Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by Matthew Sewell, is one satisfying puzzle. A handful of gimmes, a few tricks, a reasonable number of opaque clues, and an astonishing (at least to me) fifteen-letter answer. I started with 10-D, 4 letters, “Name on the cover of Breathing Lessons” and 53-A, six letters, “Nicaraguan nana,” two gimmes, and went from there.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

6-D, nine letters, “Undoing of many Bard protagonists.” I just wish they’d call him Shakespeare. Or, in the manner of Lord Buckley, Willie the Shake. Why? Because he shook everybody.

12-D, ten letters, “Trend scout.” I need to get out more. No, wait, I don’t.

13-D, ten letters, “Starting order.” It’s odd how often crosswords have me programmed to think about appetizers.

22-A, three letters, “Party      .” It took me a long time to see it.

26-D, ten letters, “Baker’s butter substitute.” Yes, I remember that.

28-D, three letters, “OED initialism since 2011.” IMO, a lousy way to clue this answer. Does anyone remember the year a given initialism made it into a dictionary?

34-A, fifteen letters, “Reason for diminished returns.” Whoa. Or woah.

37-A, six letters, “Far beyond patched.” I thought RAGGED. This clue though works in a different way.

38-A, four letters, “‘        it pretty to think so?’ (The Sun Also Rises ender).” One of the great last sentences. Another gimme, but maybe it’ll prompt someone to pick up the novel.

44-A, three letters, “What a larva may become.” This clue is wildly arbitrary. My first thought was the crossword favorite EFT. Or is it ANT? BEE? It’s like “Color you might paint a wall.”

52-D, four letters, “Possible cause for a time-out.” A great example of misdirection.

My favorite in this puzzle: 31-D, four letters, “Undo a body modification, perhaps.”

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.