Mr. James’s Reviews > Trust Me > Status Update

The conversation, too, serves a purpose of location, of locating the others on a continuum of happiness or its opposite, of satisfying the speakers that the others are within hailing distance in this our dark passage through life, with its mating and birthing, its getting and spending, its gathering and scattering. -- J.U.

The three women talk, touching their friends with their tongues not to harm them but to give themselves pleasure; little new can be offered—mere pinches or slivers added to the salad, tiny, almost meaningless remarks or glimpses that yet do enhance the flavor. -- J.U.

Above his head, on the swaybacked ceiling, footsteps scurry and rustle like those of giant rats. The children: he wants to go upstairs to check on the girls and tuck in the twins, but during these leaf-season weekends the children are invited to make their own society, and exist like a pack of shadows in the corners of the grownup fun. -- J.U.

[What was so funny?] Their all being here in Vermont, in this old farmhouse with its smells from another century, is in itself funny, and the Saturday-night meal of something so hearty and Western as chili and hot dogs is funny, and the half-gallons of cheap wine that replace themselves at the table, like successive generations of bulbous green dwarfs, are part of the delicate, hallucinatory joke. -- J.U.

The weariness of the long drive is still in her voice. Ruth’s words are like glass sandwiches that reflect back an obvious meaning on the first level, a less obvious one on the second, and so on, as deep as you want to look. “The poor child sat on the bench,” she adds. -- J.U.

This whole milieu and business of woodchopping is so exotic to him that his awareness flickers like a bad light bulb. Minutes of blankness —rural idiocy, Marx had called it— are suddenly illumined by a flash when the maul again sinks its murderous edge close to the tips of his city shoes; then the pebbles, the grit, the twigs are superillumined, vivid as the granules of paint in a Dubuffet... -- J.U.

The smells of the house are country smells—linoleum, ashes, split wood, plaster, a primeval cellar damp that rises through the floorboards and follows us up the steep, wear-rounded stairs to the second floor, where we see the children and their sleeping bags settled in the tangle of middle rooms. -- J.U.

And the leaves, whole valleys and mountains of them—the strident pinks and scarlets of the sugar and swamp maples, the clangorous gold of the hickories, the accompanying brasses of birch and beech, on both sides of the road, rise after rise, a heavenly tumult tied to our dull earth only by broad bands of evergreen and outcroppings of granite. We arrive feeling battered by natural glory [...]. -- J.U.

The Wallet: A grandfather’s hand on his grandson’s forehead; the boy looks up. The old man lowers his hand to the boy’s nose, extending his index and middle finger. A gesture superimposed onto a round face resembles what the old man fears most: a clock.

Getting into the Set: To join The Set, you must purchase the proper garments, wear intricate accessories that hang at all angles, manicure the lawn to 2 inches, and have an iphone 17 nestled in the cockpit of your mercedes. You've followed the instructions: celebrate. As you enter the restaurant you notice that The Set's table is full. So you wait at the bar, sipping at a martini -- waiting your turn.