Dream State: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of unexciting days and called it happiness.

Life was a long, incompetent search to get back to a feeling you had when you were six.

warming was a hoax—or at least a symptom of “catastrophic thinking.” Only when Garrett was in the field like this, exhausted from trap checks, did his brain get up to its old tricks; even then it was just a glimpse, like the flash of a monster’s tail.

Male friendship was all about rhythm. It was a kind of song without words, an instrumental you knew by heart, you learned the rhythm together and practiced it all the time, for days and months and years, perfecting it by feel, it was the swing of your silences, the karaoke track behind the gibberish you sang. The rhythm itself said the important th

But Brig had outdone them all, dressed as a businessman caught in a storm. His umbrella had been turned inside out, exposing its ribs, and he’d shellacked his hair so that it looked like it was gusting back; even his tie was sticking up in the air, molded to seem like it was blowing over one shoulder. He staggered around, hunched and bandy-legged,

Why this unditchable sadness? Would it hound her to the grave? Couldn’t she have a bachelorette party, for fuck’s sake, without it trailing her like a pet?

“You know what H. L. Mencken said about marriage, right?” “Here we go again.” “ ‘The longest sentence you can form with two words is I do.’ ”

Now, double-fisted, Garrett felt a stirring of warmth toward these old friends he barely knew anymore. A comforting pity too. They were like children, children who had children.

He had no desire to go to a bachelor party, Charlie’s or anybody else’s, but he knew from past experience that reneging on the basic requirements of friendship was a slippery slope.