The Corrections Jonathan Franzen Quotes

And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary?

Fiction is a solution, the best solution, to the problem of existential solitude.

Without privacy there was no point in being an individual.

He couldn't figure out if she was immensely well adjusted or seriously messed up.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.

The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

So, what, you got cigarette burns, too?" Gitanes said. Chip showed his palm, "It's nothing." "Self-inflicted. You pathetic American." "Different kind of prison" Chip said.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

His tiredness hurt so much it kept him awake.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. "What's life for?" "I don't know." "I don't either. But I don't think it's about winning.

Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

He wanted this someone to see how much he hurt.

she was so much a personality and so little anything else that even staring straight at her he had no idea what she really looked like.

It was a way of recognizing places of enchantment: people falling asleep like this.

Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

Here was a torture that Greek inventors of the Feast and the Stone had omitted from their Hades: the Blanket of Self-Deception. A lovely warm blanket as far as it covered the soul in torment, but it never quite covered everything.

Being dead's only a problem if you know you're dead, which you never do because you're dead!

He had a happy canine way of seeking approval without seeming insecure.

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

What made drugs perpetually so sexy was the opportunity to be other. Years after he'd figured out that pot only made him paranoid and sleepless, he still got hard-ons at the thought of smoking it. Still lusted for that jailbreak.

The problem was money and the indignities of life without it. Every stroller, cell phone, Yankees cap, and SUV he saw was a torment. He wasn't covetous, he wasn't envious. But without money he was hardly a man.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight-- isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've experienced before?

Brooklyn was like Philadelphia made better by its proximity to Manhattan.

That was the way most people were - stupid.

...She felt that nothing could kill her hope now, nothing. She was seventy-five and she was going to make some changes in her life.

You encountered a misery near the end of the day and it took a while to gauge its full extent. Some miseries had sharp curvature and could be negotiated readily. Others had almost no curvature and you knew you'd be spending hours turning the corner. Great whopping-big planet-sized miseries.

THE CORRECTION, when it finally came, was not an overnight bursting of a bubble but a much more gentle letdown, a year-long leakage of value from key financial markets, a contraction too gradual to generate headlines and too predictable to seriously hurt anybody but fools and the working poor.

She wondered: How could people respond to these images if images didn't secretly enjoy the same status as real things? Not that images were so powerful, but that the world was so weak. It could be read, certainly, in its weakness, as on days when the sun baked fallen apples in orchards and the valley smelled like cider, and cold nights when Jordan had driven Chadds Ford for dinner and the tires of her Chevrolet had crunched on the gravel driveway; but the world was fungible only as images. Nothing got inside the head without becoming pictures.

Whether anybody was home meant everything to a house. It was more than a major fact: it was the only fact. The family was the house's soul.

Alfred believed that the real and the true were a minority that the world was bent on exterminating.

Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?

The only guaranteed result of having an affair would be to add yet another disapproving woman to his life.

You thought you knew what food was, you thought it was elemental. You forgot how much restaurant there was in restaurant food and how much home was in homemade.

The odd truth about Alfred was that love, for him, was a matter not of approaching but of keeping away.

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it. He bowed his head at the thought of how much strength a man would need to survive an entire life so lonely.

The dream of radical transformation: of one day waking up and finding himself a wholly different (more confident, more serene) kind of person, of escaping that prison of the given, of feeling divinely capable.

She had to tell him, while she still had time, how wrong he’d been and how right she’d been. How wrong not to love her more, how wrong not to cherish her and have sex at every opportunity, how wrong not to trust her financial instincts, how wrong to have spent so much time at work and so little with the children, how wrong to have been so negative, how wrong to have been gloomy, how wrong to have run away from life, how wrong to have said no, again and again, instead of yes: she had to tell him all of this, every single day.

She had a lifetime of practice at arriving late in a family of four and being loved by all.

He had shining dark eyes and an oboe voice and mink-soft hair and could seem, even to Gary, more sentient animal than little boy.

Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it.

As if sustained and too-direct contact with time's raw passage could scar the nerves permanently, like staring at the sun.

Sleep was the ideally work-compatible girl he ought to have married in the first place. Perfectly submissive, infinitely forgiving, and so respectable you could take her to church.

It offended his sense of proportion and economy to throw away a ninety-percent serviceable string of lights. It offended his sense of himself, because he was an individual from an age of individuals, and a string of lights was, like him, an individual thing. No matter how little the thing had cost, to throw it away was to deny its value and, by extension, the value of individuals generally: to willfully designate as trash an object that you knew wasn't trash.

You see a person with kids,” she said, “and you see how happy they are to be a parent, and you’re attracted to their happiness. Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.

Chipper intuited that this feeling of futility would be a fixture in his life. A dull waiting and then a broken promise, a panicked realization of how late it was. This futility had let's call it a flavor.

It rankled her that people richer than she were so often less worthy and attractive. More slobbish and louty. Comfort could be found in being poorer than people who were smart and beautiful. But to be less affluent than these T-shirted, joke-cracking fatsos-

He didn't understand what happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached, and worn out along the fold lines.

He was remembering the nights he'd sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from "Black Beauty" or "The Chronicles of Narnia". How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

Her heart was full and her senses were sharp, but her head felt liable to burst in the vacuum of her solitude.

She told herself a story about a daughter in a family so hungry for a daughter that it would have eaten her alive if she hadn't run away.

Only silence was acceptable in its potential to be endless.

The shame and disorder in his house were like the shame and disorder in his head.

His problem consisted of a burning wish not to have done the things he'd done.

although in truth her passivity was calculated, because she knew passivity inflamed him. He had her, and to some extent she wanted to be had, like an animal: in a mute mutual privacy of violence.

Gary had hoped to find her more cooperative. He already had one "alternative" sibling and he didn't need another. It frustrated him that people could so happily drop out of the world of conventional expectations; it felt like a unilateral rewriting, to his disadvantage, of the rules of life.

As she left her parents' neighborhood, the houses got newer and bigger and boxier. Through windows with no mullions or fake plastic mullions she could see luminous screens, some giant, some miniature. Evidently every hour of the year, including this one, was a good hour for staring at a screen.

