Crossroads

by Jonathan Franzen

he’d accepted it without protest or renewed entreaty, because, by his own rational assessment, he was the one child in the family with no rightful claim to a room of his own, being neither the oldest nor the youngest nor the prettiest, and he was used to operating at a level of rationality inaccessible to others.

Daisy, who’d reached an age where she greeted anything the world did with resignation,

She didn’t quite finish the book, but it didn’t matter. The dream of a novel was more resilient than other kinds of dreaming. It could be interrupted in mid-sentence and snapped back into later.

strange how wishing for a future life and then actually inhabiting it made time feel unreal.