Purity

by Jonathan Franzen

Siegfeldstra

Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance),

From her description of him, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love was untempered by shame and thus fully contagious.

She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that

Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet.

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racked his memory for an example of his having treated another human being as anything but an instrumentality.

He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared it was a lot more time than it had felt like.

And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.

toxic self-regard,

She hadn’t entirely stopped loving Charles, but there was only so long that she could stand to be around him with an ache in her chest. She felt loyal to a baby in her that hadn’t even been conceived yet. To a possibility.

Pip wondered what the secret was of being different in a way that attracted people, as opposed to her own way.

For all her intelligence and sensitivity, she not only wasn’t making sense but was unable to recognize that she wasn’t, and it was terrible to see this in a person to whom I’d been so profoundly devoted and had made a vow of lifelong care. And so I had to keep working with her to help her understand why I couldn’t keep working with her.

My father was a good man: a tireless teacher and loyal husband, a seeder of independence in my sisters, a sucker for stories of injustice, a reflexive giver of the benefit of the doubt, a vigorous raiser of his hand when there was unpleasant work to be volunteered for. And yet I’m haunted by the fact that, all his life, he did exactly what he pleased.

I allowed myself to hope that he’d somehow overlooked the worn copy of Oui magazine that I’d shoplifted from the back of a used-book store and hidden in the closet, but after dinner he came to my room and asked me what I thought it was like to be the women in a pornographic magazine. “I hadn’t thought about it,” I said truthfully. “Well, you’re at the age where you’d better start thinking about it.

way of drawing all eyes to her. But she was fundamentally far shyer than her self-presentation led anyone to imagine, and she kept alienating people with her moral absolutism and her sense of superiority, which is so often the secret heart of shyness.