Word: nessing
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...chunks." I had read only one chapter of Bastard Out of Carolina, and the protagonist hadn't even finished sketching out her family history. The impending return of my cousins from work buzzed around my head like an increasingly angered insect, steadily rising in decibel. But the pleasures alone-ness had brought to me over that short afternoon, ephemeral as they may have been, had been a soothing balm for my raw and irritated nerves. To be able to select a room in which to recline while listening to the cheep of birds carried with it the lovely lilt...
...them that love her, most great to them that know; We may not count her armies, we may not see her King; Her fortress is a faithful heart, her pride is suffering; And soul by soul and silently her shining bounds increase, And her ways are ways of gentle- ness and all her paths are peace...
...vast sum of money," Nelson calculates. "My wife's insurance would take care of that if she died." He says this to Carl Van Ness, a stranger he has just rescued from a drowning-suicide attempt in a pond near his wife's house. Here, Nelson believes, is an answered prayer. Since Van Ness seems intent on killing himself--because he believes himself, for reasons unclear, already dead--why would he mind taking out Winona before completing the job on himself...
...Sure," Van Ness answers when asked. That response, of course, is only the beginning of a story that quickly spins out of Nelson's and, eventually, everyone else's control, except for the author's, who narrates this trajectory of calamities with noteworthy energy and skill. And Johnson is obviously aiming for something more here than standard-issue pulp-fiction chills. In their reflective moments his whacked-out villains have a tendency to quote Nietzsche, as if to explain themselves to themselves and the reader. But Johnson does not make clear where, among so many burned-out characters, the reader...
While this family has never been one to deny that "such things happen to them," they are unable to accept that anyone would ever find out. "We squelch [the world], blind ourselves to it with propriety and high-minded-ness and good cheer; act as though there's a few bad eggs out there, but the rest of us are just fine. But there's another world--a counterworld, you could say--where life is complicated and mistakes get made and women get pregnant when they're not supposed to and people do stupid things and betray each other...