Purity: A Novel

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.

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

This part of the Panhandle was so flat that it was paradoxically vertiginous, a two-dimensional planetary surface off which, having no trace of topography to hold on to, you felt you could fall or be swept.

“You’ll pick up enough of it collaterally. It’s fine if the Post has more detail on it, so long as we’re first. Let them add the salt to our soup. Worst case, they’re out in front with a drug story, and we follow with an Armageddon story.” “You’re sure you don’t want to do a co-op with them?” “With a Jeff Bezos joint? I can’t believe you’re even as

Tom’s theory of why human beings had yet to receive any message from extraterrestrial intelligences was that all civilizations, without exception, blew themselves up almost as soon as they were able to get a message out, never lasting more than a few decades in a galaxy whose age was billions; blinking in and out of existence so fast that, even if

“So, I also quit my job,” she said when they’d eaten dinner and the wine was nearly gone. “Good for you,” her mother said. “That job never sounded worthy of your talents.” “Mom, I have no talents. I have useless intelligence. And no money. And now no place to live.”

That she herself was now the older, drier, pouchier-faced woman who once had been, as Pip was now, a mobile destabilizing menace, a kind of rogue warhead …

The aim of the Internet and its associated technologies was to “liberate” humanity from the tasks—making things, learning things, remembering things—that had previously given meaning to life and thus had constituted life. Now it seemed as if the only task that meant anything was search-engine optimization.

And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety.