Status Updates From The Maples Stories

I'm liking this more than I knew I would at the outset. Only one chapter remains, and I'm sad it's coming to an end.

It is all so civilized. That may be the worst part. Richard is such a richard. I want her to be less civilized. All he does is try to displace his pain by loading into his family and his lovers, and he says things like:

There have been two revolutions in the last ten years,’ he told her. ‘One, women learned to say “fuck.” Two, the oppressed learned to despise their sympathizers.

"The man sits slumped on a sofa that is no longer there. His ankles are together, his head is bowed as if shackles restrict him. He is dramatizing his conception of himself as a prisoner. "

"The man stands and shouts. She hits him. He knocks her arm away and punches her side, startled by how pleasant, how spongy, the sensation is. A sack of guts."

The writing!

Thing I most wish I had said: "‘Your throat sounds sore. Shouldn’t you stop using it?’"

When she finally gives up on him, when he no longer owns her and she turns herself outward (and here to the Civil Rights Movement): "He had never known her like this. It seemed to Richard that her posture was improving, her figure filling out, her skin growing lustrous, her very hair gaining body and sheen."

Courting a wife tales tenfold the strength of winning an ignorant girl

You're such a nice woman. I don't know why I'm so miserable with you.

Updike brings painful precision and narrative beauty to the decay of a marriage. It hurts to read this. It is not just words, it is a series of memories that feel like my own, compressed into shards of glass