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.