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4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2015
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2015
Copyright © Jonathan Franzen 2015
Cover image © Image Source/Getty Images
Jonathan Franzen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it either are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007532766
Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 9780007532797
Version: 2017-03-28
for Elisabeth Robinson
… Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft
Contents
MONDAY
Oh pussycat, I’m so glad to hear your voice,” the girl’s mother said on the telephone. “My body is betraying me again. Sometimes I think my life is nothing but one long process of bodily betrayal.”
“Isn’t that everybody’s life?” the girl, Pip, said. She’d taken to calling her mother midway through her lunch break at Renewable Solutions. 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.
“My left eyelid is drooping,” her mother explained. “It’s like there’s a weight on it that’s pulling it down, like a tiny fisherman’s sinker or something.”
“Right now?”
“Off and on. I’m wondering if it might be Bell’s palsy.”
“Whatever Bell’s palsy is, I’m sure you don’t have it.”
“If you don’t even know what it is, pussycat, how can you be so sure?”
“I don’t know—because you didn’t have Graves’ disease? Hyper-thyroidism? Melanoma?”
It wasn’t as if Pip felt good about making fun of her mother. But their dealings were all tainted by moral hazard, a useful phrase she’d learned in college economics. She was like a bank too big in her mother’s economy to fail, an employee too indispensable to be fired for bad attitude. 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. Pip was it, as far as her own mother was concerned.
“Well, I don’t think I can go to work today,” her mother said. “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.”
“Mom, you can’t call in sick again. It’s not even July. What if you get the actual flu or something?”
“And meanwhile everybody’s wondering what this old woman with half her face drooping onto her shoulder is doing bagging their groceries. You have no idea how I envy you your cubicle. The invisibility of it.”
“Let’s not romanticize the cubicle,” Pip said.
“This is the terrible thing about bodies. They’re so visible, so visible.”
Pip’s mother, though chronically depressed, wasn’t crazy. She’d managed to hold on to her checkout-clerk job at the New Leaf Community Market in Felton for more than ten years, and as soon as Pip relinquished her own way of thinking and submitted to her mother’s she could track what she was saying perfectly well. The only decoration on the gray segments of her cubicle was a bumper sticker, AT LEAST THE WAR ON THE ENVIRONMENT IS GOING WELL. Her colleagues’ cubicles were covered with photos and clippings, but Pip herself understood the attraction of invisibility. Also, she expected to be fired any month now, so why settle in.
“Have