Lately, it seems like everything is making me cry. Not like pregnant someone-ate-my-christmas-cookie or that-stupid-hallmark-commercial cry..no, not e Lately, it seems like everything is making me cry. Not like pregnant someone-ate-my-christmas-cookie or that-stupid-hallmark-commercial cry..no, not exactly like that.
More like watching a bunch of teenagers get all excited singing a hymn mash up at the high school fall choir concert, or watching an episode of Black Mirror where a wife mail orders a textured semi-synthetic-organic compound that is malleable on command husband, or when your boyfriend decides that a puzzle solving section of Fall Out is better than messaging you. That sort of cry.. the heaving, (not in the case of the BF, that was put there to make him feel bad.. and he will), pulsing, visine seeking, leave you aching kind of cry.
Maybe it’s the cry of growing old. I feel old.
“And time is a curious thing. Most of us only live for the time that lies right ahead of us. A few days, weeks, years. One of the most painful moments in a person's life probably comes with the insight that an age has been reached when there is more to look back on than ahead. And when time no longer lies ahead of one, other things have to be lived for. memories, perhaps.”
Ove, the man called Ove, is old. Well, he’s only like 59 but he feels a lot older. He tries to live in black and white in a world that is gray and ends up becoming a ‘veritable explosion of color. A riot of yellow and red and blue and green and orange and purple.' I think he hates it. I get why.
When I started the book I was told to ‘hang in there’, that I would ‘come to love it’.. but I loved it right from the beginning because Ove, bless his gray soul, kicks ass.
Pragmatic. I used to think that word meant stodgy, lacking emotion, detached. Sound it out praaagmaaatic. Praaaag sounds like something a bridge troll would belch while waiting for you to answer it’s riddle. Ugh. Onomatopoeia gets me every time.
Ove taught me to see pragmatism differently.. it truly is practical. No fuss, no frills… git ‘er done. There’s something to be said about those type of men.. “Men like Ove and Rune were from a generation in which one was what one did, not what one talked about.” It sounds---- nice. Sourpuss, sweetheart, tomato, tomahto.
I probably would get irritated down the road. Because I suck… I can’t handle simple. I like broken, and although Ove seems broken… and okay, I will admit it, feels broken… he’s not. He’s just not built for this world.
“Now you listen to me," says Ove calmly while he carefully closes the door. "You've given birth to two children and quite soon will be squeezing out a third. You've come here from a land far away and most likely you fled war and persecution and all sorts of other nonsense. You've learned a new language and got yourself an education and you're holding together a family of obvious incompetents. And I'll be damned if I've seen you afraid of a single bloody thing in this world before now....I'm not asking for brain surgery. I'm asking you to drive a car. It's got an accelerator, a brake and a clutch. Some of the greatest twits in world history have sorted out how it works. And you will as well." And then he utters seven words, which Parvaneh will always remember as the loveliest compliment he'll ever give her. "Because you are not a complete twit.”
Oh, that’s so Ove.
So, yes.. I cried. A lot. And I thought it would be a The Elegance of the Hedgehogcry but no.. it was worse. I know… right?
The words are so gracefully arrranged that it hurts. It really does…
“Loving someone is like moving into a house," Sonja used to say. "At first you fall in love with all the new things, amazed every morning that all this belongs to you, as if fearing that someone would suddenly come rushing in through the door to explain that a terrible mistake had been made, you weren't actually supposed to live in a wonderful place like this. Then over the years the walls become weathered, the wood splinters here and there, and you start to love that house not so much because of all its perfection, but rather for its imperfections. You get to know all the nooks and crannies. How to avoid getting the key caught in the lock when it's cold outside. Which of the floorboards flex slightly when one steps on them or exactly how to open the wardrobe doors without them creaking. These are the little secrets that make it your home.”
Or…
“She laughed and laughed and laughed until the vowels were rolling across the walls and floors, as if they meant to do away with the laws of time and space.”
Breaks. My. Heart.