He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the photographs as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed a modicum of cooperation from the world of objects.

People nowadays seemed to resent the railroads for abandoning romantic steam power in favor of diesel. People didn't understand the first goddamned thing about running a railroad. A diesel locomotive was versatile, efficient, and low-maintenance. People thought the railroad owed them romantic favors, and then they belly ached if a train was slow. That was the way most people were—stupid.

By now it was too late to call St. Jude. He chose an out-of-the-way patch of airport carpeting and lay it down to sleep. He didn't understand what had happened to him. He felt like a piece of paper that had once had coherent writing on it but had been through the wash. He felt roughened, bleached and worn out along the fold lines. He semi-dreamed of disembodied eyes and isolated mouths in ski masks. He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

Two empty hours were a sinus in which infections bred.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

Impossibility is attractive.

To be so vigorous and healthy and yet so nothing.

Chip's sphincter had meanwhile dilated nearly to the degree of unconditional surrender.

Gary si augurava che ogni ulteriore migrazione verso le coste venisse proibita, e tutti gli abitanti del Midwest fossero incoraggiati a tornare ai cibi pesanti, agli abiti fuori moda e ai giochi di società, in modo da mantenere una riserva nazionale strategica di idiozia

And if the world refused to square with his version of reality then it was necessarily an uncaring world, a sour and sickening world, a penal colony, and he was doomed to be violently lonely in it.

Earlier in the day, while killing some hours by circling in blue ballpoint ink every uppercase M in the front section of a month-old New York Times, Chip had concluded that he was behaving like a depressed person. Now, as his telephone began to ring, it occurred to him that a depressed person ought to continue staring at the TV and ignore the ringing — ought to light another cigarette and, with no trace of emotional affect, watch another cartoon while his machine took whoever’s message. That his impulse, instead, was to jump to his feet and answer the phone — that he could so casually betray the arduous wasting of a day — cast doubt on the authenticity of his suffering. He felt as if he lacked the ability to lose all volition and connection with reality the way depressed people did in books and movies. It seemed to him, as he silenced the TV and hurried into his kitchen, that he was failing even at the miserable task of falling properly apart.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite. But to be seen as the finite carcass in a sea of blood and bone chips and gray matter-- to inflict that version of himself on other people-- was a violation of privacy so profound it seemed it would outlive him. He was also afraid that it might hurt. And there was a very important question that he still wanted answered. His children were coming, Gary and Denise and maybe even Chip, his intellectual son. It was possible that Chip, if he came, could answer the very important question. And the question was: The question was:

Every night after dinner he honed this skill of enduring a dull thing that brought a parent pleasure. It seemed to him a lifesaving skill. He believed that terrible harm would come to him when he could no longer preserve his mother's illusions.

Eager, perhaps, to repay the favor of listening, Sylvia nodded with encouragement. But suddenly she reminded Enid of Katharine Hepburn. In Hepburn's eyes there had been a blank unconsciousness of privilege that made a once-poor woman like Enid want to kick her patrician shins with the hardest-toed pumps at her disposal. It would be a mistake, she felt, to confess anything to this woman.

It was true that Al had asked her to move the jars and magazines, and there was probably a word for the way she'd stepped around those jars and magazines for the last eleven days, often nearly stumbling on them; maybe a psychiatric word with many syllables or maybe a simple word like "spite." But it seemed to her that he'd asked her to do more than "one thing" while he was gone. He'd also asked her to make the boys three meals a day, and clothe them and read to them and nurse them in sickness, and scrub the kitchen floor and wash the sheets and iron his shirts, and do it all without a husband's kisses or kind words. If she tried to get credit for these labors of hers, however, Al simply asked her whose labors had paid for the house and food and linens? Never mind that his work so satisfied him that he didn't need her love, while her chores so bored her that she needed his love doubly. In any rational accounting, his work canceled her work.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn't always agreeable or attractive.

You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.

He suspected that somewhere, somehow, this new technology was stupid or lazy. Some young engineer had taken a shortcut and failed to anticipate the consequences that he was suffering now. But because he didn't understand the technology, he had no way to know the nature of the failure or to take steps to correct it. And so the goddamned lights made a victim of him, and there wasn't a goddamned thing he could do except go out and spend.

I saw it all of a sudden. That whether I liked it or not, the survivor and the artist was me, not her. We're all conditioned to think of our children as more important than us, you know, and to live vicariously through them. All of a sudden I was sick of that kind of thinking. I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I'm alive now. And I can live deliberately. I've paid the price, I've done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of.

Once or twice every night, serving dinner at the big round table, Enid glanced over her shoulder and caught him looking, and made him blush. Al was Kansan. After two months he found courage to take her skating. They drank cocoa and he told her that human beings were born to suffer. He took her to a steel-company Christmas party and told her that the intelligent were doomed to be tormented by the stupid. He was a good dancer and a good earner, however, and she kissed him in the elevator. Soon they were engaged and they chastely rode a night train to McCook, Nebraska, to visit his aged parents. His father kept a slave whom he was married to.

For the next two hours Denise mainly paid attention to her hand, which she'd laid on the sofa cushion within easy reach of Robin's. The hand wasn't comfortable there, it wanted to be retracted, but she didn't want to give up hard-won territory. When the movie ended they watched TV, and then they were silent for an impossibly long time, five minutes or a year, and still Robin didn't take the warm, five-fingered bait. Denise would have welcomed some pushy male sexuality right around now.

she tuned out the tour guide and heeded the October angle of the yellow light, the heart-mangling intensities of the season. In the wind pushing waves across the bay she could smell night’s approach. It was coming at her fast: mystery and pain and a strange yearning sense of possibility, as though heartbreak were a thing to be sought and moved toward.

...the entire story is prefigured in that monologue...

It was in their nature to throw their arms around him, but this nature had been corrected out of them.

What’s it do?” she said. “Absolutely nothing,” Hibbard replied, “if you are in perfect mental health. However, let’s face it, who is?

