Jesus’ Son, by Denis Johnson

From the story The Older Man:

“Let me go home with you,” I said. She kissed me sweetly.

She’s outlined her eyes in black. I loved her eyes. “My husband’s at home,” she said. “We can’t go there.”

“Maybe we could get a motel room.”

“It depends on how much money you have.”

“Not enough. Not enough,” I admitted.

“I’ll have to take you home.”

She kissed me.

“What about your husband?”

She just kept kissing me as we danced. There was nothing in the world for  these men to do but watch, or look at their drinks. I don’t remember what was playing, but in that era in Seattle the much favored sad jukebox song was called “Misty Blue”; probably “Misty Blue” was playing as I held her and felt her ribs moving in my hands.

“I can’t let you get away,” I told her.

“I could take you home. You could sleep on the  couch. Then later on I could come out.”

“While your husband’s in the next room?”

“He’ll be asleep. I could say you’re my cousin.”

We pressed ourselves together gently and furiously. ‘I want to love you, baby,” she said.

“Oh, God. But I don’t know, with your husband there.”

“Love me,” she begged. She wept onto my chest.

“How long have you been married?” I asked.

“Since Friday.”

“Friday?”

“They gave me four days’ leave.”

“You mean the day before yesterday was your wedding day?”

“I could tell him you’re my brother,” she suggested.

First I put my lips to her upper lip, then to the bottom of her pout, and then I kissed her fully, my mouth on her  open mouth, and we met inside.

It was there. It was. The long walk down the hall. The door opening. The beautiful stranger. The torn moon mended. Our fingers touching away the tears. It was there.

The Dead Father, by Donald Barthelme

Just for the record, I actually haven’t read this book; this passage is one of the chapter openers that Jon Krakauer used for Into the Wild:

But have you noticed the slight curl at the  end of Sam II’s mouth, when he looks at you? It means that he didn’t want you to name him Sam II, for one thing, and for two other things it means that he has a sawed-off in his left pant leg, and a bailing hook in his right pant leg, and is ready to kill you with either one of them, given the opportunity. The father is taken aback. What he usually says, in such a confrontation, is “I changed your diapers for you, you little snot.” This is not the right thing to say. First, it is not true (mothers change nine diapers out of ten), and second, it instantly reminds Sam II of what he is mad about. He is mad about being small when you were big, but no, that’s not it, he is mad about being helpless when you were powerful, but no, not that either, he is mad about being contingent when you were necessary, not quite it, he is insane because when he loved you, you didn’t notice.

Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer

Two passages in this post, for reasons that I hope are obvious. The first concerns Krakauer meeting with Billie McCandless, the mother of Chris McCandless, who died after venturing into the Alaska wild:

A month later Billie sits at her dining room table, sifting through the pictorial record of Chris’s final days. It is all she can do to force herself to examine the  fuzzy snapshots. As she studies the pictures, she breaks down from time to time, weeping as only a mother who has outlived a child can weep, betraying a sense of loss so huge and irreperable that the mind balks at taking its measure. Such bereavement, witnessed at close range, makes even the most eloquent apologia for high-risk activities ring fatuous and hollow. “I just don’t understand why he had to take those kind of chances,” Billie protests through her tears. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

The second passage, ten pages later in my paperback edition, is from Krakauer recalling his own near-death experience as a young climber in Alaska:

All that held me to the mountainside, all that held me to the world, were two thin spikes of chrome molybdenum stuck half an inch into a smear of frozen water, yet the higher I climbed, the more comfortable I became. Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your  back. To resist takes a tremendous conscious effort; you don’t dare let your guard down for an instant. The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky. But as the climb goes on, you grow accustomed to the exposure, you get used t rubbing shoulders with doom, you come to believe in the  reliability of your hands and feet and head. You learn to trust your self-control.

By and by your attention becomes so intensely focussed that you no longer notice  the  raw knuckles, the cramping thighs, the strain of maintaining nonstop concentration. A trancelike state settles over your efforts; the climb becomes a clear-eyed dream. Hours slide by like minutes. The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence—the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable prison of your genes—all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.