So, if you want to read about a foul speaking, Saab loving, white shirt fighting, heart too big, grumpus. Ove is your man. He is highly recommended by his Cat Annoyance. And Me.
“The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,”
That’s it. Goal Met. Challenge conquered. I do not need to read any other book this year. I am satiated.
You know how I have that groupie mentality? Y That’s it. Goal Met. Challenge conquered. I do not need to read any other book this year. I am satiated.
You know how I have that groupie mentality? Yeah, well… Ilovejohnsteinbecksomuchit’skillingme.
“It happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, “Slow down. You’re not as young as you once were.” And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi invalidism…. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I’ve lifted pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage.”
They should put that on a t-shirt. Girls would flock. Seriously, this guy is hot. What’s the opposite of cougar because that’s what I am. Or maybe I should just move to necrophilia since we’re going on 40 years since he met the daisies. Still, all through this book I was OMG THIS IS THE MAN OF MY DREAMS. He names his truck Rocinante! And Charley? My god… don’t even.
I’ve never really had the itch to travel across America. I’m a northeaster, I can’t handle people who don’t talk as fast as me, don’t walk as fast as me, eat clam chowder that’s red, use the word ‘pop’, don’t have basements, have tornado warnings, you know… those people. I’ve tiptoed out of my comfort zone a few times but usually rush back to the elitist, bitter, hmphing bosom of my kind. John has given me a bit of a rash.
The first few parts of the book center on country that I am familiar with… he drives from Long Island to the tip of Maine and back down across New Hampshire and Vermont. He stops at roadside diners, encounters sad souls and men of few words. This is 1960, when plastic covered everything was in and politics was best left to the city folk. He absorbs so much. “ And the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater. In color sof rose and lavender and purple it moved and pulsed against the night, and the frost sharpened stars shone through it. What a thing to see at a time when I need it so badly!" And to the sad soul who served him his plastic meal that night he says “ I wondered for a moment whether I should grab that waitress and kick her behind out to look at it, but I didn’t dare. She could make eternity and infinity melt and run out through your fingers.” Yes, I realize that’s an insult, but how freakin’ beautiful.
I want to breathe that air, to feel that rising, so glorious that words are not enough (except with him, they can be and that’s amazing). I want to sit by a fire with canucks passing as seasonal potato pickers; I want to sit in the Vermont church with him listening to the hellfire promising preacher damn us.
“Having proved that we, or perhaps only I, were no damn good, he painted with cool certainty what was likely to happen to us if we didn’t make some basic reorganizations for which he didn’t hold out much hope…. I began to feel good all over. For some years now God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the hell out of me.”
My OTP. My BFF, the fly to my soup, the lox to my bagel, my everything. See, John is.. JOHN in this book, he says he’s not.. he says he doesn’t want anyone to recognize him, that he wants to know America, to understand but he comes across so vividly, full Technicolor, that I found myself responding to him. I felt the manic depressive moments like the hills and valley of a rollercoaster. He bares himself to strangers, tries to pry the life out of them. He studies voraciously—and this isn’t a newbie rambler---he’s been EVERYWHERE and you still feel lost with him on the shores of lakes in the back woods of Indiana.
“My wants are simple. I have no desire to latch onto a monster symbol of fate and prove my manhood in titanic piscine war. But sometimes I do like a couple of cooperative fish of frying size.” I would fish with you my friend. Even in Indiana.
If I were to step out of my comfort zone and travel this America, I know that I wouldn’t see the same way that John sees. I know that this is a different America from 1960 Steinbeck as much as it is to 1930 Steinbeck. Perhaps even more so… we are consumed with posthaste and irritated with impermanent. I would want to take the unknown but know that I would fall prey to the interstates and their humdrum. I am not a patient woman (I am a northeaster). I wonder how many have taken the travels with Charley route and what they discovered.
There are so many more scenes that I want to share with you. I want to follow you around and read this out loud with boisterous glee. I cannot however, dinner is due and laundry is waiting.
