Word: hangings
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Here's the moment when Joshua Ferris' new novel upshifts from good to great. The Unnamed is a novel about a marriage - hang on, that's not the moment - in which the husband Tim, a high-powered lawyer, is cursed with a bizarre affliction: every once in a while, without warning, he starts to walk compulsively, and he can't stop until he falls down from exhaustion. He and his wife Jane have tried dozens of cures, but nothing works. Then, a quarter of the way through the book, they get a letter from a famous neurologist, an Oliver Sacks...
...lesser writer, a development like that would be enough to hang the rest of the novel on. You couldn't resist it: enter the charismatic, avuncular neurologist who patiently leads Tim back into the light, dispensing wisdom and learning some life lessons of his own along the way. Maybe he cures Tim. Maybe he runs off with Jane. Who knows? But none of that happens in The Unnamed. Instead, Jane throws the letter in the trash without even finishing it. That's how crushed her spirit is. Even the possibility of hope is too much for her to bear...
...Hang in there, kid. It's going to be a while. Most of the people who get on that Greyhound bus to Los Angeles give up and go home. Sometimes the only reason you get the job is that you're the only one left. I didn't make a living [acting] until I was 35. Tenacity is critical...
...feel trapped and desperately scan the room for tasks I can do to justify the enormous waste of time that is your talking. I wash dishes, I file receipts, I read news sites, I make little fake suicide faces to my wife Cassandra about how much I want to hang up that cause her to yell "Joel, I need you now" in a really unconvincing way that I've asked her not to do, but I still can't stop making the suicide faces. In desperate times, when I am on my cell phone in the middle of nowhere...
...Butcher a Marriage It would be much harder to hang up on Powell. She makes no apologies and no effort to be likable in Cleaving, a ghastly work of revelation without enough self-reflection. Soon after wrapping up Julie & Julia, Powell began cheating on the kindly Eric, that husband who dutifully ate her butter-soaked Julia Child meals for a year. Her lover and S&M partner was Damian, a former college fling with "Mick Jagger lips, and a weak chin." I am saddened that I have a clearer vision of Damian's masturbatory methods than of his actual appeal...