Location 728 It seemed that happiness spiked around age twenty, spiked again around age sixty, but bottomed out in between, which was where Jack and Elizabeth now found themselves, at the bottom of that curve, in midlife, a period that was notable not for its well-publicized “crisis” (actually a pretty rare phenomenon—only 10 percent of people reported having one) but for its slow ebb into a quiet and often befuddling restlessness and dissatisfaction.
Location 775 His skin had the enameled quality of inveterate moisturization. His beard was long but neat, square and rigorously barbered, fading into salt-and-pepper stubble on his cheeks and head. His muscular shoulders stretched his sport coat taut. When he hugged Jack, he squeezed so hard that Jack issued a little involuntary oof.
Location 938 And so here they were, the kids, eight of them, ages six to eleven, all twirling, hopping, hands in the air, sometimes bobbing up and down in a kind of proto-twerk, staging in the living room their vague impression of how pop stars act in music videos. Meanwhile, the parents watched, clapped, hooted, and generally displayed maximal self-esteem-boosting support and encouragement.
Location 1576 They had sex when they wanted to and were able to, and this was sometimes frequently, sometimes infrequently, depending on a host of other variables, chief among them how taxing the day’s parenting had been, and how distant her mom-brain felt from her sex-brain, and how many stressful items were on her mind’s ongoing to-do list, and how depleted she felt her inner emotional reserves to be.
Location 2111 She finally comprehended parenthood’s strange paradox: that it was deeply annihilating while at the same time also somehow deeply comforting. It was both soul-devouring and soul-filling.
Location 2184 But it was a bit of a scandal among some of the older parents, most of whom were of Midwestern stock and so their comfort discussing matters private and sexual tended to fall somewhere between timidity and horror.
Location 2233 The way I think of it is: marriage is just a technology that was never quite future-proof. Like, it may have been a good tool in Victorian England or whatever. But for us? Now? Not so much. We have these twenty-first-century relationships running eighteenth-century software. So it’s glitchy and it crashes all the time. Typically with any technology we try to innovate and update and improve it, but with marriage we seem to refuse all progress. We’ve convinced ourselves that, actually, we like all those glitches. We prefer all the crashes. If it weren’t so hard to use, it wouldn’t be worth it. We’ve been persuaded that the bugs are features. It’s so dumb.”
Location 2272 “But why even get married in the first place? If you’re so against it?” “Because we have two competing impulses alive within us: the need for novelty and the need for stability. It’s this constant push-pull. When I have too many hookups, I crave stability. When I have too many nights chilling on the couch, I crave novelty. The key is to celebrate the contradiction.”
Location 2776 She had chosen, willingly, freely, to have a child, and therefore, by implication, she had also chosen to give up countless luxuries and comforts: entire nights of restful sleep, a clean and spotless house, disposable income, relaxed and languid days without any conflict or rage. All of these pleasures she had sacrificed. And not only had she sacrificed them but, because she had chosen to do this, because she had done this to herself, she now pretended to be happy and contented at their absence.
Location 2786 This was the solution! Make the seats even narrower, the lines even longer, the competition for overhead space even more cutthroat—make it all famously bad and then tell people that they could avoid all of it and have a more or less normally below-average experience for a modest fee. Thus, if they knew beforehand that the experience would be dreadful but they didn’t pay the fee to avoid it, they would be less unhappy about the dreadful experience because, ultimately, they chose to have it. They did it to themselves.
Location 3211 A prairie does not have the grandeur of a mountain range, nor the austerity of a desert, nor the gothic mystery of a forest, nor the romance of the sea. A prairie is a lawn, and it’s hard to have extravagant feelings about a lawn. Jack has a theory about this, about why the prairie is a disrespected landscape, why when we see it, we don’t really see it: it’s because you can’t capture a prairie in a picture. It is notoriously difficult to depict a prairie two-dimensionally. Even to the naked eye, it already looks flat—this despite the fact that walking the Flint Hills can be exhausting, that a landscape that seems level at a distance can take your breath away when you’re actually trudging up it.
Location 3281 It’s similar to the resentment he felt years ago when city hipsters began ironically wearing the same John Deere hat that his own father actually, sincerely, wore: Jack was like, Fuck you. He’s weirdly protective of the rural Midwest, even though, as a young man, he tried very hard to escape it.
Location 3724 Over the years, I’ve found that people tend to act automatically and think automatically, but when they’re pressed to explain why they act or think a certain way, they rush into the void and invent a story. And then, incredibly, they believe that story.”
Location 3731 All I understand for sure is that people have a very strong need to explain the world in ways that make them feel better, or safer, or more powerful, or more well liked, or more in control, but not necessarily in ways that are true. Alas, the truth is of very low importance, psychologically speaking. We’re really very silly creatures.”
