you, subtract this from what I owe.* The painting as freight, one more useful delivery, with June on the receiving dock whether she'd asked for the shipment or not." — A composed four-sentence essay in which Theo audits his own failure mode through a fully worked extended metaphor; his voice card says he is least articulate with himself, and here the growth is narrated instead of enacted. — ORDER: Compress to impulse-plus-refusal in objects: his eyes go to the glassine and the tape roll, or his hands start the first wrap fold, and he cleans the palette knife instead; keep at most one clause of the old-version voice, not the receipt monologue.

Checked and passing: "Sunday was two days away and he was not going to spend them building anything." — considered as narrated progress; survives because "building" is his established preparation vocabulary, the sentence sets a constraint, and the closing scene then honors it in objects ("both hands empty").

## 3. Where does dialogue sound polished, therapeutic, aphoristic?

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "That is true. That is mine." — Odile's confession lands in modern accountability cadence — fault "owned" in two groomed beats — when her actual ownership act in this scene is material: walking back in and initialing the loan sheet; the spoken version is too composed about culpability and pre-resolves what the scene should leave rough. — ORDER: Cut to "I thought about it less than I should have." full stop, and let the *O.M.* initials be the only ownership; if she must answer "You didn't think about what it would cost her" further, give her a materially true partial (what she did, when), never a verdict on herself.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "I put public paper where hands would find it on purpose." — Odile speaks the book's hands motif — the narrator's theme vocabulary in her mouth — turning a true partial into an epigram; her card's diction is material (paper, printer, shelf, eat), not motif-laden, and the mechanical gate already has hands-body at WATCH x16 for this chapter. — ORDER: Strip the figure — "I put it where you would find it. On purpose." or equivalent; the admission stays, the theme-speak goes.

`POLISHED-DIALOGUE` — "and he watched the words appear, recognized the species, and deleted them back to nothing" — "Recognized the species" is narration characterizing a sentence's type — the caption move §2's zero-tolerance rule exists to kill, aimed inward; the mid-word cutoff "*If you'd rather not, I completely under*" already performs the recognition. — ORDER: Delete "recognized the species," — "watched the words appear and deleted them back to nothing" is complete; the cutoff mid-"understand" does the diagnostic work.

Checked and passing (stress target — Odile's true partials): "I sent you for nine catalogs.", "I opened the door. There was nothing to sign.", and "You will be less convenient." — each considered; each survives because the deflection is materially followable and visible as deflection, with no moral thesis attached. Theo's boundary speech ("I'm keeping the keys. The freight, the condition reports, the loan sheet... You don't get to send me with a box again.") was considered as pre-resolved; it survives because it follows his card's stress arc exactly — list of facts first, then plain — and "out loud, with your own mouth" carries anger grain, not polish.

## 4. Where would literal precision beat figurative language?

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "a book his own carefulness had carried into June's apartment like a lit fuse" — Stock detonation simile pasted onto a harm that was specific and quiet (a printed acknowledgments page); the borrowed image blurs the actual damage. — ORDER: Cut "like a lit fuse" and end the clause at "June's apartment" — the indictment is the carefulness itself, and the thumbs/headcap clause that follows is the correct landing.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "because logging it had felt like closing a door he wanted to pretend was still open" — Stock door idiom that spends the chapter's literal door motif (the study's repainted door angle is the payoff) as explanatory shorthand three scenes early. — ORDER: Replace with the literal refusal — what he could not stand to write: entering one returned meant the column would now be counting what was still out; keep every door in this chapter a physical door until the painting.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "every time he had passed it the blank had said what blanks say" — Recursive cleverness that withholds the literal accusation the object was making. — ORDER: State it — nine out, one back and unlogged, nothing from her in two weeks — or cut the clause; the blank column plus the dates is the pressure.

`FIGURATIVE-WHERE-LITERAL` — "painted side keeping its own counsel against the brick" — Personification re-decorating a fact stated plainly two paragraphs earlier ("no one could see it"); the closing look-back needs the object, not an idiom of discretion. — ORDER: Replace with the literal image — painted side against the brick, stretcher bar and pencil label out; the label legible from the doorway is the point and is already on the page.

Checked and passing (stress target — portrait section): "he was not going to invent a cheekbone he'd never witnessed just to close a shape" and "So he painted the light doing that" — considered as candidate cleverness; both survive as literal craft decisions (edge knowledge, wet-drag into the ground) that enact the consent ethic instead of stating it. "He did not put it in a crate." survives as a literal negative action that closes the freight logic without commentary.

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## Revision orders (recap)

1. Cut the anger-sizing sentence; put the undersized anger in the volume and shape of Theo's accusation list.
2. Cut "It did not flatter her or prove anything..."; close the paragraph on the two literal door/cheek sentences.
3. Cut or physicalize "The shame arrived..."; open on the 1994 in both hands.
4. Cut the route-explanation and "foot in a door" gloss; keep reflex-text plus clipboard/coat actions only.
5. Cut "because at least asking plainly was one honest act available to him this morning."
6. End the door-repair sentence at "what the night had said."
7. Compress the "old version of the evening" essay to impulse-plus-refusal in objects.
8. Reduce Odile's confession to the true partial; ownership lives in the *O.M.* initials, not "That is true. That is mine."
9. Strip the hands motif from Odile's "public paper" line.
10. Delete "recognized the species."
11. Cut "like a lit fuse."
12. Replace the "closing a door" idiom with the literal logging refusal.
13. Replace or cut "the blank had said what blanks say."
14. Replace "keeping its own counsel" with the literal painted-side/brick/label image.

Chapter verdict: `LLM-CLEAN-FOUND`

LLM-CLEAN-FOUND
