Vincent Williams > Recent Status Updates

“Don’t tell me things I don’t want to know and I won’t bother you.”

She leaned forward to turn on the radio, fleeing one wad of sound for another.

pg 138. all dialogue, but so far not much actual communication happening. Do we really talk past each other this much?

“…scratching to dig through envelopes marked Personal, Here is the Information You Requested, Bonus Offer Inside; flyers headed Immediate Cash Commissions Paid on Every Sale, Prospects and Customers Everywhere, How to Make Big Profits Overseas; letters opening Dear Friend, Dear Sir, Is You Future Worth Five Minutes? Take a Good Look in the Mirror, closing Cordially, Yours for Success…”

“And turn off that noise. Noise, you’ll hide in noise any chance you get . .”

When do I meet the main character?

726 pages, why do I think I can do this with a toddler and newborn brain? But the opportunity to satirize financial capitalism via novel? Priceless (pun intended).

Once I’m done, I’ll be a master at context clues. No narration? Pure dialogue? No chapters? Novel as entropy.

“But at night the tension came in him again.”

“In the night-time, as soon as the kids were in bed, she was free. That was the most important time of all. A lot of things happened when she was by herself and it was dark.”

“I been in some of the biggest libraries in the country. I read. I read all the time. I read books that tell the pure honest truth. Over there in my suitcase I have books by Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen and such writers as them. I read them over and over, and the more I study the madder I get.”

“But how could she have been so sure the idea would work? So dumb? Maybe when people longed for a thing that bad the longing made them trust in anything that might give it to them.”

“That is the outer life. To the best of his ability, it is conducted just as it used to be. But now it is accompanied by an inner life, a gruesome inner life of tyrannical obsessions, stifled inclinations, superstitious expectations, horrible imaginings, fantasy conversations, unanswerable questions.”

Slow read, sleep-deprived. But still always looking forward to the next page.