Purity: A Novel

If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a lif

“It’s not that big a deal. Medium-size, maybe. But the mania for secrecy is out of control. Are you aware that the agencies don’t just number and watermark the classified reports we get now? They do something with the spacing between the letters of each copy—the kerning?”

She could feel herself targeting Pip with her rant, losing her cool by way of attacking Pip’s noncommittal coolness, but there was an undercurrent of grievance with Tom as well. He’d told her, a long time ago, that he’d met Andreas Wolf in Berlin, back when he was still married. All he would say was that Wolf was a magnetic but troubled person, wit

She’d listened to a lot of these utopian discussions, and it was somehow comforting that Stephen and his friends could never quite work all the kinks out of their plan; that the world was as obstinately unfixable as her life was.

She was still valued in larger groups, for the relative bitterness of her sarcasm, but when it came to one-on-one friendships she had trouble interesting herself in the tweets and postings and endless pictures of the happy girls, none of whom could fathom why she lived in a squatter house, and she wasn’t bitter enough for the unhappy girls, the sel

She was experiencing stronger symptoms of being in love, a queasiness more persistent, a heart more racing, than she remembered having had with Stephen. But the symptoms were ambiguous. A condemned person walking to the gallows had many of the same ones. When Andreas’s hand crept, thrillingly, to the inside of her thigh, she had neither the courage

“So the cat’s back,” Pip said. “Does this mean the mice don’t get to play anymore?” Colleen lit her second cigarette and didn’t answer. “Is it just me,” Pip said, “or are you giving me a weird vibe?” “I’m sorry,” Colleen said. “Have you ever seen a man ballroom-dancing with a woman who’s passed out? I feel like that woman. He moves my arms, he lead

“There was this place,” she said. “This dairy called Moonglow Dairy, near where I lived when I was growing up. I guess it was a real dairy, because they had a lot of cows, but their real money didn’t come from selling milk. It came from selling high-quality manure to organic farmers. It was a shit factory pretending to be a milk factory.” Andreas s

She didn’t know what exactly would come of permitting a newcomer into the nucleus of her and Tom, but she pictured a mushroom cloud.