Please, PLEASE read this book. Scratch the itch. Tell me all about it. ...more
“Phillip Dick’s effects fascinate me even more than the social discontent pulsing through the neon tube in front of the wrinkled mirror suspended by t “Phillip Dick’s effects fascinate me even more than the social discontent pulsing through the neon tube in front of the wrinkled mirror suspended by the piano wire from the windmill of his mind."
Wow. That is a great sentence. I would like someone someday to describe me this way. I would like Roger Zelazny to write an introduction for me, even if I’ve never heard of him.
This left me really excited to read Do androids dream of electric sheep? Other props: The title. How cool is that? Blade Runner. Yummy Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer hair that I would have promised my first child for back in the day. (Sorry, Em)
So. What can I say? Meh. Okay, Meh +. I liked it. It was ok. They probably shouldn’t have talked him up like that in the introduction. Maybe hype played a role here; maybe I’m just not smart enough to appreciate PKD. Whatever the reason, I can now state that I have read this and move on. ...more
This was like walking in on the final act of some grand production. Walking in on Romeo dooming himself as Juliet awakes. The last cries of ‘Jack! RosThis was like walking in on the final act of some grand production. Walking in on Romeo dooming himself as Juliet awakes. The last cries of ‘Jack! Rose!’ as the Leocicle drops into the icy Atlantic...hearing the last notes of ‘Hiding All Away’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
Yeah. Like that.
By now you know that I’m not the deepest well in the field. I spent my twenties reading Weetzie Bat and bopping around to King Missile. I know, I should have been studying the NYTBR or listening to Ira Glass wax poetic. It was misspent youth. I get it.
So, walking in on Dorothy pointing to her farmer friends saying ‘and you were there and you and you’… Yes, that is how I felt reading this book. I knew the name Christopher Hitchens… vaguely. (yes, you can drop me as a friend, I totally understand.) I am sure that I have read SOMETHING by him, right? I mean, I did have that subscription to the Atlantic in my thirties and I remember my husband buying this Vanity Fair so maybe there was something there… (besides sad substitutes for Lohan porn). But, I don’t KNOW Christopher Hitchens and I feel lesser because of that.
Maybe I wouldn’t like him. Maybe I would think he was another blowhard. I don’t know.. but when you are writing on your death bed and you can sound this eloquent… well, slap my knee and call me sally, I’m on board. Okay, Okay… writing about the Big C, suicide, AIDS... the death of a loved one tends to get props just on subject alone. The endurance, the courage, the tragedy of it all. It sells, I know this. It is especially jarring when you have experienced the loss of someone . You relate and you feel like you are in the know. It’s actually sort of selfish though, I mean.. YOU didn’t go through this.. you weren’t the one having toxins pumped into you, having your body, your mind, become your enemy. You just stood by and watched it happen, rubber-necking, gawking, throwing out clichés by the dozen (ha!).
Hitchens is full frontal here, he is witty and he is honest and clever and his whole take on ‘living dyingly’ makes the journey more personal. He is a master at his craft, of including you in the story, you are not bored or even sympathetic in that false sense that you think you know what he is going through. He makes you laugh as he talks about reading reactions to his illness, how the zealots actually relish: “Who else feels that Christopher Hitchens getting terminal throat cancer (sic) was God’s revenge for him using his voice to blaspheme him? Atheists like to ignore FACTS. They like to act like everything is a “coincidence”. Really? It’s just a “coincidence” (that) out of any part of his body, Christopher Hitchens got cancer in the one part of his body he used for blasphemy? Yeah, keep believing that, Atheists,. He’s going to writhe in agony and pain and wither away to nothing and then die a horrible agonizing death, and THEN comes the real fun, when he’s sent to HELFIRE forever to be tortured and set afire.”
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And his first response? Which mere primate is so damn sure that he can know the mind of god?
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(I do apologize for the use of gifs...there's no real excuse...carpe diem, folks.)
