Lanny

by Max Porter

Who can have children and not go completely mad?

This is what commuting is. Small pleasures coaxed from playing the routine like a game.

wanted dinner parties with Pete, not Greg and Sally. Dinners where nobody speaks for a while, where we talk about books we’ve read, and someone falls asleep and it’s not weird or eccentric, it’s just slow and kind, unhurried and accepting. Acceptance is a fascination of mine. I ask at every parent’s evening, Is Lanny accepted? Well-liked? Settling in?

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

I can usually see a way to understand terrible things; Satanic worship, decaffeinated coffee, cosmetic surgery, but Renoir’s portrait of Madame de Bonnières? No. It cannot be understood or forgiven. And framed in gold plastic and spot-lit from above? No offence intended, Charlotte, there is not a chamber of hell hot enough for a woman of your taste.

I’ll tell you something interesting that you may already know from your reading. The bit of a tree that draws up nutrients, the most vital living part of a tree, is actually just under the surface. So a skin wound, a minor whack with an axe or an arrow or a chainsaw, can do a lot of damage to a tree, to its living operations. It grows around that damage. I know what you’re going to say, replies Lanny. You do, do you? He stands up and stretches to the ceiling, ribs and tum, reaching like a sweet pea for the sun. That humans are just the same.

None of us actually feel anything for anyone else. It’s all pretend.

The very idea of a safe place is tyrannical.

If you’re not scared, you’re not doing it right.