As we learn in the resumption of Cy's writing, Dom's son-in-law and a police officer entered the apartment and looked around.

The officer wasn't sure if he should treat the apartment as a crime scene: he was suspicious of the son-in-law's removal of Cy's manuscript, but let it go.

Try the super again"—  Now I'm writing again....Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, interruptions to raid the icebox or listen, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word `quarry,' and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds.

For example, The New York Times review by Lehmann-Haupt gives the subtitle as "Paraphrase", and similarly misspells the word in the above quotation from the novel.

[Note 4] The novel is highly repetitious (one analysis calls it "a verbal excess"),[4] with Cy amplifying the various back stories, in ways which emphasize, and sometimes are, the themes.

[5] The "connect-the-dot" puzzles that Al's father did are echoed in the characters with names barely more than A, B, C, D, E, F, etc., and which the reader is forced to "connect".

It first appears attached to two diagrams from Ted's geometry lessons, one of a parabola showing the curve as the locus of points equidistant from a focus and a directrix, the other as a cross-section of a cone.

[T]here is a coherence of development as absorbing as the squarest linear plot, a tension in the seeming randomness that keeps one leaping back and forth in time from scrap of incident to shard of memory as nimbly as an acrobat.

... [It all spins] together to generate an electric field that crackles with the vitality of contemporary American life.Conceived with high intelligence, lucidy and wit....Ancient History is really rather like a connect-the-dot puzzle stretched out over 300 pages: and it is to McElroy's credit that the reader wants to find the pattern embedded in all the cleverness and sticks with the novel, encountering along the way some dazzling literary designs and images.