Loosely based on the real life correspondence of the poet Robert Lowell and Flannery O’Connor, Frances and Bernard is the latest epistolary novel to hit the streets. Rather than wax on, wax off…here are some of the best lines from the book:
…I think money eliminates the need for the catharsis of humor. I think that these girls, because they have not known the disappointment of being caught between what one hopes for and what one actually receives, can’t make jokes.
I do sometimes-sometimes-want to please a crowd. So as to better camouflage my dissent.
She says that if I want to persist in my obscurity—she calls it obscurity—then I can go to one of those smaller houses that print difficult books.
When you’re well you can’t imagine what it’s like to be ill, you’ve forgotten the exact dimensions of the squirming lassitude, and when you’re ill, you pant for wellness, whose sturdy contours now seem the unimaginable thing.
I see Ann: willing to insert herself into the world to help, unafraid of how it will be received, just knowing that as a Catholic she must be kind, and me hanging back, afraid of being seen as smug in my small offer of help when everyone needs so much help all the time, the amount of help needed is too big, and so I turn away in despair.
You will think I’m going mad again. I know I’m not. If I were mad, this would be rhyming.
Said Frances: “A novel that vanishes probably should not have existed in the first place.”