I really like this guy. I wish I had known him pre posthumously. Mortality is not long. (Yes, I get it.) But, it packs that punch. He is eloquent and it feels authentic, not dramatic. I believe this struggle.
“worst of all is chemo-brain. Dull stuporous. What if the protracted, lavish torture is only prelude to a gruesome execution.”
“Also ordinary expressions like ‘expiration date’.. will I outlive my Amex? My driver’s license?”
“Nose-hairs gone: runny nostrils. Constipation and diarrhea alternating.”
“ Brave? Hah! Save it for a fight you can’t run away from.”
“Banality of cancer. Entire pest-house of side-effects. Special of the day.”
I appreciate this because it knocked me on my ass. Death made me an orphan, a widow---what I might have thought a victim, but death was not kind to my loved ones and I need to see that and I need to see the struggles that they made to make sure that I didn’t see it then.
Yes, I did that. I started off a review about 9/11 with a Family Guy quote. You all saw it. Take my goodreaders badge aLet's terrorize the terrorists!
Yes, I did that. I started off a review about 9/11 with a Family Guy quote. You all saw it. Take my goodreaders badge away.
Too late? When did the satire on 9/11 begin? Is it still acceptable? Let's ask the hipsters.
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okaay...
Yes, I laughed at the Family Guy episode. GW refounding the confederacy and starting a 2nd Civil War that resulted in 17 million dead including Cesar Millan.. it puts a nice spin on the 'what happened if 9/11 was thwarted'idea.
I guess I'm just feeling...uncomfortable? lax? unworthy? about reviewing this... I also feel that everything has been said. Jaded. I think that fits. I'm jaded.
Last year I visited the 9/11 Memorial with my two daughters, then 16 and 13.. The line was one of those bank sort of lines where the nylon rope is zigzagged and you're carried like a mouse looking for cheese until you get to the airport like security circus at the end, and through all this, all you see is a baracade. No glimpses of what to come.. My daughters complained about the line to which I gave them my evil stare and then used all my guilt tactics... then ended up telling them to shut the hell up. The mood of the crowd was light... kids were skipping and people were snapping photos... I just stared. I tried to imagine where I used to sit when my husband and I would take nightly walks to the towers. I tried to recall how repulsive I thought they looked at night, big.. well SHADOWS blocking out the sky. I tried to remember hugging one of them and staring straight up and getting dizzy. It wasn't happening. I stared at the two square holes in the ground and saw two square holes. I didn't even take in the installation, the cascading water, the names etched on the side. I do remember the trees. They were so tiny.. and the one tree that had survived the attack and then later survived a hurricane so that it could be replanted and memorialized.. it was tethered with wires, kids were trying to touch it and people were posing in front of it smiling. Jaded.
Spiegelman's story seems just as jaded in his paranoid, neurotic, disillusioned, horrorific take on the attacks. He constantly refers to his pivotal image.. "The image of the looming north tower's glowing bones just before it vaporized" It is present in each piece and it's beautiful.
He talks about visiting small town America a month after the attack--"Still the small town I visited in Indiana--draped in flags that reminded me of the garlic one might put on a door to ward off vampires--was at least as worked up over a frat house's zoning violations as with threats from the 'raghead terrorists.' It was as if I'd wandered into an inverted version of Saul Steinberg's famous map of America seen from Ninth Avenue, where the know world ends at the Hudson; in Indiana everything east of the Alleghenies was very, very far away."
His references to early twentieth century comics is astute, in a conspiratoral sort of way.. how there are allusions to falling towers...Sometimes I had to put aside my cynicism and see this for what it was.. a scared, but prolific writer, trying to figure out what all of this means and how to survive it.
"Still time keeps flying and even the New Normal gets old. My strips are now a slow-motion diary of what I experienced while seeking some provisional equanimity--though three years later I'm still ready to lose it all at the mere drop of a hat or a dirty bomb. I still believe the world is ending, but I concede that it seems to be ending more slowly than I once thought... so I figured I'd make a book."
