Is this sentence grammatically correct? (From a novel) [closed]

Solution 1:

You could reduce the construction to:

[Noun phrase of quantity/duration] + and + [Result: independent clause]

Half an hour staring at this sentence and I'm no further than before.

Two days of listening to her roommate practice the cello and Sarah was ready for a long vacation.

A fresh cost of paint and your house is as good as sold.

The more prosaic way of expressing the same thing is with a subordinate clause beginning with after:

After half an hour staring at this sentence, I'm no further than before.

After two days of listening to her roommate practice the cello, Sarah was ready for a long vacation.

After a fresh coat of paint your house is as good as sold.

Beginning with after, however, ruins the suspense — and perhaps humor — of the other construction.

Solution 2:

The word ‘novel’ is the clue. Yes, it is perfectly acceptable literary English, even though it does not conform to the standard rules for sentence structure. You can imagine an advertisement like this also, say for a cleaning product: ‘One wipe and the job is done!’.

Simple paraphrase will get us to a grammatical structure we recognise. For example, we could turn the opening phrase into a temporal phrase: “After a few minutes of determined sawing, the dog was free.”. Now the predicate ‘was free, is modified by ‘after a few ... sawing.’. But that could be syntactically ambiguous: one possible way of parsing the sentence would have the dog doing the sawing.

Or she could have written: “S/he sawed with determination for a few minutes, and then the dog was free.”. But this too would be lame.

Sue Pethick is more skilful than that. She wants all the reader’s attention to be on the dog being free. She does not want so much as the delay of a temporal clause or even phrase. She does not want any attention on the person doing the sawing: It is very good story telling.