Daddy

He wore his jeans, his white socks, his white sneakers, a knitted sweater

Linda read a lot: She read books about angels and saints and rich white women from the past with eccentric habits. She read books by the mothers of school shooters and books by healers who said that cancer was really a self-love problem.

A buzzing in his head, a tight skull—certain refrains of songs looped and he said them aloud and smiled.

certain tolerance, an ability to accept change. And, really, what was so wrong with the whammy stuff, the formulas? George had thought those movies were too neat, too rote. They were too easy to love. He tried to explain that to Benji, once, back when he still believed he was educating him, believed that his son would absorb these lessons and be grateful. He hadn’t. And, anyway, that’s exactly what Benji had loved about movies, what made him watch Die Hard over and over. Who wouldn’t want to imagine that life might have a shape, a formula? That the years didn’t just pass through you

It was almost embarrassing how fervently George had believed that everything would continue to get better and better, life a steady accrual of successes, of moments becoming only more vivid and more pleasurable

THE LIGHT IN THE RESTAURANT was golden light, heavy light—an outdated sort of light, honestly, popular in the nineties but now a remnant of a kind of gaudy, old-school pleasure it was no longer fashionable to enjoy. It had been five years, maybe more, since George had been to this place. It was true that the food was not very good. Big steaks, creamed vegetables, drizzles of raspberry coulis over everything, all the food you ate back then because caring about what you ate wasn’t yet part of having money

She was prettier than Benji deserved, big brown eyes, piercings up and down the ridge of her ear, an almost invisible gold hoop through her septum. Somehow the effect wasn’t aggressive but pretty, delicate. She made it seem very natural and appealing for women to pierce their faces.

Did Ben know that the U.S. had the power to turn off the Internet in another country?
“A whole country,” Arthur sai

there was something nice about the way her stomach would tighten around its own emptiness afterwards, how it made the day sharper

unkind catalog of every unattractive thing about the woman—the dry skin around her nostrils, her weak chin, her sturdy legs in their expensive jeans