I owe Mr. Steinbeck an apology. I am so shamed that I cannot even use the familiar 'John'. I have taken this beautiful story and mucked it up. I read I owe Mr. Steinbeck an apology. I am so shamed that I cannot even use the familiar 'John'. I have taken this beautiful story and mucked it up. I read about Lee Chong during a middle school basketball game, I learned of Dora Flood while riding the shuttle bus to work. I grew to love/hate Mack during a cheerleading competition filthy with Rihanna songs. I fell in love with Doc and Frankie and Darling while watching a traumatic brain injured patient freak out about his meds.
I am not worthy. This series of stories is so…breathtaking. I may even go to California because of it… before it was Big Sur that made me think of leaving my treasured New England, but now… now I want to bask in the rubble of Cannery Row.
Except, I can’t… can I? Because it is set in a time that is so far off my radar. It’s set when credit bought you cheap whiskey and Model T’s were interchangeable. When squatters could make an old cannery their home and when artists could pretend to be French and live in a partially built boat. Why do I wish for this? It’s depressing and everything feels soaked in sepia and I see pageboys and horny sailors and dare I say… ruffians? I am messed up.
This is beautiful and sad and romantic and hopeful and tragic and wistful…. and….
Everyone seems to have a favorite story… the gopher, the party, the frog hunt. I can’t pinpoint one. I can only describe emotions and even then, I feel like I cheated and was only able to give in to them superficially. It’s really hard to take in “The word is a symbol and a delight which sucks up men and scenes, trees, plants, factories, and Pekinese. Then the Thing becomes the Word and back to Thing again, but warped and woven into a fantastic pattern. The Word sucks up Cannery Row, digests it and spews it out, and the Row has taken the shimmer of the green worlds and the sky-reflecting seas.” while the bus driver is laying on his horn and swerving dangerously around a Subaru.
I love every part of this book. Every word. It conjures up whimsy and makes me feel like there is more to life than vampires and reality shows and twitter and… and….
I also want to give a shout out to the reviews that many of my friends have posted. Each are in itself a chapter, a slice of the Row. I love that Sarah read this to her friends during a trip from Portland to Salinas. I love that Ben is reminded of teenage fears that karen uses the phrase ‘well-meaning ineptitude’ and that I now have an image of Logan flirting it up with Steinbeck.
Thank you, Mr. Steinbeck, thank you goodreaders, and thank you Carole Louise Dahl of Olympic Valley, CA for giving away this book so that I could buy it for a quarter at a library sale. I am a better person for having read this.
on a side note... does it detract from my appreciation if I mention how hot Steinbeck was? ...more
At one point in my life, I would have embraced this ‘I-am-an-anti-Christ-I-am-an-anarchist-Don't- know-what-I-want-But-I-know-how-to-get-it-I-wanna-de At one point in my life, I would have embraced this ‘I-am-an-anti-Christ-I-am-an-anarchist-Don't- know-what-I-want-But-I-know-how-to-get-it-I-wanna-destroy-the-passer-by-'Cos-I-wanna-be-anarchy’ anthem.
Now I’m just tired.
In 1996, when this novel was written, I might have been on the fringe of still believing… maybe…naps looked awful nice back then. The idea is inspiring, in a mind-set not body moving sort of way.
Yay. Old.
I will admit that I loved this movie adaptation and it’s taken me 17 years to read the book. Is that a hipster thing? I don’t know. I loved it in a Keyser Soze sort of way. In a Leonard Shelby sort of way. When I was young, Tyler Durden was one hot character. Now he seems like high maintenance. Really, who can keep up with that?
I do love the boy on boy camaraderie that fight club inspires. I have never been in a fight, unless you count the time I slammed my Holly Hobby lunch box into Troy Smith’s jaw in kindergarten. I don’t see the exhilaration but I can appreciate it. I can support the whole ‘not wanting to die without scars’ reasoning. We get one life. Let’s beat the crap out of each other and enjoy it. It’s probably not so different than a runner’s high, right?
