August 2012
27 posts
3 tags
evison continued
“Look, I didn’t plan for any of this, Cash, belive me. Not this trip, not these passengers, and definitely not what I left behind. I planned like hell for something else entirely. All this just happened.” So, then, if a statement like this — a self-aware bit of dialogue, one of those bits that most novels can’t avoid, that stand out waiting to be pull-quoted — looks a little pat...
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evison continued
“Now she stares me down more intently than ever. This time I meet her eyes unflinchingly. But truth be told, I’m only reflecting her glare, shining it back on her in hopes of blinding her to my own weakness.” Which is a nice bit of observation, as Ben gets fired, on his way to bottoming out. Evison has a minor line in semi-sad-sacks, guys who have fallen off their horses and are in the process of...
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jonathan evison, the revised fundamentals of...
“And if I seemed tired or grumpy or a little short on patience as I watched my kids like a hawk at the water’s edge, it’s not because I didn’t live for those Friday afternoons, for muddy feet and dandelion bouquets, for grass-stained knees and half-eaten lunches. Friday afternoons were perfection, the sort of perfection childless people can’t possibly understand. It wasn’t an easy perfection, all...
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lavalle continued
“It can be honorable to stand alone, arguing for some cause, but sometimes people confuse that stance with just being an asshole. Which is not a stance. It’s an aspect of character.” Part of a digression, a long description of the (single) rat that lives on the ward, who is about to play a crucial part in the escape of one of the central characters. But despite the fact that LaValle is describing...
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lavalle continued
“Mr. Mack had a well maintained mustache. Frank Waverly had actually turned a paper napkin into a pocket square for his sport coat. Of all the patients Pepper had seen so far, these two seemed least likely. They were those kind of older folks you see less and less anymore. The ones who cultivate their dignity long after anyone’s checking for it. The ones who don’t think it takes an occasion to...
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victor lavalle, the devil in silver
“Here’s what you have to understand about that book, Josephine. As good as it is, it isn’t about mentally ill people. It takes place in a mental hospital, yes. But that book is about the way a certain young generation felt that society was designed to destroy them. Make them into thoughtless parts of a machine. To lobotomize them. That book is about them, not about people like us.” The second...
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duncan continued
“You give thanks for small things. I gave thanks that I was wearing jeans, not a skirt. People start trying to kill you, you stop wearing skirts.” Because when Duncan loosens up, and enjoys the freedom that a lack of seriousness brings, things actually can get enjoyable.
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glen duncan, tallula rising
“Her primary hard-wired connection was to her brother. Nothing could come from her to me while he was withheld. She wasn’t punishing me. It was impersonal, structural, necessary. If I failed — if he died but she and I survived — then something might be possible between us, if I could stand it. But not while he was alive, not while he was withheld. Until he was established one way or...
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shipstead continued
“She gave him a long, gloomy squint. ‘This family is falling into the middle class,’ she said.” Another one of those delightful old ladies.
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shipstead continued
“When she was old, she wanted to be like Oatsie: imperious, brusque, and given to non-sequitur.” The non-sequitur in question: “You’d make a wonderful lawyer. You have beautiful hair.” And then: “That woman Janet Reno. Her hair was an abomination.” I’m pretty sure my favorite parts of this book are the old ladies, Oatsie and Mopsy, written as entirely unafraid to be horrid or manipulative, but...
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maggie shipstead, seating arrangements
“These people, this pervasive clique, this Establishment to which Winn had attached himself and his family, seemed intent on dividing their community into smaller and smaller fractions, halves of halves, always approaching but never reaching some axis of perfect exclusivity.” Emblematic and quotable, but one of the few points that don’t work in a very good debut novel. This is Dominique, one of...
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amy sohn, motherland
“Rebecca never would have dreamed that rich Tribecans would come to Gowanus to visit a kids’ store — but there were no limits to what people were willing to do for their progeny.” A little dislocating: I know that this is tongue-in-cheek, but I’m not sure quite to what extent — it is intended to be arch, but I fear only in the way that Rebecca, with a child-support settlement of...
The meaning of a story should go on expanding for... →
Flannery O’Connor’s response to a query from a professor of English, in 1961, regarding his students’ interpretations of “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” From Letters of Note, via The Millions.
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greenfield continued
“And for Sadie, who took so many of her cues as to what she should be, how she should act, what she should think, from the families of the children she cared for and, to an even greater extent, the better, fancier-heeled girls from just around the block, it sometimes seemed like nobody was casting a glance much past, say, Friday night. She hadn’t yet encountered the word provincialism, and though...
