֍ elle ֍’s Reviews > Some Hope > Status Update

"But which words could he use? All his life he'd used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe. How could they avoid being noisy and tactless, like a gaggle of children laughing under the bedroom window of a dying man?"

"He knew that under the tall grass of an apparently untamed future the steel rails of fear and habit were already laid. What he suddenly couldn't bear, with every cell in his body, was to act out the destiny prepared for him by his past, and slide obediently along those rails, contemplating bitterly all the routes he would rather have taken."

Without this snobbish fever he was stranded under the revolving ceiling fan of his own consciousness, taking shallow breaths to get as little oxygen as possible into a brain apparently unable to manufacture anything but dread and regret.

"In the eight years since his father's death, Patrick's youth had slipped away without being replaced by any signs of maturity, unless the tendency for sadness and exhaustion to eclipse hatred and insanity could be called 'mature.' The sense of multiplying alternatives and bifurcating paths had been replaced by a quayside desolation, contemplating the long list of missed boats."

You know that Patrick is the redeemable one out of all these empty, fatuous monsters because he’s the only one that’s nice to the only genuinely good person in the entire series.

Roses for Virginia Smith, piss in the boots of everyone else.

But which words could he use? All his life he’d used words to distract attention from this deep inarticulacy, this unspeakable emotion which he would now have to use words to describe.

There’s Bridget’s thing with her family — how she’s lesser because she’s a commoner, and how embarrassed she is by her mom, and how she’s afraid her mother’s poor fashion sense reflects on her herself. There’s Debbie, Patrick’s ex, who is repeatedly compared to her parents. Is it worth noticing that the only person with a good relationship with their parents is the American Marrianne?

Something very interesting here in the motif of genealogy and inheritance. Lot of talk about the connections between people and their parents. Is it supposed to be Patrick’s fear of becoming like his father, or the mixed, complicated legacy of parenting?

“… the lines of her body… were now deformed by accumulations of stubborn fat”

I know, I know, all these people are awful, they’re all hateful bigots who hide their terrifically dull emptiness behind sneers at other people, I get it, but man this shit bums me out. I really hate that Patrick had some kind of glow-up, but that it happened between books, so there’s never a break in the unpleasantness.