Real Americans: A novel

Nick was aware it wasn’t a real solution. The future was bigger than he was—bigger than the Maiers, even. Science would always move forward and not back—and that was good, of course. It meant less needless suffering. He couldn’t personally allow some progress and not others. If it wasn’t their company, it would be another. People would seek to cont

I wanted to tell Betty’s granddaughter that it wasn’t too late. That I had been like her, once, resentful of any interruptions. Later, I learned that life lay in the interruptions—that I had been wrong about life, entirely.

Time passes, indifferent to me. So much of my life I have let slip by, because I have not attended to it. All this while, instead of seeking more time, I could have been paying attention. I notice it now, my present: my grandson’s kind face, his warm hand in mine, and the smell and sensation—here the words, in any language, fail—of being alive.

We were Americans, so I told her I loved her. My parents had never said the word to me. But even though the words sounded unnatural when I spoke them, I felt them, I felt them, I wanted to make them felt. I held her tightly in my arms, in an impossible attempt to communicate my love to every particle, to the deepest part of her, to every nucleus.

He’d wanted a boy, because a boy would carry on the family name. This was so stupid, I’d always thought. What was in a name? It was only a sound. Silently, men carried on their mitochondrial lineage: information from their mothers, and their mothers before them.

Her life was small, and rich, and entirely hers.

I remembered Madame Curie, writing in France: “This life, painful from certain points of view, had, for all that, a real charm for me. It gave me a very precious sense of liberty and independence.”

You envied what you felt was possible.

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.