I can also get behind the support group addiction. What better way to lose yourself but to plop down in the middle of parasitic brain parasite survivors. That paper cut seems much friendlier now.
Our generation has always seemed… not lost… another group got that name. I hate the ‘x’ label… but we’ve always seemed bitter and pissed off and growing up has been a hassle. This book captures that feeling:
“Deliver me from Swedish Furniture Deliver me from clever art May I never be complete May I never be content May I never be perfect Deliver me, Tyler, from being perfect and complete.”
Because what then?
Maybe Tyler Durden lives in all of us. Maybe we all believe that ‘This isn’t really death… We’ll be legend. We won’t grow old.” Maybe we’re scared that we will be forgotten. Tyler Durden can save us from obscurity. “Maybe we have to break everything to make something better out of ourselves.” Many of us believed that once.
I am Joe’s xanax/paxil/klonopin ridden liver.
Sid Vicious once said “ I was the only guy with any bit of anarchy left.” Look where it got him. I have a bowl of hearty tomato soup and homemade bread waiting for me. Project Mayhem can wait. I will watch the walls fall and wonder 'Where is my mind?' thankyouverymuch.
Once again, I am reminded of how lucky I am that I shuffled off this dysfunctional family coil. There are times, I admit, that I feel I might have den Once again, I am reminded of how lucky I am that I shuffled off this dysfunctional family coil. There are times, I admit, that I feel I might have denied my children the opportunity of Rockwellian holidays but then I presently slap myself in the face and say ‘Right… Griswoldian, if I’m fucking lucky, would be more appropriate.
“Tragedy rewritten as farce” is a phrase that Franzen uses within the story. Yes, this is so. I found myself giggling and then wanting to flog myself because ‘it’s not funny’ not if this is your family. I was spared/robbed/spared of dealing with my parents as an adult. I don’t even want to think about what kind of relationship I would have had with them… I can’t see myself being very patient with their ignorance or blindness or wondering why I left New Hampshire (seriously? You ask have to ask?)
On the whole, I like The Lamberts. I like Alfred and the kids, Gary, Chipper, and Denise. Enid. Yeah, well… not so much. Until she is loaded up on illegal meds, then I can tolerate her. Franzen’s depictions are solid. Their stories are just shy of incredible that they have to be believable. The writing, oh the writing… I almost wanted to use my Gen X defensiveness and call him a ‘hipster’ but when someone can say this: He turned to the doorway where she’d appeared. He began a sentence: “I am---“ but when he was taken by surprise, every sentence became an adventure in the woods; as soon as he could no longer see the light of the clearing from which he’d entered, he would realize that the crumbs he’d dropped for bearings had been eaten by birds, silent deft darting things which he couldn’t quite see in the darkness but which were so numerous and swarming in their hunger that it seemed as if they were the darkness, as if the darkness weren’t uniform, weren’t an absence of light but a teeming and corpuscular thing, and indeed when as a studios teenager he’d encountered the word ‘crepuscular’ in McKay’s Treasury of English Verse, the corpuscles of biology had bled into his understanding of the words, so that for his entire adult life he’d seen in twilight a corpuscularity, as of the graininess of the high-speed film necessary for photography under conditions of low ambient light, as of a kind of sinister decay,; and hence the panic of a man betrayed deep in the woods whose darkness was the darkness of starlings blotting out the sunset or black ants storming a dead opossum, a darkness that didn’t just exist but actively consumed the bearings that he’d sensible established for himself, lest he be lost; but in the instant of realizing he was lost, time became marvelously slow and he discovered hitherto unguessed eternities in the space between one word and the next, or rather he became trapped in that space between words and could only stand and watch as time sped on without him, the thoughtless boyish part of him crashing on out of sight blindly through the woods while he, trapped, the grownup Al, watched in oddly impersonal suspense to see if the panic-stricken little boy might, despite no longer knowing where he was or at what point he’d entered the woods of this sentence, still manage to blunder into the clearing where Enid was waiting for him, unaware of any woods---“packing my suitcase,’ he heard himself say. This sounded right. Verb, possessive, noun. Here was as suitcase in front of him, an important confirmation. He betrayed nothing.
