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?