Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

Only when she was allowed to work on direct-mail and social-media outreach did her talents seem less wasted; having grown up with no television, she had good language skills.

and her student debt was functionally a vow of poverty. She

“You like Marie, though. And she’ll be there every day, you’ll never be alone. It’ll be sort of the same and sort of new—it’ll be nice.” She sounded to herself just like she did when she was lying on the phone at work.

Once upon a time, it had sufficed to write The Sound and the Fury or The Sun Also Rises. But now bigness was essential. Thickness, length.

Their marriages had been Old Testament, hers a matter of honoring her covenant with Charles, Tom’s a matter of fearing Anabel’s wrath and judgment. In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

That she herself was now the older, drier, pouchier-faced woman who once had been, as Pip was now, a mobile destabilizing menace, a kind of rogue warhead …

Fusion chain reactions were natural, the source of a sun’s energy, but fission chain reactions weren’t. Fissile plutonium atoms were nature’s unicorns, and nowhere in the universe could a critical mass of them naturally assemble itself.

The problem with a life freely chosen every day, a New Testament life, was that it could end at any moment.

Their conservatism appealed to her German belief that nature was perfect and that all the troubles in the world were caused by man.

His fame soon changed even their memories of him.