ليس من الممكن في ظروف مالية منتعشة كهذه أن يفشل إلا أحمق أو نصاب.

لحسن الطالع؛ على كل من قراراته السيئة التي اتخذها، يتخذ قرارين أو ثلاثة قرارات جيدة.

He ate arugula (“rocket,” the old farmers called it) so strong it made his eyes water, like a paragraph of Thoreau.

He'd lost track of what he wanted, and since who a person was was what a person wanted, you could say that he'd lost track of himself.

...with nothing left to relish or discover, he just might die of boredom. Elective ignorance was a great survival skill, perhaps the greatest.

That this was what jail was for: people who believed that they, rather than society, made the rules.

I’m just happy you’re home safely.

His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained.

It’s the fate of most Ping-Pong tables in home basements eventually to serve the ends of other, more desperate games.

I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but

They rode an elevator in silence. Too-precipitous intimacy had left in its wake a kind of dirty awkwardness.

Robin turned and looked straight into her. “What’s life for?” “I don’t know.” “I don’t either. But I don’t think it’s about winning.

كم هى ضخمة القوة التي يحتاجها الرجل حتى ينجو من حياة كاملة وحيدة منعزلة هكذا

Sometimes I get so excited thinking about my morning coffee,” Mr. Söderblad said, “I can’t fall asleep at night.

What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

Chip, who much preferred queer theory to queer practice

Now that I’m blind, I can see there is nothing to see.

Enid had chosen to believe the promise of his looks. Life then became a matter of waiting for his personality to change.

Aveva perso le tracce di ciò che voleva, e poiché una persona è ciò che vuole, si poteva dire che avesse perso le tracce di se stesso.

L’ignoranza volontaria era un importante mezzo di sopravvivenza, forse il più importante di tutti.

They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

She felt as if, while working and sleeping and working and sleeping, she’d aged so rapidly that she’d passed Emile and caught up with her parents.

In the kitchen Enid dredged the Promethean meat in flour and laid it in a Westinghouse electric pan large enough to fry nine eggs in ticktacktoe formation.

In the elevator it seemed to Enid that the ship was suffering not only from a seesaw motion but also from a yaw, as if its bow were the face of someone experiencing repugnance.

He spoke of his lifelong crusade on behalf of fifty-watt lightbulbs. (“Sixty’s too bright,” he said, “and forty is too dim.

Most of the lights were burning brightly, but near the center of the spool was a patch of unlit bulbs—a substantia nigra deep inside the tangle.

prairie

Impossibility is attractive. You know, the safety of dead-ended things.

That his comments actually pertained to her questions—that in spite of the infinity in his eyes he was participating in a finite conversation—made up for the sourness in his face.

The house felt more like a body—softer, more mortal and organic—than like a building

Her life would have been easier if she hadn't loved him so much, but she couldn't help loving him. Just to look at him was to love him.

He’d realized only recently that at the center of the act of sitting down was a loss of control, a blind backwards free fall.

Worse than spanking or even liver was the sound of someone else’s Ping-Pong.

The only way to avoid despair was not to involve himself at all.

My apartment rightfully belongs to the people of Lithuania!

His expression was like a perspectival regression toward a vanishing point of misery.

The wind had teeth today, it bit right through his calfskin jacket. It was a wind unchecked by any serious topography between the Arctic and St. Jude.

Enid and Sylvia resumed relations stiffly, their emotional muscles pulled and aching from last night's overuse.

The intelligent are doomed to be tortured by the stupid

Well, just remember,” Gary said, “there’s more to life than cooking. You’re at a stage now where you need to start thinking about what you really want and how you’re going to get it.

After Gary had given the enlargements their sour baths, he raised the lights and discovered that both prints were webbed over with peculiar yellow blotches. He cursed a little, not so much because he cared about the prints as because he wanted to preserve his good spirits, his serotonin-rich mood, and to do this he needed... cooperation from the world of objects.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before?

But like so many phenomena that were beautiful at a distance—thunderheads, volcanic eruptions, the stars and planets—this alluring pain proved, at closer range, to be inhuman in its scale.

Maybe the futile light in a house with three people separately absorbed in the basement and only one upstairs, a little boy staring at a plate of cold food, was like the mind of a depressed person.

If you were looking aside and mentally adding up the hours until the execution of a young killer, all that registered was something dark flashing by. But if you happened to be gazing directly at the window in question and you happened as well to be feeling unprecedentedly calm, four-tenths of a second was more than enough time to identify the falling object as your husband of forty-seven years.

But he’d squirted such filth on her when she was helpless. She’d witnessed such scenes of marriage, and so of course, when she was older, she betrayed him. What made correction possible also doomed it.

There came a time, however, when death ceased to be the enforcer of finitude and began to look, instead, like the last opportunity for radical transformation, the only plausible portal to the infinite.

but a woman could subsist on self-deceptions like these and on her memories (which also now curiously seemed like self-deceptions) of the early years when he’d been mad for her and had looked into her eyes.

He could see the desired outcomes, the drowning at sea, the shotgun blast, the plunge from a height, so near to him still that he refused to believe he had lost the opportunity to avail himself of their relief.

And the posture of the older oak trees reaching toward this sky had a jut, a wildness and entitlement, predating permanent settlement; memories of an unfenced world were written in the cursive of their branches.

E quando l'evento, il grosso cambiamento nella tua vita è semplicemente una presa di coscienza, non è strano? Non c'è assolutamente nulla di diverso, tranne il fatto che vedi le cose in un altro modo e di conseguenza sei meno impaurita e meno ansiosa e nel complesso più forte: non è sorprendente che una cosa completamente invisibile nella tua testa possa sembrarti più vera di qualunque altra cosa tu abbia mai provato prima?

How modest—compared to the furious locomotive—a stretch of weedy track could seem, skirting a field of late sorghum. But without this track a train was ten thousand tons of ungovernable nothing. The will was in the track.

I'm saying that children are not supposed to get along with their parents. Your parents are not supposed to be your best friends. There's supposed to be some element of rebellion. That's how you define yourself as a person.

