New York Times, Wednesday, May 13, 2020

As I recall, this idea came after completing Howard Barkin's Sunday puzzle that gradually zoomed out from ANIMAL HOUSE, ON EASY STREET, etc. until its revealer GOOGLE EARTH. I sought a well-concealed progression with a snappy revealer and was working my way up from LETTER to BOOK for the longest time. The theme didn't seem worthwhile, though, until I zoomed out more and found OEUVRE hiding at the end of the last themer. Tying the progression up with a profane confederation of vowels seemed like the sort of thing a solver might enjoy. After triple-checking the French spelling, the puzzle came together.

The grid is a bit name-heavy and has a few warts holding it together, but hopefully the good outweighs the bad. Thanks to Will and company for polishing up the clues and keeping a couple of my favorites (26-D, 47-D). In these tumultuous times, I'm delighted to contribute a few minutes' diversion to the world. At minimum, I offer up the puzzle as a belated Mother's Day gift to my dear mom, Chris, who has always been a voracious reader and willing francophone.

You would think that a writer who locks himself in his writing cave day after day, pounding out words that are mostly crap but maybe just maybe a few of them are halfway decent and if he's lucky he'll one day have an OEUVRE of works that generations use as doorstops and/or toilet paper, would figure out this theme right away.

Of course! It's the story about a burglary in a SORORITY house, the job pulled off by a Scot named MAC, using knowledge of FIBONACCI numbers to crack the SAFE's code. Oh, and don't forget the HORSE that he uses in the complex scam.

HORSE D'OEURVE might just be the worst menu typo ever.

While I jest about the heist, the five minutes I strained, trying to figure out the theme, was no joke. There's an eternal debate, whether crossword constructors should bash their solvers over the head with a revealer, or if allowing them to work out the concept on their own is better.

In the end, I greatly appreciated working out the novel (ha) progression, PASSAGE to CHAPTER to BOOK to SERIES to OEUVRE. Tough to discover, though, and I wonder how many general solvers will toss the puzzle aside without ever understanding the clever concept.

The clue for EGS didn't help, either. I fixated on that, sure that it must be a revealer — especially since one of those e.g.s was in a clue for the last theme answer. Come on!

I finished with an error, with OPENENDED / AVEDY. Given its clue, I couldn't imagine that OPENENDED could be anything but that, and if Aveda and Aveeno are brand names, why not Avedy? Although the clue [Question whose answer can go almost anywhere] is both clever and accurate, solvers would be better served by something like [Broad question, slangily].

There's this tale about a fox and this bunch of grapes …

A revision would have been nice, to eliminate HAP and CIDE, as well as TOEJAM with its unnecessarily graphic cluing. And that crazy EGS, of course.

Overall, though, the writer in me loved the subtly-presented progression, and that trumps all. While I had enough reservations about the warts in execution to pause a long moment before giving it the POW!, the concept was something I'd never seen before. That's a rare occurrence, indeed.