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.

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?

The Lost Continent, by Bill Bryson

In which Bryson travels through small-town America. Not as good as In a Sunburned Nation, because Bryson is often too cursory in his visits, and grouchy, and he goes to the gational parks on days when they are veiled in fog. But still enjoyable, because Bryson is still by and large such a wonderful narrator. To wit:

I drove on to Grand Teton National Park. And there’s another arresting name for you. Tetons means tits in French. That’s an interesting fact—a topographical tit-bit, so to speak—that Miss Mucous, my junior-high geography teacher, failed to share with use in the eighth grade. Why do they always keep the most interesting stuff from you in school? If I’d known in high school that Thomas Jefferson kept a black slave to help him deal with sexual tension or that Ulysses S. Grant was a hopless drunk who couldn’t button his own fly without falling over, I would have had a livelier interest in my lessons, I can assure you.

At any rate, the first French explorers who passed through Northwestern Wyomning took one look at the mountains and said “Zut alors! Hey Jacques, clock those mountains. They look just like my wife’s tetons.” Isn’t it typical of the French to reduce everything to a level of sexual vulgarity? Thank goodness they didn’t discover the Grand Canyon, that’s all I can say. And the remarkable thing is that the Tetons look about as much like tits as….well, as a frying pan or a pair of hiking boots. In a word, they don’t look like tits at all, except perhaps to despreately lonely men who have been away from home for a very long time. They looked a little like tits to me.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, II

Pardon the double dip, but I can’t help it. This passage is from much later in the book, when he has arrived at Alice Springs after a long pass through remote country:

Because it is so bang in the middle of nowhere, Alice Springs ought to seem a miracle—an actual town with department stores and schools and streets with names—and for a long time it was sort of an antipodean Timbuktu, a place tantalizing in its inaccessibility. In 1954, when Alan Moorehead passed through, Alice’s only regular connection to the outside world was a weekly train from Adelaide. Its arrival on Saturday evening was the biggest event in the life of the town. It brough mail, newspapers, new pictures for the cinema, long-awaited spare parts, and whatever else couldn’t be acquired locally. Nearly the whole town turned out to see who got off and what was unloaded.

In those days Alice had a population of 4,000 and hardly any visitors. Today it’s a thriving little city with a population of 25,000 and it is full of visitors—350,000 of them a year—which is of course the whole problem.These days you can jet in from Adelaide in two hours, from Melbourne to Sydney in less than three. You can have a latte and buy some opals and then climb on a tour bus and travel down the highway to Ayers Rock. It has not only become accessible, it’s become a destination. It’s so full of hotels, motels, conference centers, campgrounds, and desert resorts that you can’t pretend even for a moment that you have achieved something exceptional by getting yourself there. It’s crazy really. A community that was once famous for being remote now attracts thousands of visitors who come to see how remote it no longer is.

In a Sunburned Country, by Bill Bryson, I

Bryson’s hilarious and brilliant book about Australia. Just a piece from early on in which he sells what makes this country/continent so remarkable:
I have a story about a little bug called Nothomyrmecia macrops that I think illustrates perfectly, if a little obliquely, what an exceptional country this is. It’s a slightly involved tale but a good one, so bear with me.

In 1931 on the Cape Arid peninsula in Western Australia, some amateur naturalists were poking about in the scrubby wastes when they found an insect none had ever seen before. It looked vaguely like an ant, but was an unusual pale yellow and had strange, staring, distinctly unsettling eyes. Some specimens were collected and these found their way to the desk of an expert at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne, who identified the insect at once as Nothomyrmecia. The discovery caused great excitement because, as far as anyone knew, nothing like it had existed on earth for a hundred million years. Nothomyrmecia was a proto-ant, a living relic from a time when ants were evolving from wasps. In entomological terms, it was extraordinary, as if someone had found a herd of triceratops grazing on some distant grassy plain.

As expedition was organized at once, but despite the most scrupulous searching, no one could find the Cape Arid colony. Subsequent searches came up equally empty-handed. Almost half a century later, when word got out that a team of American scientists was planning to search for the ant, almost certainly with the kind of high-tech gadgetry that would make the Australians look amateurish and underorganized, government scientists decided to make one final, preemptive effort to find the ants alive. So a party of them set out in a convoy across the country.

