More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Why are you crying?” “I’m sorry. You’re being so nice to me.” “You’d do the same for me.” Alice nodded. “I know. I’m sorry.” “Darling, don’t continually say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Next time you feel like saying ‘I’m sorry,’ instead say ‘Fuck you.’ Okay?”
“I love you,” purred Alice. “You love Vicodin is what you love.
Two ounces of your finest paddlefish roe for Miss Eileen here.” “Oops,” said Alice. Ezra turned to look at her calmly. Then, tutting and shaking his head: “I’m sorry darling. You’re not Eileen.”
‘My sweet little whorish Nora
...and what follows, from a book Ezra reads to her, is trashy porn...
“Did you buy him all those coats?” “Yep.” “And do you think he went crazy before he became homeless, or the other way around?” Ezra thought about this. “Don’t sentimentalize him.” “What do you mean?” “Don’t pity him. Don’t overempathize with him. He’s fine.”
“Good morning, dear! You look pretty today. Tell me: Do you have a boyfriend?” “Not yet, Anna! Not yet.”
The senile Anna episodes grow tedious...
“My darling Eileen got to be forty and wanted a baby, with me. I didn’t want to lose her so I thought about it very seriously. And I came close to doing it. I’m glad as hell I didn’t.” “What happened?” “We split up, which was very hard, and it took a while but she found someone else, Edwin Wu. And now they have little Kyle and Olivia Wu, who are four and six and pure enchantment.”
The night before his birthday they shared a praline tart and watched the president announce the invasion. In this conflict, America faces an enemy who has no regard for conventions of war, or rules of morality. . . . We come to Iraq with respect for its citizens, for their great civilization, and for the religious faiths they practice. We have no ambition in Iraq except to remove a threat and to restore control of that country to its people.
The following evening a friend was going to throw him a party to which Alice was not invited.
“Sweetheart, you don’t want to be there. I don’t want to be there. Besides, you’re the one who doesn’t want people to know about us. You’re the one who doesn’t want to wind up on Page Six.”
“Your heart is doing something funny.”
Pransky agreed to see him the following morning and detected nothing amiss
“So, Mary-Alice, I’ve been thinking . . .” The waiter came with their drinks. “That maybe you would like to visit me out in the country this summer.” “Really?” “If you’d like to.” “Of course I’d like to.”
there is Clete, and a few others who come around to mow the lawn and whatnot, so I suggest we take the precaution of giving you an alias.”
“Samantha Bargeman.”
He wiped his hands on his napkin and pulled a business card from the pocket of his shirt: SAMANTHA BARGEMAN Editorial and Research Assistant to Ezra Blazer
In January, I submitted to Congress a framework for Medicare reform that insisted on giving seniors access to prescription drug coverage, and offering more choices under Medicare.
“Because,” Cormery went on, “when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone . . . you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.”
Camus, The First Man
“Nine twelve.” “You won’t believe this, but I’m rereading David Copperfield, for my book, and four lines down on page one hundred and twelve I’ve just come across the word ‘bargeman.’ ”
“What.” “Tell me something.” “Okay.” “Do you ever think this isn’t good for you?” “On the contrary,” Alice said a little too loudly. “I think it’s very good for me.”
The friend who called her The Kid, for example, had written a book about Auschwitz that Ezra had given a guardedly favorable quote.
Ninety-seven years they’d lived between them, and the longer it went on the more she confused his for her own.
When, then, does one man’s delusion become the world’s reality? Is it every generation’s destiny to contend with a dictator’s whims? “By shrewd and constant application of propaganda,” we read in Mein Kampf, “heaven can be presented to the people as hell and, vice versa, the wretchedest experience as a paradise.”
It's as though Mein Kampf were his textbook.
In fact, it almost certainly is. Some day, Stephen Miller will tell the tale.
“Have you read this?” She held up the Auschwitz book. Ezra shook his head. “It’s no good.”
If you want to learn about the Holocaust I’ll show you what to read.”
“I have something for you.” From his shirt pocket he pulled a sheet of paper with three ring holes in it, folded neatly into fourths: GITTA SERENY, INTO THAT DARKNESS PRIMO LEVI, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM “Thank you,” said Alice. “You’re velcome,” he said.