Joey aveva sorriso con furia per impedirsi di piangere. La sua ferita gli sembrava strutturale, come se lui e suo padre avessero scelto le proprie idee politiche al solo scopo di odiarsi, e l'unico modo per uscirne fosse il distacco.

Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A capacity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

She’d visited the Continent five times on vacation and twice on business trips with Alfred, so about a dozen times altogether, and to friends planning tours of Spain or France she now liked to say, with a sigh, that she’d had her fill of the place.

The traveler didn't see how such a place could exist in a world of Lithuanias and Polands. It was a testament to the insulatory effectiveness of political boundaries that power didn't simply arc across the gap between such divergent economic voltages.

Time and again Gary had the feeling that there was something disagreeable that his family wanted to forget, something only he insisted on remembering; something requiring only his nod, his go-ahead, to be forgotten. This feeling, too, was a Warning Sign.

It struck him that if he could have sex with this girl for one second he could face his parents confidently, and that if he could keep on having sex with this girl once every minute for as long as his parents were in town he could survive their entire visit.

There was something almost tasty and almost sexy in letting the annoying boy be punished by her husband. In standing blamelessly aside while the boy suffered for having hurt her. What you discovered about yourself in raising children wasn’t always agreeable or attractive.

She’d never really known her father. Probably nobody had. With his shyness and his formality and his tyrannical rages he protected his interior so ferociously that if you loved him, as she did, you learned that you could do him no greater kindness than to respect his privacy.

Life, in her experience, had a kind of velvet luster. You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal. She believed she couldn’t hurt anybody as long as she was only working.

a “marketing psychologist” and who advised Chip, now, to wake up and do the same), he returned to his car and discovered that each of his plastic-wrapped cheeses was protected by its own antitheft badge and that, indeed, a fragment of antitheft badge had stuck to the bottom of his left shoe. Tilton

Oh, il mito, l’infantile ottimismo delle riparazioni! La speranza che gli oggetti non si logorassero mai! La sciocca fiducia nel fatto che ci fosse sempre un futuro in cui lui, Alfred, non solo sarebbe stato vivo ma avrebbe anche avuto sufficiente energia per aggiustare le cose. La tacita convinzione che alla fine tutta la sua frugalità e la sua passione di conservatore avessero uno scopo, e che un giorno, svegliandosi, si sarebbe trasformato in una persona completamente diversa, con tempo ed energia infiniti per occuparsi di tutti gli oggetti che aveva conservato, per mantenere tutto funzionante, tutto a posto.

Dad, Dad, Dad. What’s wrong?” Alfred looked up at his son and into his eyes. He opened his mouth, but the only word he could produce was “I—” I— I have made mistakes— I am alone— I am wet— I want to die— I am sorry— I did my best— I love my children— I need your help— I want to die— “I can’t be here,” he said.

The Astors and the Vanderbilts, their pleasure domes and money: she was sick of it. Sick of envying, sick of herself. She didn't understand antiques or architecture, she couldn't draw like Sylvia, she didn't read like Ted, she had few interests and no expertise. A paucity for love was the only true thing she'd ever had.

There were a thousand things she wanted from life, and since few were available at home [...], she had forcibly channeled all her wanting into the numbered days, the mayfly lifetime, that the luxury cruise would last. For months the cruise had been her mind’s safe parking space, the future that made her present bearable [...].

A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.

La differenza è che gli uccelli uccidono solo perché devono mangiare. Non lo fanno con rabbia, non lo fanno senza motivo. Non è una cosa nevrotica. Per me è questo che rende la natura un luogo pacifico. Le cose vivono o non vivono, ma non esiste il veleno del risentimento, della nevrosi e dell'ideologia. È un sollievo dalla mia rabbia nevrotica.

But his entire life was set up as a correction of his father’s life, and he and Caroline had long agreed that Alfred was clinically depressed, and clinical depression was known to have genetic bases and to be substantially heritable, and so Gary had no choice but to keep resisting ANHEDONIA, keep gritting his teeth, keep doing his best to have fun …

our culture attaches too much importance to feelings, he says it’s out of control, it’s not computers that are making everything virtual, it’s mental health. Everyone’s trying to correct their thoughts and improve their feelings and work on their relationships and parenting skills instead of just getting married and raising children like they used to,

Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical.

How Lithuanian we all felt,” Gitanas said, “when we could point to the Soviets and say: No, we’re not like that. But to say, No, we are not free-market, no, we are not globalized—this doesn’t make me feel Lithuanian. This makes me feel stupid and Stone Age. So how do I be a patriot now? What positive thing do I stand for? What is the positive definition of my country?

In the old days, Christmas lights had come in short strings that were wired serially. If a single bulb burned out or even just loosened in its socket, the circuit was broken and the entire string went dark. One of the season’s rituals for Gary and Chip had been to tighten each little brass-footed bulb in a darkened string and then, if this didn’t work, to replace each bulb in turn until the dead culprit was found. (What joy the boys had taken in the resurrection of a string!) By the time Denise was old enough to help with the lights, the technology had advanced. The wiring was parallel, and the bulbs had snap-in plastic bases. A single faulty light didn’t affect the rest of the community but identified itself instantly for instant replacement . . .

Gary wished that all further migration to the coasts could be banned and all midwesterners encouraged to revert to eating pasty foods and wearing dowdy clothes and playing board games, in order that a strategic national reserve of cluelessness might be maintained, a wilderness of taste which would enable people of privilege, like himself, to feel extremely civilized in perpetuity—

...he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: To feel as if he couldn’t survive without a woman made a man feel weak; And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

but he was a lonely straight male, and a lonely straight male had no equivalently forgiving Theory of Masculinism to help him out of this bind, this key to all misogynies: ¶ To feel as if he couldn’t survive without a woman made a man feel weak; ¶ And yet, without a woman in his life, a man lost the sense of agency and difference that, for better or worse, was the foundation of his manhood.

