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[...] It employs none of the fictive habits, the prompts and crutches and connective tissue of narrative. Time slips around like an eel. Place is bulldozed. Characters have no identity save for the words they speak and they speak the speakable with tireless abandon. There is no communion, no closure. There are rants. Mad soliloquies. Offended ripostes, offensive parries. Almost everyone accounted for is indignant, baffled, enraged, duplicitous, misunderstood, or misunderstanding. [...]
[...] They are both so miserable and distracted in their marriage that they harbor a flatulent drifter in their home, both thinking he is the other's father. [...]
i didnt even notice this lmao but it's so funny (dicephalis couple)
We are ... swept along. Mr. Gaddis confessed that he wanted us to be, in this flow of unremitting talk -- "might miss a lot but that's what life is, after all? Missing something that's right before you?" His characters can't or won't communicate in any meaningful way. [...]
During all the years he worked on J R, he was dutifully laboring for a paycheck from the corporate machine -- Kodak, Ford, IBM, Pfizer ("an operation of international piracy") -- writing ad copy and position papers [...] He knew the cant of marketing well and was ever alert to systems of speech, of persuasion, of obfuscation, seeing and portraying the American way of waste -- the waste of nature, talent, energy, the waste that markets, systems, management demand for gtowth.
The girl is twenty-five. It has not been very long since her divorce but she cannot remember the man who used to be her husband. He was probably nice. She will tell the child this, at any rate. Once he lost a fifty-dollar pair of sunglasses while surf casting off Gay Head and felt badly about it for days. He did like kidneys, that was one thing. He loved kidneys for weekend lunch. She would voyage through the supermarkets, her stomach sweetly sloped, her hair in a twist, searching for fresh kidneys for this young man, her husband. When he kissed her, his kisses, or so she imagined, would have the faint odor of urine. Understandably, she did not want to think about this. It hardly seemed that the same problem would arise again, that is, with another man. Nothing could possibly be gained from such an experience! The child cannot remember him, this man, this daddy, and she cannot remember him. He had been with her when she gave birth to the child. Not beside her, but close by, in the corridor. He had left his work and come to the hospital. As they wheeled her by, he said, “Now you are going to have to learn how to love something, you wicked woman.” It is difficult for her to believe he said such a thing.
lol
Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large dog in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-seven years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.
Elizabeth was a nervous young woman. She was nervous because she was not married to Sam. This desire to be married again embarrassed her, but she couldn’t help it. Sam was married to someone else. Sam was always married to someone.
Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness. They met at the wedding dinner of the daughter of a mutual friend. Delicious food was served and many peculiar toasts were given. Sam liked Elizabeth’s aura and she liked his too. They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink. At one point, he thought he saw a red rabbit in the floral centerpiece. It’s true, it was Easter week, but he worried about this. They danced again. Sam danced Elizabeth out of the party and into the parking lot. Sam’s car was nondescript and tidy except for a bag of melting groceries.
lol
They began going out together. Elizabeth promised to always take the babysitter home. At first, Elizabeth and Sam attempted to do vile and imaginative things to each other. This culminated one afternoon when Sam spooned a mound of tiramisu between Elizabeth’s legs. At first, of course, Elizabeth was nervous. Then she stopped being nervous and began watching Sam’s sweating, good-looking shoulders with real apprehension. Simultaneously, they both gave up. This seemed a good sign. The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.
The Wilsons’ surroundings are splendid. Mrs. Wilson has splendid clothes, a splendid figure. She has a wonderful Cuban cook. The house is worth three-quarters of a million dollars. The plantings are worth a hundred thousand dollars. Everything has a price. It is fantastic. A precise worth has been ascribed to everything. Every worm and aphid can be counted upon. It costs a certain amount of money to eradicate them. The sod is laid down fresh every year. For weeks after the lawn is installed, the seams are visible and then the squares of grass gather together and it becomes, everywhere, in sun or shade, a smooth, witty and improbable green like the color of a parrot.
The restaurant that the yard boy’s girlfriend chooses is not expensive. It is a fish restaurant. The plates are plastic. There is a bottle of hot sauce on each table. The girlfriend doesn’t like fancy.
The yard boy’s girlfriend is not talking to him. She has not been talking to him for days, actually. He knows he should be satisfied with whatever situation arises but he is having a little difficulty with his enlightenment.
heh