The Broom of the System: A Novel

There was simply no getting around the fact that Stonecipher LaVache Beadsman looked satanic. His skin was a dark, glossy red, his hair an oily black and swept back without care over a deep widow’s peak, his eyebrows Brezhnevian in thickness and starting up high off to the side to slant down evilly over his eyes, his head small and smooth and oval

I miss and love with all my purple fist a strange girl from a flamboyant and frightening family, in many ways a flamboyant and frightening girl, perched high in the crow’s nest of the Frequent and Vigorous vessel, scanning gray electrical expanses for the lonely spout of a legitimate telephone call.

Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright corner of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile.

Her existence, like her beauty and real worth, was intrinsically aesthetic, not physical or emotional. Veronica would be most comfortable, I remain convinced, as a human exhibit, motionless in the cool bright corner of a public hall, surrounded by a square of red velvet no-touch ropes, hearing only whispered voices and heels on tile.

In the girls’ faces I see softness, beauty, the shiny and relaxed eyes of wealth, and the vital capacity for creating problems where none exist.

But what of Lenore, of Lenore’s hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color—blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut—but which effects an outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one’s eye.

I miss Vance with a fierceness we reserve for the absent who cannot return.

Right out of Kafka: the person who does not want to do the ridiculous thing is the person who is ridiculous. (Idea: Kafka at an AmherstlMt. Holyoke mixer, never referred to by name, only as “F. K. ,” only one not dancing . . . ) Modern party-dance an evil thing.

Christianity is, really, is the offer of an irresistible reward in exchange for an unperformable service.”

I hated it here. And I have never been as happy as when I was here. And these two things together confront me with the beak and claws of the True.