[...] For her first grad seminar in American modernism [...] building a thesis from her marginalia in As I Lay Dying ("SUFFOCATING IN PERSPECTIVE"). Contemporary writers were so shit-scared of moralizing that they delegated to their poor characters the responsibility for conveying their philosophies through indirect discourse, the indeterminate ironies of narrative distance, constraining writers from delivering the grand true-eyed pronouncements of Tolstoy or Proust. Writers had capitulated to the camera lens. Postmodern author-surrogates and clairvoyant first-persons were just Band-Aids on a fault line. We needed a return to omniscience.

Linda was angry that they could settle so easily into prescribed social roles, down to the smallest exchange--arguments over buying single-ply toilet paper or refilling the Brita pitcher, then collapsing together to watch reality TV in silence, too exhausted to even make fun of it.

[...] Penetration went ... okay, with some mistargeting, but then he began the missionary's lonely ordeal in the savage jungle. [...]

[...] All of this disqualified him as a good person and a feminist, but he wasn't antifeminist either, more of a solipsist--and if solipsism was theory, then masturbation was practice.

"The Internet is a vile, omnivorous privatization machine. A technological vector of capitalist domination. Heidegger."

"Yo, you don't win arguments by saying, 'Heidegger'."

[...] She turned to enter a stall, lowered to her knees, and made the familiar pattern of motions hair pushed back and three fingers snaked into her mouth, repeating nothing in her head as she sang out her stomach. As it splashed and clouded out below her, she remembered how virtuous and light it felt to have done this. Though not while you did it. Then you were alone and it always hurt.

At Yale, promise became indistinguishable from purpose. [...] Whenever he doubted the utility of learning the behavior of light around massive bodies, he reminded himself that it was keeping him alive. [...]

[...] At orientation he sweatily lurked by snack bowls with an escape-ready smile. [...]

"[...] You hate anyone who's not as smart as you aspire to be. Because you can manipulate them, or because they don't try hard enough to see through you. Even worse is that you both resent men and live for their attention, and your attention-getting makes other girls either despise or lose respect for you. Basically, you're lonely, and exploit desperate guys for validation, being sure to make them suffer so that you're not technically serving them. But ironically that makes you, like, metaneedy--you need their need. And finally you inflate this loneliness to existential proportions, convince yourself it's more than just self-manufactured twenty-something drama. But that's all it is: drama. Sorry I'm rushing this; I had more to say."

This hag has not left Will's apartment in 3 weeks. It's your basic hardwood-&-whitewash affair, screaming realtor from every sconce & track light. Big round glass table, daybed, lounge chair so overstuffed it leans you forward. Huge flat-screen on the wall where portraits of ancestors might have once hung.