My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist: A novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

Soon psychopathology replaced ethnicity as the critical demographic determinant.

have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time.

When Elvis Presley, in the song “Jailhouse Rock,” sang the lyrics “If you can’t find a partner, grab a wooden chair,” he freed a generation of young people to love furniture and, by extension, to love any inanimate object in a way that heretofore would have been strictly verboten.

The people whom we loved seem to float across our hearts (like those entoptic specks that drift across our eyeballs), tantalizing us with the proximity of their impossibility.

Inflate me so that I may rise into the sky and mourn the monotonous topography of my life.

As I chugalug a glass of tap water milky with contaminants, I realize that my mind is being drained of its contents and refilled with the beliefs of the most mission-oriented, can-do feral child ever raised by huge and lurid puppets.

You have the glibness, superficial charm, grandiosity, lack of guilt, shallow feelings, impulsiveness, and lack of realistic long-term plans that excite me right now, she says, moving even closer.

The vector of my movement from a given point is isotropic—meaning that all possible directions are equally probable.