[Paragraph 1] A novelist’s early stories use first-person narration, and critics often attribute their intimacy to direct access to a character’s thoughts. [Paragraph 2] The later stories feel even more intimate despite using third person. They achieve this effect not because the narrator reveals more private facts, but because the syntax closely follows each character’s shifting attention. [Paragraph 3] Intimacy, in these works, depends less on grammatical person than on the movement of perception through a sentence. A question asks