More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
For it all seemed suddenly like one long, tired script, our blocks of speech assigned to us at the start of time. And though we might yearn for new adventures, happy ends, we lack the capacity to imagine even alternative lines.
Though a longtime antagonist of organized religion, Charlie was as superstitious as the next guy and never wanted to cross the last remnants of God that still resided in his mind.
Then she tore through town, heading east on Vermilion past the Palmer Bank, past the sodium-vapor lights still burning above the deserted American Legion baseball fields, past the giant glowing scoop of vanilla in its tilted cone advertising the Custard Cup, past the water tower and the golf club and out to the city limits and the start of farmhouses, silos, and combine harvesters.
He hated living paycheck to paycheck, hated the chipped tableware they put out for guests, the threadbare towels on the bathroom hooks, the mismatched bed linens, the secondhand furniture, the stains in the carpets in every room…
He was out there one Saturday afternoon, the sun was beating down, the insects were going from bad to worse, he was light-headed, and every minute or two he had to kill the engine to wipe the sweat off his spectacles—compounding annoyances that might have led him to conclude that he was living a chump’s life. But then came the revelation: he didn’t mind. There would be a cigarette to reward him when he was done, and a cold glass of sun tea, and cornbread with dinner. He had a wife he admired, and a bathtub without water bugs, a newborn he might still do right by, and another on its way.
He mowed to mow now, to acquit a duty without stinting or dodging or asking for something in return. He washed the dishes. He made the bed. He did the laundry. He folded the towels, and upon putting them away again did not worry that he was wasting his time, would die broke, unachieved, a fat nobody…the old equations no longer applied.
during that sweet short window when he was his best self.
Someone had been eager to make this suburban chain steak house look like Frank Sinatra’s living room.
Historically, Jake, no one in my family has been very good at telling the truth.
You can’t lose a father and not be affected in some profound and unexpected way.
All we had to defend against this was memory.
He came out of surgery gray, half dead. What was meant to heal him was, for me, the start of his dying. That man, that immortal, my father, a fairly standard midcentury model, Updikean in his defects and indulgences, besotted by the American dream and completely unkillable, with at least a dozen second acts already behind him, was gone. In place of the unique article was an imitation. He had not undergone some lifesaving surgery but an experimental whole-body transplant into somebody half his size. He writhed around, looked bothered by the light. He appeared to have an allergy to his own skin.
What self-deceptions we require to get out of bed in the morning.
But a son’s revolt against his father usually ends in parody,
We carry around ideas of people in our heads, fixed ideas of their character and firm predictions of how they’ll behave, what they’ll say before the hour is up and the facial expressions they’ll make that will unaccountably get under our skin. We tell stories about them that never vary, never improve, then confirm that our ideas are accurate every time we get reacquainted.
we drank like brothers that night, as good brothers must from time to time, and had us a heart-to-heart.
Real life makes for good novels because it’s lived as a bunch of lies, and because fictions of one kind or another are the only things worth living for.
I had missed them without knowing it, the way a middle-aged man observing a child at play will suddenly apprehend how much paradise has crumbled away since he was that age,
Charlie’s solution to this was to tinker, with headlamp and toolbox, in the workshop of the American dream,
his fictions got him out of bed most mornings,
Before entering that close and carpeted room where death reclined in a glossy cherrywood casket, his mourners could experience (or relive) the life now lost one snapshot at a time, a panoramic profusion that tricked the mind (by the third or fourth poster board) into perceiving wholeness, movement, resuscitation: much as a flipbook projects the pole vaulter into the air and over the bar, the illusion in this instance animated all the stages, ages, and awkward phases of a life in full, its growth spurts, bad fashions, changes in facial hair, kisses blown to anonymous lovers and goodbyes waved
...more
As for me, it is the fate of sons to become their fathers, and I am like mine, a dreamer and a liar, and more deluded than not.
