Pip’s mother, though chronically depressed, wasn’t crazy. “This is the terrible thing about bodies. “Let’s not romanticize the cubicle,” Pip said. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. “And meanwhile everybody’s wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. What if you get the actual flu or something?” “My Endeavor is the only thing that makes that job survivable, and I can’t connect with the Endeavor when there’s an invisible fisherman’s sinker pulling on my eyelid.” “Well, I don’t think I can go to work today,” her mother said. Pip was it, as far as her own mother was concerned. Some of her friends in Oakland also had problematic parents, but they still managed to speak to them daily without undue weirdnesses transpiring, because even the most problematic of them had resources that consisted of more than just their single offspring. She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail, an employee too indispensable to be fired for bad attitude. But their dealings were all tainted by moral hazard, a useful phrase she’d learned in college economics. It wasn’t as if Pip felt good about making fun of her mother. “I don’t know-because you didn’t have Graves’ disease? Hyperthyroidism? Melanoma?” “If you don’t even know what it is, pussycat, how can you be so sure?” “Whatever Bell’s palsy is, I’m sure you don’t have it.” I’m wondering if it might be Bell’s palsy.” “It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.” “My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. It brought her some relief from the feeling that she wasn’t suited for her job, that she had a job that nobody could be suited for, or that she was a person unsuited for any kind of job and then, after twenty minutes, she could honestly say that she needed to get back to work.

She’d taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. “Isn’t that everybody’s life?” the girl, Pip, said. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.” “Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,” the girl’s mother said on the telephone.

Purity jonathan franzen review