Three: something important is about to happen. Pay attention. Yes, you.

How to Buy a Love of Reading - Tanya Egan Gibson
New York: Dutton, 2009

The gimmicky premise: Nouveau Riche Long Islanders decide to show up their neighbors and serve their chubby and anti-intellectual daughter by becoming patrons of the arts. That is, they hire an author to move into their home and write a novel to their daughter's specifications. Needless to say, things don't entirely go as planned.

The cast:

• Carley is the daughter, overweight and addicted to reality television. But she may be way more perceptive than she seems. She also is in love with...
• Hunter, her best friend. Also super hot and popular. Also an alcoholic who pops pills, worships Fitzgerald, and cries more than I ever knew any boy to. He's the only one who has actually read the first novel by...
• Bree, whose postmodern trickery (and footnotes! footnotes everywhere!) makes her the unlikeliest of candidates to write a Arthurian novel (the theme of Carley's upcoming Sweet 16, selected by her parents) for a teen girl. She's a former classmate of...
• Justin, a successful novelist and Hunter's idol and neighbor technically, although he's been gone since being shot by a deranged fan.

There are other characters too, obviously. I can leave them aside for now. And I will not even try to get into the web of relationships just among these four. Suffice it to say that love shows itself in strange ways. And sometimes we love someone not because of who they are, but who we are for loving them. And do those lies and misperceptions - the fault of love - matter, in the end?

I waited a week to write about this book because I had SO much to say. I still do, particularly about love and how desperately selfish it can be. How maybe we would be happier if we loved people for who they were instead of ghosts or mirages. How a "happy" ending can still be the wrong one. And how a father holding a bouquet of flowers can be the trigger that makes me cry. I honestly don't even know if I liked this book - it was ambitious, that's for sure, but that's doesn't necessarily make it successful. But like it or not, it made me think far more than I expected.

And a few miscellaneous thoughts: did I feel like the parody of pomo literature was at the expense of DFW? Not sure, but considering my other summer reading, it was on my mind. Also, the line that turned into the title of this post. It made me happy. Gibson's descriptions of Justin's panic attacks weren't entirely convincing, but perhaps close enough. And Aftermemory. When you go back and relive events the way you wished they could be. But none of this is as important as the rest of it. So go back and re-read the previous paragraph.

What I am seeking. What am I seeking?

From Tanya Egan Gibson:

...and then she and Justin are cracking up, slap-happy, teary-insane with that feeling that comes from getting exactly what you need when you don't know what to ask for.

From Robert Hellenga:

It seemed to him he'd come to the place he'd been looking for all evening, a place where prayers are answered in unexpected ways, which is just the way prayers are supposed to be answered. You might get what you want, but it won't be quite what you expected.

This is water

(aka an update on Erin's own Infinite Summer)

I'm a member of that generation that has a hard time with sincerity. Whenever feelings get a little too real, we need to say something caustic, ironic, to back away. Is this a generational thing, or a cultural thing, or just part of being young? I'm not sure. Anyway, I found it again yesterday while reading about Mario Incandenza:

The older Mario gets, the more confused he gets about the fact that everyone at E.T.A. over the age of about Kent Blott finds stuff that's really real uncomfortable and they get embarrassed. It's like there's some rule that real stuff can only get mentioned if everybody rolls their eyes or laughs in a way that isn't happy. (p. 592, btw)

And that's the thing about Madame Psychosis for him (and prob not just him) - she talks about "stuff that is real."

Because I suspect we all secretly crave that sincerity, even as we are embarrassed by it.

So this is the real thing I read 2 pages before, about Mario, that just pulled and pulled at me:

He can't tell if Hal is sad. He is having a harder and harder time reading Hal's states of mind or whether he's in good spirits. This worries him. He used to be able to sort of preverbally know in his stomach generally where Hal was and what he was doing, even if Hal was far away and playing or if Mario was away, and now he can't anymore. Feel it. This worries him and feels like when you've lost something important in a dream and you can't even remember what it was but it's important. Mario loves Hal so much it makes his heart beat hard. He doesn't have to wonder if the difference now is him or his brother because Mario never changes.

Oh, and the title for this post? That's from here.