The reading group (not book club) had begun meeting in January, two months after the midterm elections that had, as they could not yet know, swept the Democrats out of congressional power for the next almost-decade, and Vivek was treated with the mild deference due to someone who had recently suffered the death of a somewhat important relative, a great-uncle, maybe, or adult cousin. There were no Republicans among them, of course, but there was some range in the degree to which politics was central to their lives, from the socialists associate-editing a newish journal of “literature and ideas” to Thomas, who presumably voted for Democrats, if he voted, but also went to church, exercised regularly, and worked for an international bank. Derek had felt in himself a recent, emerging desire for political commitment (like Larkin in the abandoned church, but for economic justice?), though he hadn’t acted on it. He didn’t enjoy going to protests, and he didn’t want to be in one of the Marxist reading groups whose membership overlapped significantly with this one. Maybe he would ask Vivek if there was anything he could do for 2012, though he feared that would prove less than life-changing. Hope had pulled off the big win once; what could the next election be other than a crowd-pleasing but redundant sequel?

He’d moved down to the corner of the table to talk to Patrick, who was the lead singer of a rock band that had just received a devastating negative review on a popular website. Derek was existentially unnerved by the unfairness of it. Patrick was sweet and funny, and everyone who heard his music loved it, and yet now some asshole had endangered his possible career because his album didn’t meet some nonsensical standard of originality, as defined by a critic whose sense of history didn’t extend any further back than David Bowie’s third album. As if originality even existed. Derek realized this was a rich position to take, as someone who edited (assisted in the editing of) reviews of various degrees of negativity, and he had already written a couple of less-than-positive ones himself, though they were for obscure-enough venues that he was confident he hadn’t derailed anyone’s ambitions. It was wrong, he knew, that the reason he was opposed to this particular bad review was that it was Patrick, a person who was already so sufficiently self-effacing that he didn’t need a website to tell him he should dislike his own work. The solution, Patrick was telling him now, was not to take things personally. One needed, he had discovered, to let one’s work be as the seagull over the ocean, drifting on currents and squawking horribly, unencumbered by the dull perspectives of the beach­goers on the distant shore.

“Huh,” Derek said.

“Yeah, I guess I’ve been thinking about it too much,” Patrick said.