Intermezzo: A Novel

The most distressing thing about Bridget’s attitude to Margaret, and especially towards her marriage, is not the belief that Bridget is being cruel, so much as the suspicion, bred in the bone, a lifelong instinct, that after all she might be right.

Language doesn’t fit onto reality like a toy fitting into a slot. Reality is actually one thing and language something else.

He wipes at his nose,

Sense of all the windows and doors of her life flung open. Everything exposed to the light and air. Nothing protected, nothing left to be protected anymore. A wild woman, her mother called her. A shocking piece of work. And so she is. Lord have mercy.

thinks sometimes the nature and extent of her suffering has lifted her free from the petty frustrations of mere inconvenience.

And it almost never is for extraneous reasons, because mutual attraction – which even makes sense from the evolutionary perspective – is simply the strongest reason to do anything, overriding all the contrary principles and making them fall away into nothing.

But say with my brother, I can get very focused on being in the right. And my brain sort of glosses over anything I’ve done wrong. Because I view him differently. I don’t really think my actions affect him. I see myself very affected by his actions, but not the other way around.

And what it says, Ivan thinks, is that Peter likes people he can dominate and feel superior to, and he’s not such a great fan of people who talk back to him and disagree.

It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it. Money overall a very exploitative substance, creating it seems fresh kinds of exploitation in every form of relationality through which it passes. Greasing with exploitation the wheels of human interaction generally.