Keep the Change, by Thomas McGuane

“I don’t know if I ever told you this, Astrid,” Joe said, turning back toward the bed. “But I used to be a pretty darn good caddy. I was captain of all the caddies when I was sixteen years old. Carried double with those big old leather bags. Nine out of ten of those golfers let me pick up their clubs. I never played myself. I was saving up for college. My father could afford to send me to college but his drinking made him so erratic, I wasn’t sure he would keep it together until I got there. Sure enough, he went tits-up on a land development deal and I was lucky to have my caddy savings. One time, I tried to help him. He was such a good fellow when he was sober that I was sure he had no idea how he was acting when he was drinking. So I bought a tape recorder and spent the evening with him. He went crazier than usual. The next day, while he was still hung over, I brought the tape into his bedroom, set it up on the dresser and turned it on real loud. Well, it should have worked. As a theory it was very much in the ballpark. But the actual sound of his own ranting and raving was much more than he could deal with. He bellowed. He smashes the machine. He kicked me out of the house. Not long afterward, he drank himself to death. Possibly, that is where he was headed. Sometimes I think I murdered my father with his own voice.”

“What got us started on this?”

“I look out at the stars and wonder if my folks are out there.”

“I see.”

“All their troubles gone.”

Old School, Tobias Wolff

Wolff’s book about a young man at a prep school who wants to be a writer, as do all his friends. Starts slow, sneaks up on you. Quite strong. In  this passage the narrator is in his last meeting with fellow seniors who work on the school literary journal, and are arguing about whether to print the submission of one of their fellow students who they have consistently rejected.

There’s something there, Bill said.

Come on, I said.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, run the stupid thing! George said. Who cares? It’s not like the rest of this crap’s about to set the world on fire. When we looked at him hi bristled and said, Well, is it?

Of course the answer was no. Our schoolboy journalwas not going to set the world on fire. But for  the past year we’d been acting on the faith that it might, choosing and shaping every issue with the solemnity of Big Jeff  designing a spaceship. So, the game was over—that’s what George was telling us, the  prick, the  spoiler. He’d somehow lost his innocence and now he couldn’t rest until we too had seen that our sanctum sanctorum was only a storage room, our high purposes not worth a fart in a gale of wind.

But George, of all people—what  had  worked this change in him? What had he been writing up in that airless room, what  vein of acid knowledge had he struck?

Okay, I said. What the hell. Let’s run it.

So we’d come to the end; our last issue was laid to rest, albeit with a bullet in its head. The others fled the  room, leaving me to order and stack the manuscripts and hand them off to the incoming editor, a fifth former who’d been sitting in on the meeting to see how it was done. He  looked pretty disappointed.

Mr. Rice’ll need those first thing tomorrow, I told him.

I know.

Our Story Begins, by Tobias Wolff

Don’t usually read short story collections,  but loved this one. A couple passages in one here. The first is from “Next Door.” The narrator is a husband who cares for his sick wife; they live next door to a couple which fights violently:

All the lights are off next door except the one in their bedroom window. I think about the life they have, and how it goes on and on, until it seems like the life they were meant to live. Everybody always says how great it is that human beings are adaptable, but I don’t know. In Istanbul, a friend of mine saw a man walking down the street with a grand piano on his back. Everyone just moved around him and kept going. It’s awful, what we get used to.

The next is a brief rant from a professor, an  immigrant, on a smoking break, to an adult student of a similar age:

“Americans!” Professor Landsman was fumbling with the buttons of her coat. “Such faith in the future, where all shall be reconciled. Such compassion toward the past, where all shall be forgiven, once understood. Really, you have no comprehension of history. Of how done it is, how historical. One may not redeem a day of it, not a moment of it, with all these empathies and tender discernments. One may visit it only as one visits a graveyard, hat in hand. One may read the inscription on the stones. One may not rewrite them.”

V., by Thomas Pynchon

Made it to the end, finally. Brilliant, jazz. I fully intend to read it again within the next two years, god willing. One last passge, slightly random, but with a line I loved. It’s a backflash passage in the book’s chronology. The protagonist here is Mondaugen, a scientist who is tracking signals in the atmosphere, and has been stationed in a German fortress which has devolved into a bacchanal while they wait out a siege (you know). Anyway:

He bent to kiss one shoulder. “No,” she moaned, and then went berserk; picked up a flacon of Cologne water, inverted it on his head, arose from her vanity, hitting Mondaugen in the jaw with the shoulder he was trying to kiss. He, felled, loss consciousness for a fraction of a minute, woke to see here cakewalking out the door, singing Auf dem Zippel-Zappel-Zeppelin, a tune popular at the turn of the century.
He staggered to the corridor; she’d vanished. Feeling rather a sexual failure, Mondaugen set out for his turret and oscillograph, and the comforts of Science, which are glacial and few.