On the second day out, while driving across the South Australia desert, one of their vehicles began to smoke and sputter, and they were forced to make an unscheduled overnight stop at a lonely pause in the highway called Poochera. During the evening one of the scientists, a man named Bob Taylor, stepped out for a breath of air and idly played his flashlight over the surrounding terrain. You may imagine his astonishment when he discovered, crawling over the trunk of a eucalyptus beside their campsite, a thriving colony of none other than Nothomyrmecia.

Now consider the possibilities. Taylor and his colleagues were eight hundred miles from their intended search site. In the almost 3 million square miles of emptiness that is Australia, one of the handful of people able to identify it had just found one of the rarest, most sought-after insects on earth—an insect seen alive just once, almost half a century earlier—and all because their van had broken down where it did. Nothomyrmecia, incidentally, has still never been found at its original site.

You take my point again, I’m sure. This is a country that is at once staggeringly empty and yet packed with stuff. Interesting stuff, ancient stuff, stuff not readily explained. Stuff yet to be found.

Trust me, this is an interesting place.

Panama, by Thomas McGuane

McGuane prose is a strange kind of kicky poetry, and usually great. The narrator in Panama is an on-the-downhill rocker who is living in Key West and trying to get back with his old lady, Catherine. In this passage he catches up to her in a grocery store, and a fight ensues:

Slapping me, crying, yelling, oh God, clerks peering. I said `You’re prettiest like this.” She chunks a good one into my jaw. The groceries were on the floor. Someone was saying `Ma’am? Ma’am?” My tortoiseshell glasses from Optique Boutique were askew and some blood was in evidence. My lust for escape was complete. Palm fronds beat against the air conditioned thermopane windows like my own hands.

Two clerks were helping Catherine to the door. I think they knew. Mrs. Fernandez, the store manager, stood by me.

`Can I use the crapper?’ I asked.

She stared at me coolly and said `First aisle past poultry.’

I stood on the toilet and looked out at my nation through the ventilator fan. Any minute now, Catherine Clay, the beautiful South Carolina wild child, would appear shortcutting her way home with her groceries.

I heard her before I could see her. She wasn’t breathing right. That scene in the aisles had been too much for her and her esophagus was constricted. She came into my view and in a very deep and penetrating voice I told her that I still loved her, terrifying myself that it might not be a sham, that quite apart from my ability to abandon myself to any given moment, I might in fact still be in love with this crafty, amazing woman who looked up in astonisment. I let her catch a glimpse of me in the ventilator hole before pulling the bead chain so that I vanished behind the dusty accelerating blades, a very effective slow dissolve.

Foe, by J.M. Coetzee

Foe, a reimagining of Robinson Crusoe, tells the story of a female castaway who washes ashore on an island inhabited by ‘Cruso’ and Friday. The female castaway is later rescued (with Cruso, who dies on ship, and Friday) . She seeks  out a writer, `Foe’ and asks him to write the story of the island.

This passage is from early in the book, on the island, after Cruso has described how Friday’s tongue had been cut out when Friday was a child. She has asked why:

Cruso gazed steadily back at me. Though I cannot swear to it, I believe he was smiling. `Perhaps the slavers, who are the Moors, hold the tongue to be a delicacy,’ he said. `Or perhaps they grew weary to listening to Friday’s wails of grief, that went on day and night. Perhaps they wanted to prevent him from ever telling his story: who he was, where his home lay, how it came about that he was taken. Perhaps they cut out the tongue of every cannibal they took, as punishment. How will we ever know the truth?’

`It is a terrible story,’ I said. A silence fell. Friday took up our utensils and retired into the darkness. `Where is the justice in it? First a slave and now a castaway too. Robbed of his childhood and consigned to a life of silence. Was Providence sleeping?’

`If Providence were to watch over all of us,’ said Cruso, `who would be left to pick the cotton and cut the sugar-cane? For the business of the world to prosper, Providence must sometimes wake and sleep as lower creatures do.’ He saw that I shook my head and went on. `You think I mock Providence. But perhaps it is the doing of Providence that Friday finds himself on an island under a lenient master, rather than in Brazil, under a planter’s lash, or in Africa, where the forests teem with cannibals. Perhaps it is for the best, though we do not see it so, that he should be here, and that I should be here, and now that you should be here.’

On first reading I liked Cruso’s line about the cotton and the sugar cane. Rereading this passage, it’s as much  about the power of the story-teller to define reality, which is the real subject of the book.