Fuck. Hate him.
And that… that… was describing the onset of Parkinson’s….. holy shit. I really wanted to hate him. I wanted to take his Shopenhauer references and stick them in Al’s phantasmagorian growth. Hellz yeah, I be jealous. Tots.
Franzen’s care in giving just enough illumination of each of the children to relate back to their parentage is incredible. How Chip’s distrust and disgust for capitalism and the corporate world’s hold on the average joe’s superego leads him to sleep with an underage student… a ‘trust fund product of hippies’ that leads to his demise and decision to write bogus economic advertisements to mislead Americans to send money to Lithuania for the opportunity to have streets named after them. All normal.
Gary’s story… Gary’s concern with being labeled ‘depressed’ is my favorite. Gary is the oldest, the one that is supposed to succeed… supposed to be the carbon copy of what the next generation does…and drink himself into that belief.
“he estimated that his levels of Neurofactor 3 (i.e.; serotonins: 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. He had a spring in his step, an agreeable awareness of his above-average height and his late-summer suntan. His resentment of his wife, Caroline, was moderate and well contained. Declines led advances in key indices of paranoia (e.g.; his persistent suspicion that Caroline and his two older sons were mocking him), and his seasonally adjusted assessment of life’s futility and brevity was consistent with the overall robustness of his mental economy. He was not the least bit clinically depressed.”
Denise, the youngest, the most guilt ridden of the three, is also quite interesting. Her motivation in life seems to be centered on the fact that she was beautiful, talented, want-for-nothing, and hated herself for it. Her never-ending unknowing quest to destroy herself by sleeping with people who she feels would never otherwise have what she has leads her down paths near lunacy… all the while holding herself up as a world renowned chef and all around nice girl.
I can’t do these descriptions justice. I’ve read so much Franzen that words are stringing themselves together on their own and not nearly at the fluency or perspicacity that he can give us.
Enid… now Enid, I can tell you I despise… I have read and seen too many Enids in my time (read more than seen since I am a booknerd). She is manipulative, she sees herself blameless, she concocts stories to impress neighbors, she has that tone.. that tone of vindictiveness that makes me want to wrap my hands around her oil of O’lay laden neck and squash.
“To Enid, at this moment came a vision of rain. She saw herself in a house with no walls; to keep the weather out, all she had was tissue. And here came the rain from the east, and she tacked up a tissue version of Chip and his exciting new job as a reporter. Here it came from the west and the tissue was how handsome and intelligent Gary’s boys were and how much she loved them. The wind shifted, and she ran to the north side of the house with such shreds of tissue as Denise afforded: how she’d married too young but was older and wiser now and enjoying great success as a restaurateur and hoping to meet the right your man! And then the rain cam blasting up from the south, the tissue disintegrating even as she insisted that Al’s impairments were very mild and he’d be find if he’d just work on his attitude and get his drugs adjusted, and it rained harder and harder and she was so tired,, and all she had was tissue----“
Maybe I’m afraid that I will become Enid. That I will hold my regrets and hostilities in until I feel justified in making others carry it. God, I really hope not. I don’t want to be Alfred either, with his woods and his hallucinations and just out of reach is since sense of what is right and wrong. Yes, this book made me afraid. If my kids grow up feeling that immediate family is the ONLY family, I will understand. Because, I’m sure at about that time, my Enid like alter ego will be making an appearance and that middle school CDC education will regurgitate out and my poor poor grandchildren will suffer. No way, Jose… keep them away.
“I leave it to your discretion” was Alfred’s go to sentence and I will use it here. I leave it to you to delve into this maladjusted family. Beware of the self-insight that follows, the neurosis, the sense of failing, the relief, the combustion of tears, the guffaws.
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