Status Updates From John's Wife: A Novel

If anyone was wondering, this book is great.

http://numerocinqmagazine.com/2013/03...

Mitch’s personal ethic, which he shared with most in town, was that the world, the only one around, the one they all lived and competed in, was a business world where wealth was synonymous with virtue and poverty was either a case of genetic bad luck (which was what charity was for) or of criminal weakness of character (poorhouses and jails). Mitch knew how to read this business world at a glance and act without…

Without an I as God-given, we have to invent one with our thoughts, our passions, our actions, or ones we think of as “ours,” and this we offer up somewhat desperately as our humanity, though, alas, no one may be receiving, no one watching.

He recalled an economics theory professor he had back at university who held that the central principle of all human interaction was simple raw power, he laced all his lectures with reminders that economics, history, life itself could not be understood without remembering that. He said it was the basis not merely of community order, but also of religious faith, science, and the search for truth, and of course of love

things as well as people actively showed themselves to the photographer because of his gifts, country roads stretching out to display their longing to him, vistas unpeopling themselves to reveal their troubled depths, houses fluttering their starched lace curtains at him like flirtatious lashes, light entering their wide porches to open them into a broad friendly smile, their flower-bordered cement walks reaching out

You built things to last, Barn. Trouble is, that scares people. Nowadays, they need things around them that wear out faster than they do.” Sanctuaries of the family, that was what Barnaby was building—solid foundations, rational structures you could trust, tasteful neighborly details, a principle of restraint and comfort and proportion throughout—but people didn’t have families in the old way anymore.

Shopping malls as spiritual experience: good old national temples with the sacred stuff of glorious enterprise heaped up at the altars and shopping baskets as communion trays and beeping cash registers like the ringing of church bells, moral lessons provided by merchant-priests and their security guard-sextons. And there are all the fastfood chapels for ritual feasting, inviolable in content as (contd. in comments)

Stu poured some whiskey for him and Floyd after supper, put on some Cajun fiddle music, told some jokes, including one about a rich Texan he said he once knew who was so big he wouldn’t fit in his coffin until they gave the corpse an enema, and then they were able to bury him in a shoebox and had room for his boots as well, which made Edna, who had been constipated ever since she got here (contd. in comments)