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“This isn’t about the photograph—don’t be silly,” Marion told the sixteen-year-old.
age highlighted
“He’s sending you to break up with her—what a coward!” Marion said, touching Eddie’s hair in that motherly way she had.
Wtf
But, for all those years, Eddie would wonder at the seeming nonchalance of her departure.
Yr not non chalant bro
Mrs. Vaughn was further incensed to see that Eduardo had not yet cleaned up those revealing drawings. In addition, there was a totally illogical aspect to her hatred of the gardener: he had doubtless seen her terrible nakedness in the drawings. (How could he not have seen it?) And so she hated Eduardo Gomez in the manner that she hated Eddie O’Hare, who had also seen her so . . . exposed.
Feel like im watching eyes wide shut or somthing with how much sex dominates everything and what the book is trying to say about it
They possessed none of the candid magic of those hundreds of photographs of Thomas and Timothy. Ruth was a sober, frowning child who viewed the camera with a suspicious eye; when a smile was occasionally coaxed out of her, it lacked spontaneity.
“Please don’t be jealous, Allan,” Ruth said. It was her reading-aloud voice, her inimitable deadpan, which they all knew. Allan looked stung. Ruth hated herself.
Eddie tried to look composed, although the wet wool of his jacket clung to him like a shroud. In the candlelight he saw the bright yellow hexagon shining in the iris of Ruth’s right eye; when the light flickered, or when she turned her face toward the light, her eye changed color— from brown to amber—in the same way that the same hexagon of yellow could turn Marion’s right eye from blue to green.
Now, in the bedroom of her hotel, Ruth considered calling Allan and thanking him, but he would probably be asleep. It was almost one A.M. And she had been so stimulated to talk and listen to Eddie that she didn’t want to feel let down—as she might, if she talked to Allan.
Ruth crumpled up the photocopy after she’d ripped it off the squash-court door.
Motif
You write about when it’s safe for a widow to re-enter the world, but there is no such thing as a widow for one year. I will be a widow for the rest of my life!
Say that again
“Horace Walpole once wrote: ‘The world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.’ But the real world is tragic to those who think and feel; it is only comic to those who’ve been lucky.”
To Ruth, still childless at thirty-six, one of the shocks of knowing couples with children was the disquieting phenomenon of how the children grew.
“The older woman gives in to him in part because she thinks she’s in control—and because this young man is exactly the sort of beautiful boy who was unattainable to her when she was his age. What she doesn’t know is that this boy is capable of causing her pain and anguish—at least I think that’s what happens,” Ruth added.
The best fictional detail was the detail that should have defined the character or the episode or the atmosphere. Fictional truth was what should have happened in a story—not necessarily what did happen or what had happened.
She’d wanted only to arrange a time to be alone with him—possibly a coffee in the morning—to discover what his interest in her was; to imagine him as her admirer, and maybe as her lover; to absorb more of the details of which the beautiful Dutch boy was composed. And then he hadn’t shown up. I guess he finally got tired of me, Ruth thought. She could sympathize with him if he had; she had never felt so tired of herself.
He wrote nonstop autobiographical logorrhea—he’d never “imagined” a story or a character in his life. All he did was record his miserable longings, his wretchedly ordinary experience. He’d left her lecture wanting to kill himself, but instead he’d gone home and destroyed all his writing.
He had the smoothest skin, a fine nose, a strong chin, a heart-shaped mouth. And although his body was too slight for Ruth’s taste, he had broad shoulders and a wide chest—he was still in the process of growing into his body.
both boys, in their hockey uniforms, looked so Canadian. Yet to Margaret there was something identifiably American about these missing boys, a kind of cocksure combination of mischief and unstoppable optimism—as if each of them thought that his opinion would always be unchallengeable, his car never in the wrong lane.
Dolores de Ruiter had lived a life of half-truths. And what was not the best of her lies—indeed, what Harry thought of as one of the most painful lies he’d ever been associated with—became evident at the funeral. One after another, the prostitutes who’d known Rooie took Harry aside to ask him the same question. “Where’s the daughter?” Or, looking over the multitude of old Dr. Bosman’s grandchildren, they would ask: “Which one is she? Isn’t the daughter here?” “Rooie’s daughter is dead,” Harry had to tell them. “In fact, she’s been dead for quite a number of years.” In
This book is such an airplane book but i love it
“Then her husband died, about a year ago,” the bookseller said. So Ruth Cole was a widow, Sergeant Hoekstra supposed. He studied the author photo. Yes, she looked more like a widow than she looked married. There was something sad in one of her eyes, or else it was some kind of flaw. She stared warily at the camera, as if her anxiety were an even more permanent part of her than her grief.
That mid-October, the fall foliage was at its peak in Massachusetts, but the colors were more muted—just past their prime—as Ruth and Harry headed north. It struck Harry that the low, wooded mountains reflected the melancholy of the changing season. The faded colors heralded the coming dominance of the bare, mouse-brown trees; soon the evergreens would be the only color against the mouse-gray sky. And in six weeks or less, the changing fall would change again—soon the snow would come. There’d be days when shades of gray would be the only colors amid a prevailing whiteness, which would be
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(Although he drank nothing but Diet Coke, Eddie preferred his Diet Coke in a wineglass.)
There are so many of these bad little qualifiers about the characters that are meant to make them seem real but instead are just disconnected from reality
“It’s been almost forty years, Eddie. It’s time you got over it!” Then the train left and took her away. The westbound 4:01 left Eddie standing in the rain, where Hannah’s remarks had turned him to stone. Her remarks were of the nature of such a long-standing sorrow that Eddie carried them with him throughout the inattentive cooking and eating of his Sunday-night supper.