Terwijl hij wachtte tot het trillen minder werd - terwijl hij machteloos keek naar de rukkerige, maaiende bewegingen, alsof hij in een kinderkamer vol krijsende, zich misdragende peuters zat en zijn stem kwijt was en ze niet tot bedaren kon brengen - vermaakte Alfred zich ermee zich voor te stellen dat hij zijn hand afhakte met een bijl: dat hij het ongehoorzame lichaamsdeel duidelijk maakte hoe vreselijk boos hij erop was, hoe weinig hij ervan hield als het hem niet wilde gehoorzamen. Het leidde tot een soort extase als hij zich voorstelde hoe het blad van de bijl de eerste keer in het bot en de spieren van zijn ergerlijke pols hakte; maar tegelijk met de extase, ermee samengaand, was er een neiging om te wenen om die hand die van hem was, waar hij van hield en die hij het beste toewenste, die hij zijn hele leven al kende. 61

Reading Chip's college orientation materials, Alfred had been struck by the sentence New England winters can be very cold. The curtains he'd bought at Sears were of a plasticized brown-and-pink fabric with a backing of foam rubber. They were heavy and bulky and stiff. "You'll appreciate these on a cold night," he told Chip. "You'll be surprised how much they cut down drafts." But Chip's freshman roommate was a prep-school product named Roan McCorkle who would soon be leaving thumbprints, in what appeared to be Vaseline, on the fifth-grade photo of Denise. Roan laughed at the curtains and Chip laughed, too. He put them back in the box and stowed the box in the basement of the dorm and let it gather mold there for the next four years. He had nothing against the curtains personally. They were simply curtains and they wanted no more than what any curtains wanted - to hang well, to exclude light to the best of their ability, to be neither too small nor too large for the window that it was their task in life to cover; to be pulled this way in the evening and that way in the morning; to stir in the breezes that came before rain on a summer night; to be much used and little noticed. There were numberless hospitals and retirement homes and budget motels, not just in the Midwest but in the East as well, where these particularly brown rubber-backed curtains could have had a long and useful life. It wasn't their fault that they didn't belong in a dorm room. They'd betrayed no urge to rise above their station; their material and patterning contained not a hint of unseemly social ambition. They were what they were. If anything, when he finally dug them out of the eve of graduation, their virginal pinkish folds turned out to be rather less plasticized and homely and Sears-like than he remembered. They were nowhere near as shameful as he'd thought.

Various chemicals that molecular floodgates had been holding back all afternoon burst loose and flooded Gary’s neural pathways. A cascade of reactions initiated by Factor 6 relaxed his tear valves and sent a wave of nausea down his vagus: a “sense” that he survived from day to day by distracting himself from underground truths that day by day grew more compelling and decisive. The truth that he was going to die. That heaping your tomb with treasure wouldn’t save you.

Poor people smoked, poor people ate Krispy Kreme doughnuts by the dozen. Poor people were made pregnant by close relatives. Poor people practiced poor hygiene and lived in toxic neighborhoods. Poor people with their ailments constituted a subspecies of humanity that thankfully remained invisible to Gary except in hospitals and in places like Central Discount Medical. They were a dumber, sadder, fatter, more resignedly suffering breed. A Diseased underclass that he really, really liked to keep away from.

the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as ‘diseased.’ A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that’s free, which means the person has to spend even more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental ‘health’ is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you’re buying into buying.

I may be dead tomorrow, I said to myself, but I’m alive now. And I can live deliberately. I’ve paid the price, I’ve done the work, and I have nothing to be ashamed of. “And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You

Robin’s voice on the executive chef’s line came to signify tongue. She didn’t say more than a word or two before Denise tuned out. Robin’s tongue and lips continued to form the instructions demanded by the day’s exigencies, but in Denise’s ear they were already speaking that other language of up and down and round and round that her body intuitively understood and autonomously obeyed; sometimes she melted so hard at the sound of this voice that her abdomen caved in and she doubled over; for the next hour-plus there was nothing in the world but tongue, no inventory or buttered pheasants or unpaid purveyors; she left the Generator in a buzzing hypnotized state of poor reflexes, the volume of the world’s noise lowered to near zero, other drivers luckily obeying basic traffic laws. Her car was like a tongue gliding down the melty asphalt streets, her feet like twin tongues licking pavement, the front door of the house on Panama Street like a mouth that swallowed her, the Persian runner in the hall outside the master bedroom like a tongue beckoning, the bed in its cloak of comforter and pillows a big soft tongue begging to be depressed, and then.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight—isn’t that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you’re less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn’t it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you’ve experienced before? You see things more clearly and you know that you’re seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is ever talking about. Moments like this.

Chip was struck by the broad similarities between black-market Lithuania and free-market America. In both countries, wealth was concentrated in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury.

And when the event, the big change in your life, is simply an insight–isn't that a strange thing? That absolutely nothing changes except that you see things differently and you're less fearful and less anxious and generally stronger as a result: isn't it amazing that a completely invisible thing in your head can feel realer than anything you've ever experienced before? You see things more clearly and you KNOW that you're seeing them more clearly. And it comes to you that this is what it means to love life, this is all anybody who talks seriously about God is every talking about. Moments like this.

The soul,' he said to Pip, 'is a chemical sensation. What you see lying on this sofa is a glorified enzyme. Every enzyme has its special job to do. It spends its life looking for the specific molecule it's designed to interact with. And can an enzyme be happy? Does it have a soul? I say yes to both questions! What the enzyme you see lying here was made to do is find bad prose, interact with it, and make it better. That's what I've become, a bad-prose-correcting enzyme, floating in my cell here.' He nodded at Leila. 'And she worries that I'm not happy.' Pip's eyes widened with swallowed comment. 'She's still looking for her molecule,' Charles continued. 'I already know mine. Do you know yours?

I'm saying the structure and f the entire culture is flawed, chip said. I'm saying the bureaucracy has arrogated the right to define certain states of mind as 'diseased.' A lack of desire to spend money becomes a symptom of disease that requires expensive medication. Which medication then destroys the libido, in other words destroys the appetite for the one pleasure in life that's free, which means the person has to spend more money on compensatory pleasures. The very definition of mental health is the ability to participate in the consumer economy. When you buy into therapy, you're buying into buying. And I'm saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized, medicalized, totalitarian, modernity right this instant.