Location 4078 Otherwise, she stays silent and listens, for her father finds it necessary to point out—with the authority that comes from shallow knowledge—every mistake she makes.
Location 4128 “But I don’t care about getting rich.” “Spoken like someone who’s already rich,” he says. “And anyway it’s not the money itself that’s important, it’s what the money gets you.” “What does it get you?” “Status. Ease. Comfort. But most of all, it gets you freedom.” “Freedom?” “The freedom to live your life as you see fit, to depend on no one, to live without constraint. To walk free and own no superior,” he says, now quoting Walt Whitman. She knows he’s quoting Walt Whitman because this very quote is etched onto a plaque at the Gables, the one hanging outside the Walt Whitman bedroom. “Most people,” he continues, “live small lives inside small boxes. But that’s not us. Walk free and own no superior. Remember that, Elizabeth. Words to goddamn live by.”
Location 4810 “Our lives are bound by time, but our memories are not. In the place where we actually experience our life, up here”—pointing to his forehead—“time does not exist. Something that happens right now could take you back to something that happened twenty years ago. And for a moment, in your mind, the distance between them vanishes. It’s like there is no time.”
Location 5101 Jack didn’t think that he and Elizabeth lied to each other, exactly, but more like there was a kind of gulf between them full of diplomatically unspoken things.
Location 5428 Back then, we really believed that the worst person in the entire soulless corporate machine was the man in the gray flannel suit, you know? The man in the small beige cubicle. But we were wrong about that. The truth is that tattooed hipsters are way, way worse.” “How do you figure?” “Because they’re capitalism’s prospectors, mining the earth for the next trendy thing. Have you noticed how the corporations that profit most from art never create their own art? I’m talking about entertainment companies here, the cultural capital–type stuff—music, publishing, film and TV—the people who own those companies don’t create a thing. And that’s because creation is unpredictable. Only a few artists ever truly catch on. Trendiness is a bad investment. Too risky for companies that have to answer to shareholders and boards. And so they transfer that risk to us. They ask us to be starving artists, living in a garret, doing the work for free on the off chance of making it big. We thought we were so anti-corporate back then, in the nineties, at the Foundry, but actually we were each taking on our own little share of corporate risk. We were helping to outsource risk and diffuse it across the labor force. Then one artist out of a hundred becomes legitimately trendy, the corporations suck them up and make their standard profits, and the rest of us become, I don’t know, adjuncts.”
Location 5519 “Jack, listen to me.” She stood up and walked toward him, took his hands in hers. “I’ve found everything I ever wanted with you. I mean that. When I left home and came to Chicago, I had no idea what would happen. I just wanted to make a decent life, and I wanted to find a good guy, and maybe have a beautiful family together, and live in a nice home, and look what happened—I got all of that.” “And yet now you’re bored.” “No, not bored. Just no longer seduced by the mystery of it all. Life’s big hard questions—What will happen? Who will I become?—have largely been answered. And now I feel like there’s this huge absence where the mystery used to be. And I guess that’s really what I’m after.” “The mystery.” “The adventure of it.
Location 6304 And in this manner, a whole person can be transformed. He realized that people, and marriages, and neighborhoods, were all modular things, with pieces that could be swapped out at any moment. Out on the street, a mom-and-pop store shutters, is replaced by a global retail chain, and if this happens a few times every year, eventually the block becomes unrecognizable. People were like that too, with all sorts of contradictions inside them waiting to get out. He realized that his current self—which seemed to him pretty stable and suitable and more or less true—was no more true than his younger self. Someday another person would emerge, a total stranger, and around him new friends would emerge and a new city would emerge and a new wife and a new son would emerge and they’d be an entirely new family. The people he loved, he thought, were visitors, and waiting inside them was the possibility of someone better or someone worse, someone good or someone wretched, someone intimate or someone strange. His wife, son, friends, coworkers—he could not count on any of them to be consistently themselves. And this saddened him.
Location 6410 She criticized herself for caring so much about what other people thought, then criticized herself again for always criticizing herself. She knew the man was at this moment not going through these mental spirals, was not deconstructing the interaction and litigating it before a fake jury. That’s the thing about assholes—they are assholes unreflectively. No asshole thinks to himself: Yeah, that was a quality asshole move. No, they just are. They go around just being, in perfect clueless bliss.
Location 7037 So he made it pretty clear to the people back home that he was going to Chicago to absolutely forget where he came from. And in 1992, you could do that: just untether yourself and go to a new place and become a new person, a kind of dramatic bridge-burning that’s quite a lot harder in the age of Facebook, he thinks, where all the people of your vast network compel you—softly, but powerfully—to continue being exactly who they’ve always believed you to be.
