Purity: A Novel

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

In the bright light of his prospects, his marriage of fifteen years was seeming lackluster and unbecoming to him, a contract entered into when Blenheim stock was undervalued. Leila had come along at just the right time to put an end to it.

No phone call was complete before each had made the other wretched.

“Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.”

“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

That’s part of Wolf’s M.O.—protect the source.” “He’s making people forget there ever was a Julian.” “At least Julian still blows him out of the water as a coder. Wolf’s hackers are all hired guns. He couldn’t even hack an Xbox by himself.” “But Wiki was dirty—people died because of Wiki. Wolf is still reasonably pure. In fact, that’s his whole bra

Her guilt was so large that it was gravitational, warping space and time, connecting through non-Euclidian geometry to the guilt she hadn’t felt while wrecking Charles’s marriage.

Her memory of Annagret was tangled up with the memory of Jason, and it made her feel strangely dirty, as if she’d been not robed but fully naked when she did the questionnaire and had then inflicted her dirtiness on Jason; as if she’d had some very wrong sort of personal intercourse with Annagret, the sort a person had bad dreams about. And now it

Pip was Jason’s newest enthusiasm but thankfully not his only one; she could get him off the subject of her virtues by mentioning math, tennis, TV shows, video games, writers. His life was much fuller than hers, and the breathing space this gave her was welcome. If she wanted his complete attention again, all she had to do was put his hands on her