Chronic City??? final thoughts

[Jeremy Forrest]

I'm about halfway through The Corrections now...just encountered this on
page 272 of the first ed. hardcover:

"Unfortunately, metal in its free state - a nice steel stake or a solid bras
candlestick - represented a high level of order, and Nature was slatternly
and preferred disorder. The crumble of rust. The promiscuity of molecules in
solution. The chaos of warm things. State of disorder were vastly more
likely to arise spontaneously than were cubes of perfect iron. According to
the Second Law of Thermodynamics, much *work* was required to resist this
tyranny of the probable - to force the atoms of a metal to behave
themselves."

A direct reference to entropy, and I can detect as much when comparing the
children's upbringing to how they view life as adults.

Despite this, I'm detecting more of an *As I Lay Dying* parallel, what with
the quickly fading patriarch with little narrative input and the divergent
views of the other characters whose backstories are being filled in.
 However, I *am *still only halfway through the book, so perhaps the next
280 or so pages will change my thoughts.
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