by
Lucia Berlin
inspo/characterisation
Lucia Berlin,
Helen Garner,
Shirley Hazzard,
Michael Ondaatje,
Rachel Kushner,
Francesco Pacifico,
David Foster Wallace,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Elizabeth Hardwick
nice character descriptions (fiction, memoir, journalism)
When I’m with Joe none of this matters. I think he is a reporter because he likes to talk to people. Wherever we go we end up talking to strangers. And liking them.
I don’t think I ever really liked the world until I met him. My parents don’t like the world, or me, or they would trust me.
Now, me … if they said I had a year to live, I’ll bet I would just swim out to sea, get it over with. But Sally, it is as if the sentence had been a gift. Maybe it’s because she fell in love with Xavier the week before she found out. She has come alive. She savors everything. She says whatever she wants, does whatever makes her feel good. She laughs. Her walk is sexy, her voice is sexy. She gets mad and throws things, hollers cusswords. Little Sally, always meek and passive, in my shadow as a girl, in her husband’s for most of her life. She is strong, radiant now; her zest is contagious. People stop by the table to greet her, men kiss her hand. The doctor, the architect, the widower.
Sally adores Mexico, with the fervor of a convert. Her husband, her children, her house, everything about her is Mexican. Except her. She’s very American, old-fashioned American, wholesome. In a way I am the more Mexican, my nature is dark. I have known death, violence. Most days I don’t even notice that period when the room has sunlight in it.
I told Elena to cancel a meeting and an appointment. He spoke all morning, simply and clearly, about their relationship, about her arrest.
I am a defense attorney. I’m cynical. I am a material person, a greedy man. I told him I would take the case for nothing.
“No. Thank you,” he said. “Just please tell her that you’re doing it for no charge. But it’s my fault she got into this trouble and I want to pay for it. What will it be? Five thousand? More?”
“Two thousand,” I said.
“I know that’s too low. How about three?”
“Deal,” I said.
lol
[i like this because it shows that he knows how to read people but the reader has to be in on it]
Jesse made everybody feel important. He wasn’t kind. Kind is a word like charity; it implies an effort. Like that bumper sticker about random acts of kindness. It should mean how someone always is, not an act he chooses to do. Jesse had a compassionate curiosity about everyone. All my life I have felt that I didn’t really exist at all. He saw me. I. He saw who I was. In spite of all the dangerous things we did, being with him was the only time I was ever safe.
She holds him like a potato sack. The expression on her face says, “Where does this sack go?” It occurs to me that she has nobody to tell her anything at all.
What do you mean? we all said. Harris just shrugged, took a sip of his drink. He doesn’t talk much at parties. He hangs back, not needing anything from anyone, which of course draws people toward him. I’ve watched him move from room to room, running in slow motion from a crowd that is unconsciously chasing him.
It took balls to do what he did because if he failed—and he had failed—he’d end up where he was. He hadn’t accomplished the things of which he’d dreamed, and now he couldn’t even get done the very basic things that most adults did—like pay his bills, for example (a most unpleasant form letter—and purple—was lying on his cluttered desk, somewhere, from Commonwealth Gas), or alphabetize his books. And when he tried, when he took the books off the shelves in order to put them back in alphabetical order, he became so discouraged at the impossibility of categorizing them properly that he just left them lying there, heaped upon the floor. He worked out a lot but he didn’t apply moisturizer to his skin at night, and he seldom flossed. And then there was the Google. . . . Whereas Katie, Katie was the sort of girl who, when she replied to e-mails, spliced her responses into segments, in which she answered specific points, which were set off from the margin by little arrows. This just wasn’t something Sam could do. He was always writing people back about other things.
And yet Katie seemed willing to sit there. Was she dumb?
Warren Beasley had his own radio program on a local station. It was called “Death Is Just Around the Corner,” and it was broadcast from two to five in the morning. I had listened to the program, or at least parts of it, close to a hundred times, and not once on all those occasions had I heard Warren repeat himself to any extensive degree. He invited no guests, played no records and gave no news bulletins, except of his own making. The show had ten or twelve steady sponsors and many irregulars—hair restorers, makers of artificial limbs, ear-piercing shops, a metaphysician in Long Island City, an illuminator of manuscripts and scrolls, several dog kennels. Most of the sponsors wrote their own commercials and they were usually read by Warren in what can only be called a mounting orgasmic frenzy. Warren also delivered commercials for nonexistent products. He talked for three solid hours every morning but Monday, sometimes with style, humor and intelligence, sometimes with scatological glee, sometimes in the bitter self-pitying tone of a genuinely desperate man. Warren had a brilliant mind, I thought, but he was completely irresponsible and it wasn’t easy to characterize his audience. [...]
love this
“I’m the proprietor of an electrical appliance repair shop on Fourteenth Street.”
“Tell him what you specialize in.”
“Toasters with doors and prewar radios. I have problems with pop-up things and things that are combinations of things like clock-radios or radio-phonographs. You have to read to keep up-to-date. I haven’t read a book in twenty years. I don’t have a head for numbers. I don’t like voltage. My shop is small and I do what I can to encourage people to keep out.”