V., by Thomas Pynchon

Crawling along, but still crawling. This is from Esther’s visit to a plastic surgeon, Dr. Schoenmaker:

“What sort of nose did you have in mind?”

What else: Irish, she wanted, turned up. Like they all wanted. To none of them did it occur that the retrousse nose too is an aesthetic misfit: a Jew nose in reverse, is all. Few had ever asked for a so-called “perfect” nose, where the roof is straight, the tip is untilted and unhooked, the columella (separating the nostrils) meeting the upper lip at 90 degrees. All of which went to support his private thesis that correction—along all dimensions: social, political, emotional—entail retreat to a diametric opposite rather than any reasonable search for a golden mean.

A few artistic finger flourishes and wrist-twistings.

“Would that be it?” Eyes aglow, she nodded. “It has to harmonize with the rest of your face, you see.” It didn’t, of course. All that could harmonize with a face, if you were going to be humanistic about it, was obviously what the face was born with.

“But,” he was able to rationalize years before, “there is harmony and harmony.” So, Esther’s nose. Identical with an ideal of nasal beauty established by movies, advertisements, magazine illustrations. Cultural harmony, Schoenmaker called it.

“Try next week then.” He gave her the time. Esther was thrilled. It was like waiting to be born, and talking over with God, calm and businesslike, exactly how you wanted to enter the world.

V., by Thomas Pynchon

Previously I’ve been waiting until I finished a book to go back and then choose a passage, but I’m going to do this book as I go, as there are so many passages that could qualify. This one made me laugh the other day on the subway:

Somehow it was all tied up with a story he’d heard once, about a boy born with a golden screw where his navel should have been. For twenty years he consults doctors and specialists all over the world, trying to get rid of this screw, and having no success. Finally, in Haiti, he runs into a voodoo doctor who gives him a foul-smelling potion. He drinks it, goes to sleep, and has a dream. In this dream he finds himself on a street, lit by green lamps. Following the witch-man’s instructions, he takes two rights and a left from his point of origin, finds a tree growing by the seventh street light, hung all over with colored balloons. On the fourth limb from the top there is a red balloon; he breaks it and inside is a screwdriver with a yellow plastic handle. With the screwdriver he removes the screw from his stomach, and as soon as this happens he wakes from the dream. It is morning. He looks down toward his navel, the screw is gone. That twenty years’ curse is lifted at last. Delirious with joy, he leaps out of bed, and his ass falls off.

Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris

I almost gave up on this book, because I found its use of the first-person plural (the narrator is a nameless “we”) grating and distancing. (The point of “we,” Ferris explains in the reader’s guide, is that companies refer to themselves as “we,” and the book is about the office of an ad agency). But I stuck with it and the book had its share of redeeming values. I’m interested to see what Ferris does next.

This passage comes after an aloof mid-level employee, Joe Pope, explains how when he was a teenager he stood by as a friend was beaten, and went to juvenile court for it, and the experience has made him leery of aligning with any kind of group:

Good thing we never invited Joe Pope to join the agency softball team. Didn’t like groups—well, what did he think he was doing working at an advertising agency? We had news for him. He was one of us whether he liked it or not. He came in at the same time every morning, he was expected at the same meetings, he had the same deadlines as the rest of us. And what an odd profession for him, advertising, where the whole point was to seduce a bette portion of the people into buying your product, wearing your brand, driving your car, joining your group. Talk about a guy who just didn’t get it.

We took it personally, his reluctance to speak on our behalf. That old joke by Groucho Marx had been inverted: he’d never want to belong to a club that would have us as members. Well, if that wasn’t arrogance, if that wasn’t elitism, we didn’t know what was. And what did that attitude leave him with? Probably a very boring existence. He could attend civlized concert recitals though never himself join a quartet. He was allowed to read novels so long ashe didn’t participate in any book club. He could walk the dog but his dog was forbidden from entering a dog park where he might be forced to commingle with other pet owners. He didn’t engage in political debate. That would demand he join in. No religion, either, for what was religion but one group seeking a richer dividend than the others? His was a joyless, lonely, principled life. Was it any wonder none of us ever asked him to lunch?