Mala’s Reviews > John's Wife: A Novel > Status Update
Mala
is on page 269 of 470
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
— Apr 20, 2016 10:29AM
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Mala
is on page 370 of 470
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…
— Apr 20, 2016 10:35AM
Mala
is on page 307 of 470
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.
— Apr 20, 2016 10:34AM
Mala
is on page 276 of 470
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
— Apr 20, 2016 10:32AM
Mala
is on page 260 of 470
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.
— Apr 20, 2016 10:28AM
Mala
is on page 120 of 470
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)
— Apr 17, 2016 09:19AM
Mala
is on page 73 of 470
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)
— Apr 17, 2016 09:17AM
Mala
is reading
That file cabinet, once his refuge, now made his heart sink when his eye fell on it and caused him to doubt the folly of his having cast himself as the town historian, he who could gather all the stuff of stories but could no longer find any story in the stuff, an apostle of the word fallen from grace, a deserter trapped in the trenches. More than anything it was the mind-numbing volume of mazy (contd. in comments)
— Apr 17, 2016 09:14AM
Mala
is reading
Coover's yarn is peppered with a joke here & there: Whoo! You still in such fine whack in everything you do, old man?” “Aw, hell no,” he confesses, lighting up a nine-inch stogie. “Old age is a bitch, son. Take last night, for example. Woke my little darlin’ up about midnight and asked her how about it, and she says: ‘How about what?You just had it at ten o’clock and eleven o’clock, you old goat!’ (Contd in comments)
— Apr 17, 2016 09:01AM
Mala
is on page 56 of 470
She sometimes had the weird feeling that John had brought to this town,not Waldo,but her,and no doubt others like her as well,not out of any sense of caring for an old flame (that was flattering herself),and not just to make her eat shit and feel the fool either,though she wouldn’t put it past him,but just because,a smalltowner to the bone,he’d started up these stories and wanted to keep them all around him,see how
— Apr 17, 2016 08:59AM
Mala
is reading
Bruce, a city boy, albeit less of urb than sub, approached this remote hog wallow that day with trepidation, a stranger to its hobnail country ways, except so far as John had acridly portrayed them on their college drinking bouts,visions dancing in his booze-bruised head of desensitized TV zombies dangerously adrift on potholed junker-lined streets,of blue laws,Bible Belters, and bottle flies,and (Contd. in comments)
— Apr 17, 2016 08:49AM
