Sex and Rage: A Novel

By June, about two-thirds of what was left after the half had been removed was craftily Scotch-taped onto regulation 8 ½” x 11” pages: diabolically, this man Wallace had turned what was once a Jacaranda Leven harum-scarum mess (she was such a mess) into an elegant, readable, calmly ordered cloistered hallway. You could practically hear the silence

It had a debonair glaze to it, not drinking in New York, that flew in the face of every tenet of A.A. about how to stop drinking. She had not come to the toxic level where she’d have to be straitjacketed to keep away the pink spiders. There was still time, it seemed, to slip bareback onto the golden palomino and ride into the sea, through a tangle

so glad that she’d turned out to be a writer, since if her drinking problem had been what it was and she’d been only a Xerox operator, she might have been tempted to go to A.A.

The Plot Lumps Up Her confusing airtight scheme depended on Sunrise.

“Oh,” Sunrise said, in a death-rattled groan. “God. Hi.” There were sharks. “He’s kicking you out?” Jacaranda said. “He . . . he’s given me fifteen minutes to pack and get out, and I only have seven dollars and forty cents and my . . . my friend isn’t in town who I usually stay with and . . .” Sunrise swept out to sea, a sea of her own tears.

“WHAT do you think of New York?” Wally asked one day when he took her out to lunch. Without Janet and the Russian Tea Room, with just Wally at lunch, New York somehow felt sensible. “You mean, what do I think of New York?” she asked. “That’s what I asked,” he said. Jacaranda attempted gathering her thoughts and composing herself, but neither of tho

The firm was so substantial in its reputation, its history, of fostering little-known writers that Dobson & Dalloway publishing Jacaranda was like Bach asking her to study composition with him. For Jacaranda to be accepted by them meant that she could get hit by a bus and not die.

Jacaranda found not a crack of hope for herself and Shelby. She remembered that the way he’d looked at her the night before had the look of finality, that he wasn’t going to subject himself to her wild mercurial tempers anymore. He was going to close off the lagoon, lose the map, swim alone.

Whoo, Whoo, Whoo, Whoo, Shuffle Off to Buffa . . . It was almost impossible to feel human compassion, plain humanity, toward Sunrise, Jacaranda suspected later on, especially if you were a human female. But that day Jacaranda could feel Sunrise’s pulse.