Unlike his peers, Mr. Pynchon never started from a set conception of the world, but from the detritus of pop culture, science, and art. He did not plot so much as pattern his novels, setting up complementary and clashing resonances and dichotomies in such a way as to refuse any reductive analysis of the narrative…
If in recent years one type of writing has managed to at least hint at the genuine problem in education, it is the adolescent fantasy novel. […] The structuring desire of every novel of this sort is the same: a well-resourced school that offers a meaningful education. The anxiety that eventually takes over the story is also the same: that the school will turn out to be just as authoritarian, just as banal and arbitrary as its real-life counterparts.
I’d always felt my boy would live forever. He seemed strung with a different make of vein…
The novel wouldn’t strain the reader’s suspension of disbelief quite as much if the narrator were just a few years older—a short Publishers Weekly review even made the mistake of calling it a “portrait of teenage rebellion”…
Dreams have the following architecture: metallic substance, pursuant laws of mineralness. Vague plunder of booty, plastic robe of pearls. Sesame pirates of our wonderfully dull childhood where a perverted man usurps your surname and wanders the lawn, sprinkling reindeer tears…
I said to them, ‘We need to understand that we’re the last generation of writers that can think of themselves as Victorian gentlepeople, living above the marketplace…’
The ghost of one of the murdered, misburied underage models begins to haunt Benson. She has bells for eyes, tiny brass ones dangling from the top of each socket…
…the boy knew from experience that if he stepped inside the room a certain alteration of the air would unnerve him—he’d begin to feel that strange sad clutching sensation, that was also a sensation like that of sand slipping away beneath your feet…
Sometimes I smile before I mean it. Better, sometimes I’ve smiled before I mean it. Meant it. You know what I mean?—Sometimes I smile before I smile, or know I’m smiling, and I mean it, although I didn’t mean to—never mind–
G enters the unoccupied cottage. Porridge, chairs, beds. Too hot, too cold, too high, too wide, too hard, too soft. Just right. G eats, breaks, crawls in. The owners return. An intruder!
As an edifice built to stupefy and alienate the reader, Taipei is something to behold. It is like a hall of mirrors where the visitor’s reflection eliminates any trace of her original affect, where a smile is thrown back as an anesthetized mouth…
This fridge has a powerful right to speak. That’s right. A hooligan in his past life, this refrigerator was born with an unusually powerful voice…
At best willing only to consume, to rifle through trash on her Kindle, ready to relinquish her final moments of quietude to the noise of visual culture, the reader is whispered about as an aphasic oldster awaiting euthanasia…
What good are the legs?
The girl
Waits
Like the rat’s daughter-in-law…
…swaying anorexic or bulimic between as always two mothers this one who loves me falsely and would deny me all food and that one who loves me falsely and would kill me with food…