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karl taro greenfield, triburbia
“He bought a vast loft in the building of Jay-Z and drove around in a ridiculous-looking yellow Ferrari.” This is just weird, or at best, half-baked, the broken English. The speaker is a French woman married to an Italian chef, and living like all the characters in the novel in Tribeca. But it’s the first jarring shift out of a comfortable and unobtrusive narrative voice that we’ve had. Most but...
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abbott continued
“A stitch of panic rises over that high brow, her back rustling against the vinyl curtain, and here I am, I suddenly realize, five inches taller than the little shrub, the little Napoleon. I just never felt it before.” And that makes the moment where Addy grows up work, which of course happens at the Big Game, which also works, even if it’s a little hokey. But the part that suffers — the...
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abbott continued
“I let everyone see I’m not afraid, and that I’m not anything but a silly cheerleader, a feather-bodied sixteen-year-old with no more sense than a marshmallow peep.” But our hero, Addy, to some degree really is a marshmallow peep. Dare Me relies a little much on the glamor of its setting and on an atmosphere of paranoia, at the expense of plot and clarity. Addy gets stuck between knowing best...
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megan abbott, dare me
“‘So we’re not an ass-shaking pep squad?’ Beth mutters, her voice smoke-thick, her eyes shot through with blood and boredom. ‘If I wanted to be an ath-lete,’ she says, ‘I’d’ve joined the other dykes on field hockey.’” Of course the mean-girl stuff is delightful, as is the notion of setting a noir plot among cheerleaders, as for that matter is the struggle between the captain and the coach for the...
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powell continued
“Half the world is an animal and the other half a meddling high-minded egghead and they are not coming together except in certain forms of predation and exploitation of the other. This is why tyrants have their spectacular runs. They force peace momentarily. Then the candy eaters start to get a leg up, or the meddlers do, and the pseudo-truce starts to fray, and someone offs the tyrant, or he dies...
“If we could sit in these chairs unperturbed while everything was taken and have...”
– Padgett Powell, You & Me | Ecco 07.31.12
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powell continued
“The edge of incoherence is a strong position, militarily speaking. Not incoherence outright, but the selvage as it were, affords a bidirectional moment between dissolution and precipitation, liquid and solid, that can absorb about any assault, any direction, gross or subtle, acid, base, land, sea, or air. The mind properly speaking is in a condition suggesting pickle relish, or chow-chow as it...
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padgett powell, you & me
“Two generations ago we would go out there, yank that codger out of that bus, give him a good beating that did not actually put him in the hospital but which decided ran him out of town, our object, and the matter would be handled, no legal repercussions, no perverse crimes on our watch, no counseling services involved, no law, nothing but bluebirds and rocks and sticks and good picnics and war...
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jones continued
“Daniel is somewhere safe inside his imagination, and there’s this small part of me that envies him. That wants to be him. There’s a bigger part of me that wants to take back everything I ever said and say things when I didn’t say anything and should have.” And without that grounding in realism — without something to give weight and drag to Daniel’s imagination — when we finally get...
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shane jones, daniel fights a hurricane
“I kept thinking about how I know it’s not real, this idea of a Hurricane coming and just destroying everything, but in a way it could be real, right? Nothing says that it won’t happen. Weather is unpredictable. And my job where I’m working on his pipeline, we’re basically moving it closer and closer to the ocean, and the fear is that once it hits the ocean, the Hurricane will become a reality. I...
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french continued
“When I think about the Spain case, from deep inside endless nights, this is the moment I remember. Everything else, every other slip and stumble along the way, could have been redeemed. This is the one I clench tight because of how sharp it slices. Cold still air, a weak ray of sun glowing on the wall outside the window, smell of stale bread and apples.” But if there are things that French does...
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french continued
“The smell of the sea swept over the wall and in through the empty window-hole, wide and wild with a million intoxicating secrets. I don’t trust that smell. It hooks us somewhere deeper than reason or civilization, in the fragments of our cells that rocked in oceans before we had minds, and it pulls till we follow mindlessly as rutting animals.” Because this is not a straight procedural, nor does...
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tana french, broken harbor
“I don’t feel sorry for anyone I run across via work. Pity is fun, it lets you have a great wank about what a wonderful guy you are, but it does bugger-all good to the people you’re feeling sorry for. The second you start getting gooey about what they’ve been through, your eye comes off the ball. You get weak. Next thing you know, you can’t get out of bed in the morning because you can’t face...
