As this was a National Book Award Finalist, I read a review of this one that made it seem like our bookclub would love it. We didn't. Very similar to Bent Road...to the point that a few months later we had a conversation where we all tried to recall which characters were from which book. Middle-America-family-drama type stuff here. Good for passing the time, but not the Irving/Cunningham-caliber of writing that I was expecting. Apparently, these particular quotes and excerpts stirred something in me at one point...
"The individual and the state, the individual as unwilling participant in the state. The self existed among the great confusion of other selves, each of us, all of us, the cells in the body politic. The political animal. A shuffling, shambling, bearlike creature, sometimes lurching forward, at other times gnawing and swatting at its own troubled innards."
"It wasn't fair. Maybe when you were a child, or for a little while longer, you thought that as soon as you pointed unfairness out, a swift and righteous justice would prevail."
"He didn't feel like dredging it up, explaining. How naive he'd been, naive being a nicer way of saying dumb, to think that ideas could protect you from the world's catastrophes, or from cruelty or unfairness or your own vanity."
"...It was better when the church was crowded and they had to sit in the balcony, where you could at least look down on people and imagine yourself parachuting on top of them. ...nothing you could do to keep from being eaten up and digested by your boredom. ...he didn't know why they weren't all embarrassed. Everything about church was profoundly embarrissing to him, as if religion was something that only took place in the most unnatural circumstantces."