He was remembering the nights he’d sat upstairs with one or both of his boys or with his girl in the crook of his arm, their damp bath-smelling heads hard against his ribs as he read aloud to them from Black Beauty or The Chronicles of Narnia. How his voice alone, its palpable resonance, had made them drowsy. These were evenings, and there were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, when nothing traumatic enough to leave a scar had befallen the nuclear unit. Evenings of plain vanilla closeness in his black leather chair; sweet evenings of doubt between the nights of bleak certainty. They came to him now, these forgotten counterexamples, because in the end, when you were falling into water, there was no solid thing to reach for but your children.

Although in general Gary applauded the modern trend toward individual self-management of retirement funds and long-distance calling plans and private-schooling options, he was less than thrilled to be given responsibility for his own personal brain chemistry, especially when certain people in his life, notably his father, refused to take any such responsibility. But Gary was nothing if not conscientious. As he entered the darkroom, he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3(i.e., serotonin: a very, very important factor) were posting seven-day or even thirty-day highs, that his Factor 2 and Factor 7 levels were likewise outperforming expectations, and that his Factor 1 had rebounded from an early-morning slump related to the glass of Armagnac he’d drunk at bedtime.

...Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in a time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest youngest moment provided no guarantee that you'd be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he'd established his daughter Denise was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip's living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn't absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife Enid was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel.

She went to the basement to get the ancestral ten-quart Dutch oven, and the clutter in the laundry-room cabinets made her furious. She dragged a trash can in from the garage and began to fill it with her mother’s crap. This was arguably helpful to her mother, and so she went at it with abandon. She threw away the Korean barfle-berries, the fifty most obviously worthless plastic flowerpots, the assortment of sand-dollar fragments, and the sheaf of silver-dollar plants whose dollars had all fallen off. She threw away the wreath of spray-painted pinecones that somebody had ripped apart. She threw away the brandy-pumpkin “spread” that had turned a snottish gray-green. She threw away the Neolithic cans of hearts of palm and baby shrimps and miniature Chinese corncobs, the turbid black liter of Romanian wine whose cork

in the hands of a few; any meaningful distinction between private and public sectors had disappeared; captains of commerce lived in a ceaseless anxiety that drove them to expand their empires ruthlessly; ordinary citizens lived in ceaseless fear of being fired and ceaseless confusion about which powerful private interest owned which formerly public institution on any given day; and the economy was fueled largely by the elite’s insatiable demand for luxury. (In Vilnius, by November of that dismal autumn, five criminal oligarchs were responsible for employing thousands of carpenters, bricklayers, craftsmen, cooks, prostitutes, barkeeps, auto mechanics, and bodyguards.) The main difference between America and Lithuania, as far as Chip could see, was that in America the wealthy few subdued the unwealthy many by means of mind-numbing and soul-killing entertainments and gadgetry and pharmaceuticals, whereas in Lithuania the powerful few subdued the unpowerful many by threatening violence.

Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons are there to be pushed—students and activists claiming the right to not hear things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them. Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you toward content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side you’re on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate. And here is another way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best—the work of Alice Munro, for example—invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might hate you.

But Denise left the kitchen and took the plate to Alfred, for whom the problem of existence was this: that, in the manner of a wheat seedling thrusting itself up out of the earth, the world moved forward in time by adding cell after cell to its leading edge, piling moment on moment, and that to grasp the world even in its freshest, youngest moment provided no guarantee that you’d be able to grasp it again a moment later. By the time he’d established that his daughter, Denise, was handing him a plate of snacks in his son Chip’s living room, the next moment in time was already budding itself into a pristinely ungrasped existence in which he couldn’t absolutely rule out the possibility, for example, that his wife, Enid, was handing him a plate of feces in the parlor of a brothel; and no sooner had he reconfirmed Denise and the snacks and Chip’s living room than the leading edge of time added yet another layer of new cells, so that he again faced a new and ungrasped world; which was why, rather than exhaust himself playing catch-up, he preferred more and more to spend his days down among the unchanging historical roots of things.

Suggested Reading Atkinson, Kate. Behind the Scenes at the Museum; Binchy, Maeve. Tara Road, The Copper Beech, and Evening Class; Bloom, Amy. Come to Me; Edwards, Kim. The Memory Keeper’s Daughter; Ferris, Joshua. The Unnamed; Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl; Foer, Jonathan Safran. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections; Ganesan, Indira. Inheritance; Hanilton, Jane. Disobedience; Jonasson, Jonas. The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared; Joyce, Rachel. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry; Kidd, Sue Monk. The Secret Life of Bees; Mapson, Jo-Ann, The Owl & Moon Cafe; McEwan, Ian. Atonement; Miller, Arthur. All My Sons; Morrison, Toni. Love; O’Neill, Eugene. Long Day’s Journey into Night; Pekkanen, Sarah. The Opposite of Me; Porter, Andrew. In Between Days; Quindlen, Anna. Blessings and One True Thing; Rosenfeld, Lucinda. The Pretty One; Sittenfeld, Curtis. Sisterland; Smith, Ali. There But For The; Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club; Tyler, Anne. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant; White, Karen. The Time Between; Williams, Tennessee. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway; Yates, Richard. The Easter Parade.

