1 Cayley, John. ‘Differences That Make No Difference and Ambiguities That Do.’ Review of Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading with Computers, Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019. Novel: a forum on fiction 54, no. 2 (August 2021): 315- 320. Differences that Make No Difference and Ambiguities that Do MARTIN PAUL EVE, Close Reading with Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2019), pp. 272, paper, $25.00. JOHN CAYLEY Any of us who may have been anxious, when considering this book, that it might threaten to assail some preferred depth or distance or dimension of reading—close, distant, symptomatic, surface, deep, hyper, machine—can allay our fears. Eve’s treatment is evenhanded, well-informed, and comprehensively contextualized. It seems, initially, a remarkable proposition that “computational formalism” should be applied to a single, ostensibly unitary, long-form fiction, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, when typically in literary studies the quantitative methodologies of instrumentalized digital humanities are usually applied to much larger corpora. Such corpora are made up of vast numbers of such works (and/or their commentaries and contexts), and the scholarly, critical intention seems to be to generate statements or to support hypotheses in the realm of literary sociology and historicism. We might characterize this as not only distant but “meta-symptomatic” reading. What appears to read as a collection of novels