Cadence: from rolling to percussive

Sticking with Francine Prose for a second day, we notice how she marvels at a change of cadence in Philip Roth's American Pastoral. She quotes a passage that starts with a rolling, 52-word sentence fragment and then switches to a salvo of "brief, percussive declarative sentences and fragments."

Ah yes, how we love to do that in corporate work. Like in this speech:

By Saturday the 15th, from every franchise east of the Mississippi, with their families back home still fearful of what might happen next and their loyal customers put on hold for however long it might take for them to return, we had hundreds of disaster recovery specialists inside the Pentagon, cleaning. Scrubbing walls. Scouring the louvers of every air vent. Unscrewing fluorescent lights and wiping them all down. Removing the residue of burnt jet fuel. They got it out of Donald Rumsfeld's office. They got it out of the Joint Chiefs' offices. They swabbed it off the walls of 17 miles of corridors. More than 300 of the best in the world at what they do, living in hotels hundreds of miles from home for seven weeks, putting in 70, 80 hours a week, wiping up soot. This is not glorified work. This is basic, repetitive, down-on your-hands-and-knees work. 

This is how Mr. Roth did it (remember: the cadence of the sentences, not the content):

The old intergenerational give-and-take of the country-that-used-to-be, when everyone knew his role and took the rules dead seriously, the acculturating back-and-forth that all of us here grew up with, the ritual postimmigrant struggle for success turning pathological in, of all places, the gentleman farmer's castle of our superordinary Swede. ... A beautiful wife. A beautiful house. Runs his business like a charm. ... This is how successful people live. They're good citizens. They feel lucky. They feel grateful. God is smiling on them. There are problems, they adjust. And then everything changes and it becomes impossible. But who is set up for the impossible that is going to happen? Who is set up for tragedy and the incomprehensibility of suffering? Nobody. The tragedy of the man not set up for tragedy -- that is every man's tragedy.