Gary era îngrijorat de propria sănătate mentală, dar în după-amiaza aceea, în timp ce ieşea din casa mare de şist de pe Seminole Street, traversa curtea mare şi urca treptele exterioare care duceau la garajul lui mare, atmosfera din mintea sa era la fel de caldă şi de însorită ca aceea din nord-vestul Philadelphiei. Un soare de septembrie strălucea trecînd printr-un amestec de abur şi norişori bordaţi cu gri şi, atît cît putea Gary (care, să nu uităm, era vicepreşedinte al Băncii CenTrust, nu medic psihiatru) să citească şi să înţeleagă simptomele neurochimice, toţi indicatorii principali arătau foarte bine. Chiar dacă în general era un suporter al curentului modern care promova managementul individual al fondurilor de pensii, al programelor de telefonie interurbană şi al opţiunilor pentru învăţămîntul privat, nu se bucurase deloc să îşi asume responsabilitatea pentru procesele chimice ale propriului creier, mai ales în condiţiile în care unele persoane apropiate, tatăl lui mai exact, refuzau să îşi asume o astfel de răspundere. Dar principala calitate a lui Gary era conştiinciozitatea. Intrind în laborator, aprecie nivelul Neurofactorului 3 (serotonina, un factor foarte, foarte important) ca fiind cel mai ridicat din ultimele şapte sau poate chiar treizeci de zile, constată că nivelul Factorilor 2 şi 7 era, de asemenea, peste aşteptări şi că Factorul 1 cunoştea o revenire după minima de azi-dimineaţă, consecinţa paharului de Armagnac pe care îl băuse la culcare. Pasul îi era ager, iar conştiinţa înălţimii sale peste medie şi a bronzului de sfîrşit de vară îi dădea o stare agreabilă. Aversiunea faţă de Caroline, soţia lui, era moderată şi bine ţinută în frîu. Simptomele de paranoia (bănuiala permanentă că soţia şi cei doi fii ai săi mai mari îşi băteau joc de el) erau în declin, iar perspectiva adaptată sezonier asupra futilităţii şi scurtimii vieţii era în consens cu soliditatea generală a economiei sale mentale. Din punct de vedere clinic, nu era cîtuşi de puţin deprimat.

Ah, mizantropia şi acreala! Gary ar fi vrut să se bucure de faptul că era un om realizat şi cu dare de mînă, dar ţara îi complica soarta. Peste tot în jurul lui, milioane de proaspăt făcuţi milionari americani erau angajaţi într-o cursă identică a confortului personal, a achiziţionării casei victoriene perfecte, a schiului pe pante virgine, a relaţiei personale cu maestrul bucătar, a descoperirii plajei fără urmă de pas pe nisip. Şi mai erau alte zeci de milioane de tineri americani care nu aveau bani, dar tot căutau aerul Cool Perfect. în tot timpul acesta însă, realitatea tristă era că nu toată lumea putea fi extraordinară, nu toată lumea putea fi foarte cool; altfel, cine ar mai fi rămas om obişnuit? Cine ar mai fi îndeplinit ingrata sarcină de a fi, prin comparaţie, ne-cool? E drept, mai erau toţi cetăţenii care populau centrul Americii: conducătorii de dubiţe din St. Jude, cu cîte cincisprezece sau douăzeci de kilograme excedentare şi treninguri pastel, cu abţibilduri antiavort pe bara din spate a maşinilor şi tunsori prusace. Gary constatase însă în anii din urmă, cu o nelinişte care se acumula ca tensiunea în plăcile tectonice, că populaţia continua să se scurgă dinspre Midwest către zonele mai spălate, de coastă (Desigur, făcea parte el însuşi din acest exod, dar el fugise de mult şi, cinstit vorbind, întîietatea îşi avea privilegiile ei.) în acelaşi timp, toate restaurantele din St. Jude căpătau un aer european (brusc, femeile de serviciu învăţaseră să ceară roşii de grădină, brusc, crescătorii de porci învăţaseră să mănînce crème brülée), iar clienţii complexului comercial din apropierea casei părinţilor lui aveau aerul că totul li se cuvine, tulburător de asemănători cu el însuşi, iar produsele de consum electronice aflate la vînzare în St. Jude erau la fel de puternice şi de moderne ca şi cele din Chestnut Hill. Gary ar fi vrut ca migraţia către coastă să fie interzisă şi toţi locuitorii din Midwest să fie îndemnaţi să revină la obiceiul de a mînca mîncăruri în aluat, de a purta haine lălîi şi de a juca şah şi dame, pentru a menţine o rezervă naţională strategică de inocenţă, o sălbăticie a gustului care ar fi îngăduit celor privilegiaţi, ca el, să se simtă pe veşnicie extrem de civilizaţi... Destul! îşi spuse. Dorinţa anihilantă de a fi altfel, de a domni suprem în propria superioritate era doar un alt Semnal de Alarmă al depresiei C.

Ah, mizantropia şi acreala! Gary ar fi vrut să se bucure de faptul că era un om realizat şi cu dare de mînă, dar ţara îi complica soarta. Peste tot în jurul lui, milioane de proaspăt făcuţi milionari americani erau angajaţi într-o cursă identică a confortului personal, a achiziţionării casei victoriene perfecte, a schiului pe pante virgine, a relaţiei personale cu maestrul bucătar, a descoperirii plajei fără urmă de pas pe nisip. Şi mai erau alte zeci de milioane de tineri americani care nu aveau bani, dar tot căutau aerul Cool Perfect. în tot timpul acesta însă, realitatea tristă era că nu toată lumea putea fi extraordinară, nu toată lumea putea fi foarte cool; altfel, cine ar mai fi rămas om obişnuit? Cine ar mai fi îndeplinit ingrata sarcină de a fi, prin comparaţie, ne-cool? E drept, mai erau toţi cetăţenii care populau centrul Americii: conducătorii de dubiţe din St. Jude, cu cîte cincisprezece sau douăzeci de kilograme excedentare şi treninguri pastel, cu abţibilduri antiavort pe bara din spate a maşinilor şi tunsori prusace. Gary constatase însă în anii din urmă, cu o nelinişte care se acumula ca tensiunea în plăcile tectonice, că populaţia continua să se scurgă dinspre Midwest către zonele mai spălate, de coastă. (Desigur, făcea parte el însuşi din acest exod, dar el fugise de mult şi, cinstit vorbind, întîietatea îşi avea privilegiile ei.) în acelaşi timp, toate restaurantele din St. Jude căpătau un aer european (brusc, femeile de serviciu învăţaseră să ceară roşii de grădină, brusc, crescătorii de porci învăţaseră să mănînce crème brülée), iar clienţii complexului comercial din apropierea casei părinţilor lui aveau aerul că totul li se cuvine, tulburător de asemănători cu el însuşi, iar produsele de consum electronice aflate la vînzare în St. Jude erau la fel de puternice şi de moderne ca şi cele din Chestnut Hill. Gary ar fi vrut ca migraţia către coastă să fie interzisă şi toţi locuitorii din Midwest să fie îndemnaţi să revină la obiceiul de a mînca mîncăruri în aluat, de a purta haine lălîi şi de a juca şah şi dame, pentru a menţine o rezervă naţională strategică de inocenţă, o sălbăticie a gustului care ar fi îngăduit celor privilegiaţi, ca el, să se simtă pe veşnicie extrem de civilizaţi... Destul! îşi spuse. Dorinţa anihilantă de a fi altfel, de a domni suprem în propria superioritate era doar un alt Semnal de Alarmă al depresiei C.

