There are acres of persiflage about walled gardens, but zip about stoops. The other thing to note about Garber's barrage of allusions and citations is how little she actually does with any of them. No matter how far one ploughs into this book, one never quite becomes accustomed to the sheer irrelevance of Garber's personal anecdotes, the blithe pointlessness of her free-associative digressions. But it is too sustained for that. Somewhere along the line, the dread possibility that this is Garber's authentic idiolect must be confronted.
Buyers are liars.
There are occasions on which Garber wanders, as it were inadvertently, into an interesting topic. There is something potentially rather interesting here about the sentimental arbitrariness of the preservation ethos. The moment that an architectural feature comes of age and earns the right to be protected is usually when it is old enough to have featured in the preservationists' misty watercolor memories of his or her own childhood. It is significant that the closest Sex and Real Estate ever comes to advancing an authorial idea occurs in a passionate defence of George Babbitt's middle-class materialism. This unique appearance of an angle is worth quoting in full.