Her boss was on the phone, feet on his desk, rolling a piece of Scotch tape between his fingers. “What about Blazer? Why don’t we publish Ezra Blazer anymore? Hilly wouldn’t know literature if it went down on him.”
The moon, too, looked sharper and more luminous than usual, such that all at once it was no longer Céline’s moon, nor Hemingway’s, nor Genet’s, but Alice’s, which she vowed to describe one day as all it really was: the received light of the sun.
for a country is considered the more civilized the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak or a powerful one too powerful.
A Symphony Space flyer
A Film Forum postcard
A MoMA Film brochure
Se bella giu satore Je notre so cafore Je notre si cavore Je la tu la ti la twaaaaah!
I have no idea what this is from, whether it is indeed Charlie Chaplin's or what
laminectomy.
Augh! Who would eveer agree to such a procedure?
On Columbus, they stopped again so that Ezra could chat with the hot dog vendor.
“What does ‘halal’ mean?” asked Gabriela. “Good for Muslims!” the vendor called down proudly. While Gabriela took a call on her phone, Alice and Ezra sat on the bench where they’d met.
Alice didn’t hear for her thoughts—about where she’d been in her life, where she was going, and how she might get there without too much difficulty from here. Considerations complicated by this maddening habit of wanting something only until she’d got it, at which point she wanted something else.
“You’re writing. Aren’t you?” Alice shrugged. “A little.”
“Then what do you write about?” “Other people. People more interesting than I am.” She laughed softly, lifting her chin toward the street. “Muslim hot dog sellers.”
Yes, this is a retroactive highlight...
But writing about myself doesn’t seem important enough.” “As opposed to?” “War. Dictatorships. World affairs.” “Forget about world affairs. World affairs can take care of themselves.” “They’re not doing a very good job of it.” A woman from Ezra’s building came down the path wearing a Gore 2000 cap and power walking a shih tzu. “Hello,” Ezra said as she passed. “Hello, Chaucer,” he added to the dog. For her part, Alice was starting to consider really rather seriously whether a former choirgirl from Massachusetts might be capable of conjuring the consciousness of a Muslim man, when Ezra turned
...more
So Alice is framing a soaringly imaginative novel in her mind following the exchange with Ezra, and Ezra returns to the conversation with the famous - and famously hackneyed - Chekhov observation
“If there’s a defibrillator hanging on the wall in the first chapter, in a later chapter must it go off?”
Ronkonkoma,
Gives a kind of quiddity to the fiction of this May-September 20-something, 60-something romance...
At the other end of her car sat an old woman who rested her hands on her purse and her purse in her lap, staring out the window at the scenery spooling by while a group of teenagers whooped and hollered all around her.
“Excuse me. Is this lady bothering you?” Like gophers into holes, the teenagers dropped into their seats and remained there for the rest of the ride, communicating in monkish whispers.
Alice began to tell him about the old woman on the train, but as soon as she said “periwinkle” Ezra lowered his ginger ale and shook his head. “Don’t sentimentalize her.” “You always say that. Don’t sentimentalize people. As though I have a choice.” “Sentiments are okay. Not sentimentality.”
the steel veins of the metropolis—whose relentless intensity had lately seemed increasingly at odds with Alice’s dream of a more contemplative life. A life of seeing, really seeing the world, and of having something novel to say about the view. On the other hand: Could all the rural quietude on earth cure the anxiety of self-doubt? Was she even capable of being alone for as long as it took? Would it make her life any less inconsequential than it was now? And, hadn’t he already said everything she wanted to say?
This was followed by two brief Stockhausen pieces, which by contrast sounded to Alice like a cat walking around on the keyboard;
“Gryphon,” said Alice, stepping closer to make room for the people filing behind her. “You must be very clever then. Roger doesn’t hire dummies.” “You know Roger?” “Of course.
Sitting beside him, Alice said, “Cal knows Roger. My boss.” “Oops. Oh well.” Alice nodded. “Oh well.”
was thinking about my book. About a scene I haven’t got right. Not that you ever get them right, mind you. You might as well write about the Hutus for all you’re going to get right about them.”
