Sublime

In his memoir Self-Consciousness, John Updike wrote that he was offering his as “a specimen life, representative in its odd uniqueness of all the oddly unique lives in this world.”

Updike’s “A&P”

asperity.

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

Near-adolescent romantic haze befuddling me as I ascended stairs. But reality cannot be ignored; we must grow up.

He remembered: deaths. Jimmy first.

But in the world of satisfying stories—her preferred domain—both of Olivia’s parents are so much less than they should have been.

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupper-ware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had