the happy ending

“I envied them their dysfunctional and usually empty houses, their near-total lack of supervision.”

—ANTHONY BOURDAIN, “THE HAPPY ENDING” FROM MEDIUM RAW

Why it’s beautiful

He could’ve written this, which would’ve been correct as well:

I envied their dysfunctional and usually empty houses…

But adding “them” to absorb the verb “envied” puts the focus on the kids he’s talking about. He envied them. Their freedom was what he wanted, but they were the real object of his jealousy.

I don’t see this sentence structure as often anymore—I [verb] [object] [possessive pronoun] [noun]—maybe because people think it sounds literary, but I love it.

I also love that he placed a comma instead of the word “and” toward the sentence’s end. That’s the rhetorical device “asyndeton,” in which you purposefully omit a connecting word like “and.”