I am helping a friend who is preparing for their GRE (Graduate Record Examinations).
In the "reading comprehension" section, there is a passage and then there are some questions. While I can easily understand the passage and answer the questions correctly, I don't particularly understand how some of the sentences are constructed.
Most of Werner's metaphorical moments were painterly - the juxtaposing of the wild bird and the tame tree, the shimmer of the periwinkle, the splurt of titanium white that fell from it onto the pavement. He loved New York for its simple surprises, although in truth, Oregon and Iowa and Arizona and everywhere else had simple surprises as well. Cantaloupe-colored sunrises, banded cows, Dairy Queens, all kinds of things that didn't include black plastic mountains of trash and the smell of dog urine.
First, why are there three "and"s like that - so close to each other? They don't seem to be serving a purpose that commas cant.
Second, the bold sentence has me really confused - it is not idiomatic (In fact, I suspect it is not syntactically valid).
Question: How is the bold sentence idiomatic or even logical? There seems to be something missing from it. To me, it seems incomplete - like a sentence fragment.
This seems to be from a famous "creative nonfiction" essay published in "Best American Essays 2007". The essay is called “Werner”, written by Jo Ann Beard. I can't find the full essay, but here is the paragraph I am talking about (passage 2): GRE Reading Comprehension "Werner".