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It was the longest abstention of his adult life, excepting the five years when he hadn’t drunk at all, five years that had included (it was true) the period when he’d courted and married Mimi. But the present abstention had come a year too late. A year ago, without warning—or rather, after a warnin…

She set down her pen and looked at me. “Charlotte, we know this thing is rotten,” she said. “But it’s still in our hands, we can still walk away. All we will have lost is some time!” I saw the martini in her eyes—the heat, the conviction. And a strange feeling overtook me then; it flared at the wor…

Harris put his arm around his wife and pulled her close. There was so much he wanted to say. Courage! Look around you! The makings of happiness are before us! When Demographics in America first began to thrive, when he launched his focus groups of disenfranchised machine tool workers and reconstruc…

He gazed through his windshield at the fake red-brick exterior, the debased shrubbery surrounded by wood chips. Beijing, Moscow—they were all over the world, McDonald’s, colonizing, anesthetizing, and it was said that no country containing one had been at war since. Of course, they were already def…

I made a brief, meticulous study of Thomas Keene: his smooth self and his fat shadow self, his olive Armani, his sandy hair and small round eyes. I scrutinized him for one granule of cynicism, a scintilla of evidence that at bottom he didn’t believe a word he was saying. I found nothing. This ex—fa…