Decaffeinated prose

Perhaps I hadn't had enough caffeine, but this morning I was befuddled by the following sentence in a brief book review in the New Yorker:

"Slater, in this enormously detailed biography, gives a vivid sense of Dickens's quotidian existence, and when he isn't noting dates or fees sets about identifying the people and events that Dickens's 'clutching eye' transmuted into fiction."

I maneuvered the first half of the sentence readily, but then trouble hit after the third comma, when I kept wondering what to do with "sets." First I saw it as a noun, and then I tried to read "fees sets" as some sort of noun phrase, which doesn't work at all, and then when I finally realized that "sets" is the verb, I had to go back once again and figure out who was setting what where. Another set of commas would have clarified the sentence, but a sentence already burdened by three commas might be overwhelmed by more. It might be easier just to add more caffeine.

In my coffee mug, of course. Not in the sentence.