Location 7204 that Lawrence is getting unnecessarily worked up and angry about nothing, that there are no shadowy cabals secretly plotting against the world, and what’s happening here is actually just that a small group of engineers in Silicon Valley have built moneymaking algorithms that are now optimizing, that what Lawrence is seeing is not reality but rather an algorithmic abstraction of reality that sits invisibly atop reality like a kind of distortion field.
Location 7275 Putting that story on Facebook feels like it changes the story. It suddenly feels like he’s maybe using the story selfishly, though unconsciously, to brag, that maybe the real reason he’s posting it is to show off his charmed life, or to boast about his parenting skills, or to fish for praise and attention. This weird and precious and private family thing becomes something altogether new when alchemized by Facebook—it gains a second, uglier entendre. It becomes instrumental. Toby becomes a prop. The whole thing turns into an ad.
Location 7305 But they’re not doing it in literature. Because it turned out that hypertext didn’t disrupt literature. No, it disrupted reality. That’s what Jack thinks when he sees his father’s lunacy: The actual world has become one big hypertext, and nobody knows how to read it. It’s a free-for-all where people build whatever story they want out of the world’s innumerable available scraps.
Location 7478 “The prairie terrified them,” she said. “Those early settlers, on cloudy days they’d lose all sense of cardinal directions because everywhere they looked it looked the same. On sunny days they’d see a lake on the horizon and ride all day and never reach it. Distances are strange on the plains. Everything gets extended and weird. You can’t judge how near something is in all that space.”
Location 7612 “It was the lack of trees. They thought if trees couldn’t live here, nothing could. So they misunderstood the whole place. Which is basically what Mom does.” They watched Lawrence as he stopped and leaned against a fence post, looking out across the land, staring at the field, which was due for burning whenever the weather allowed for it. “Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn’t grow, and so they didn’t notice all the things that did grow. It’s an important lesson. If you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what’s really there.”
Location 7833 Jack suddenly wondered what a place like Wicker Park would look like from this vantage, from the Flint Hills of Kansas, what it would look like to his mother, and he decided, staring forlornly at this pile of wood—wood that was, to be honest, really excellently distressed and evocative—that his home in Chicago would look insatiable. It would look like a place that plundered all the world’s money and capital and jobs and people while places like the Flint Hills were catastrophically emptied. Standing here, Jack imagined that Wicker Park would seem, to the people of the prairie, like a place that harvested their work, harvested their money, harvested their promising children, harvested their land, even harvested the corpses of their very homes, using the remains to decorate the fancy walls of fancy people who congratulated themselves for recycling.
Location 8326 “Information overload is the new hungry lion.” “And isn’t that the truth. We feel unsafe. We feel uncertain. And so the body gets stingy. It conserves. What placebo offers us is the illusion of certainty. It gives you a story that, once you believe it, triggers the body to finally do its own natural thing. So placebo doesn’t cure you—rather, placebo creates the emotion required to cure yourself. And that emotion is certainty.”
Location 8357 Our certainty blinds us to how the world changes and changes and changes.” “So if nothing is real, if certainty is just an illusion, what do we do? Believe in nothing?” “Believe what you believe, my dear, but believe gently. Believe compassionately. Believe with curiosity. Believe with humility. And don’t trust the arrogance of certainty. I mean, my goodness, Elizabeth, if you want the gods to really laugh at you, then by all means call it your forever home.”
Location 8543 Jack’s lesson here: Sometimes you take the shit that’s forced upon you and call it a stance. Sometimes what we think of as a philosophy of life is really just the complicated way we deal with the way other people deal with us.
Location 8834 “You have to let it breathe,” his sister had advised, and maybe that was Jack in a nutshell: he let nothing breathe. He let nothing just be. He let nothing evolve or unfold naturally, without trying to control it or coerce it. His sister, on the other hand, had accepted the world’s inherent unpredictability, and even embraced it, living in an exotic place every year, always learning something new, never knowing what would come next. Jack pretended he was following her example, but what he’d really done after moving to Chicago was demand immediate permanence and safety and control: he’d found a girl, and an aesthetic, within his first year, and then henceforth never changed a thing. For Jack, marriage and art were not about investigation or learning or growth. They were more like the snapshots you take and then pin down in the album: they were artifacts, mementos, fixed under laminate. He could not let them breathe.
Location 9140 Maybe it was like Dr. Sanborne said: certainty was just a story the mind created to defend itself against the pain of living. Which meant, almost by definition, that certainty was a way to avoid living. You could choose to be certain, or you could choose to be alive.
Location 9211 Behind curtains, this, he thinks, is what lovers do—they are alchemists and architects; pioneers and fabulists; they make one thing another; they invent the world around them.