At Ardennes she conceived a desire to strangle the young woman who prepped and held down garde manger. The woman, Becky Hemerling, was a culinary-institute grad with wavy blond hair and a petite flat body and fair skin that turned scarlet in the kitchen heat. Everything about Becky Hemerling sickened Denise—her C.I.A. education (Denise was an autodidact snob), her overfamiliarity with more senior cooks (especially with Denise), her vocal adoration of Jodie Foster, the stupid fish-and-bicycle texts on her T-shirts, her overuse of the word “fucking” as an intensifier, her self-conscious lesbian “solidarity” with the “latinos” and “Asians” in the kitchen, her generalizations about “right-wingers” and “Kansas” and “Peoria,” her facility with phrases like “men and women of color,” the whole bright aura of entitlement that came of basking in the approval of educators who wished that they could be as marginalized and victimized and free of guilt as she was. What is this person doing in my kitchen? Denise wondered. Cooks were not supposed to be political. Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it. Denise suspected that Becky Hemerling had chosen the cooking life to make a political point: to be one tough chick, to hold her own with the guys. Denise loathed this motivation all the more for harboring a speck of it herself. Hemerling had a way of looking at her that suggested that she (Hemerling) knew her better than she knew herself—an insinuation at once infuriating and impossible to refute. Lying awake beside Emile at night, Denise imagined squeezing Hemerling’s neck until her blue, blue eyes bugged out. She imagined pressing her thumbs into Hemerling’s windpipe until it cracked.    Then one night she fell asleep and dreamed that she was strangling Becky and that Becky didn’t mind. Becky’s blue eyes, in fact, invited further liberties. The strangler’s hands relaxed and traveled up along Becky’s jawline and past her ears to the soft skin of her temples. Becky’s lips parted and her eyes fell shut, as if in bliss, as the strangler stretched her legs out on her legs and her arms out on her arms…    Denise couldn’t remember being sorrier to wake from a dream.    “If you can have this feeling in a dream,” she said to herself, “it must be possible to have it in reality.

God damn you!” Alfred said. “You belong in jail!” The turd wheezed with laughter as it slid very slowly down the wall, its viscous pseudopods threatening to drip on the sheets below. “Seems to me,” it said, “you anal retentive type personalities want everything in jail. Like, little kids, bad news, man, they pull your tchotchkes off your shelves, they drop food on the carpet, they cry in theaters, they miss the pot. Put ’em in the slammer! And Polynesians, man, they track sand in the house, get fish juice on the furniture, and all those pubescent chickies with their honkers exposed? Jail ’em! And how about ten to twenty, while we’re at it, for every horny little teenager, I mean talk about insolence, talk about no restraint. And Negroes (sore topic, Fred?), I’m hearing rambunctious shouting and interesting grammar, I’m smelling liquor of the malt variety and sweat that’s very rich and scalpy, and all that dancing and whoopee-making and singers that coo like body parts wetted with saliva and special jellies: what’s a jail for if not to toss a Negro in it? And your Caribbeans with their spliffs and their potbelly toddlers and their like daily barbecues and ratborne hanta viruses and sugary drinks with pig blood at the bottom? Slam the cell door, eat the key. And the Chinese, man, those creepy-ass weird-name vegetables like homegrown dildos somebody forgot to wash after using, one-dollah, one-dollah, and those slimy carps and skinned-alive songbirds, and come on, like, puppy-dog soup and pooty-tat dumplings and female infants are national delicacies, and pork bung, by which we’re referring here to the anus of a swine, presumably a sort of chewy and bristly type item, pork bung’s a thing Chinks pay money for to eat? What say we just nuke all billion point two of ’em, hey? Clean that part of the world up already. And let’s not forget about women generally, nothing but a trail of Kleenexes and Tampaxes everywhere they go. And your fairies with their doctor’s-office lubricants, and your Mediterraneans with their whiskers and their garlic, and your French with their garter belts and raunchy cheeses, and your blue-collar ball-scratchers with their hot rods and beer belches, and your Jews with their circumcised putzes and gefilte fish like pickled turds, and your Wasps with their Cigarette boats and runny-assed polo horses and go-to-hell cigars? Hey, funny thing, Fred, the only people that don’t belong in your jail are upper-middle-class northern European men. And you’re on my case for wanting

If a woman had written One Day, it would have been airport fiction. Look at The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. If I had written that, it would have had a pink, fluffy cover on it. If Jenny Eugenides had written it, it would have had a pink fluffy cover on it. What is it about? It’s about a woman choosing between two men. What is The Corrections about, by Jonathan Franzen? It’s about a family, right? And I’m attacking gun control and teen suicide and end-of-life care and the Holocaust, and I’m writing women’s fiction?

You looked at yourself from one perspective and all you saw was weirdness. Move your head a little bit, though, and everything looked reasonably normal.

Jonathan Franzen, opening his literary masterpiece The Corrections in precisely the same way that Eric Hill opened Where’s Spot? The madness of an autumn prairie cold front coming through. You could feel it: something terrible was going to happen.

We have so many elections,” Gitanas said

Say somebody said to you

It’s not about winning. It’s about fun.TM

He was leaning forward to direct the driver to the Tavern when a radical new thought arrested him: I stole nine bucks

I’m saying that I personally am losing the battle with a commercialized