Was this the decisive moment of my life? It felt as if the gap that had dogged me all my days was knitting together before my eyes—so that, from this point on, my life would be as coherent and meaningful as my favorite books. At the same time, I had a powerful sense of having escaped something: of having finally stepped outside the script.

It was how I had felt when I was sitting in a dark classroom after watching The Usual Suspects, or after reading Either/Or, when all the different things that Ivan had said and written had come flooding back to me, assuming a new shape, bigger than I had suspected. It was happening again now: some pieces of some larger story that I could barely

Was that what a novel was: a plane where you could finally juxtapose all the different people, mediating between them and weighing their views?

how she acted, how she was, how other people saw her. From this perspective, the aesthetic wasn’t really the opposite of the ethical.

Isn’t there something to be researched, in every corner of God’s creation? Isn’t that what you’ve found, miss, in your travels?”

It might have been because of her political views, which she shared with the doorman, who was a Marxist, and also religious—not privately, like my grandmother, but in a way that was critical of secularism and of the United States.

My mother said that that had been wrong. She said that children were people, whose dignity and privacy were worthy of respect. She was the only person I had ever met or heard of who thought or said anything like that.

Why was that the thing you had to do when you saw a girl: to prosecute whether and in what way she was beautiful—as Lara, I realized, was? With guys, some of them were physically repellent or appealing, but a lot of them initially presented as neutral, and there wasn’t that immediate, urgent-feeling cognitive puzzle to slot them in, as there was

In fact I had been right: it did feel, by comparison, more bearable and legitimate. Yet to say that I was on any objective level enjoying myself would have been an overstatement.