“I had made the discovery that if you put people in a comic light they became more likable — if you spoke of someone as a gross, belching, wall-eyed human pike you got along much better with him thereafter, partly because you were aware that you were the sadist who took away his human attributes. Also, having done him some metaphorical violence, you owed him special consideration.”
(Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, p. 152)
The text puts the comma before ‘thereafter’, but that can’t be right, can it?