Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Folding Star (1994)

  They sounded like the dreariest people on earth. (They sounded like us.) Had they gone in the sea? Yes, although the water was quite cold. Then what had he worn to do so? A slip. Swimming-trunks, did he mean, or shorts? Trunks. And what colour were they? They were black. As it happened, he'd forgotten his own and had had to borrow Patrick's, and they were too large. So he couldn't keep them on? Oh he could, but it wasn't easy . . . What, um, what had he read?. He had read Great Expectations and something by Gramsci! (He seemed full of ideas on the latter but I kept bringing him back firmly to Pip, Magwitch and Herbert Pocket.) When a little over an hour had elapsed there was another quick knock and Mrs Altidore stepped in and looked from one to the other of us, as if expecting a decision. There was a moment's silence. Then she asked Luc how it had gone, and he nodded and shrugged, accustomed to evading her fuss. I told her that he had very good English and she said, "I know." She then had Luc show me out, which he did with a telling mixture of reluctance and formality. I shook his big strong hand and he nodded his forelock forward and curtly said goodbye. out in the street I felt almost nothing. I didn't like to inspect my motives—I walked on quite briskly, looking about appreciatively, like someone at ease with himself and not denying a disappointment. though the question insisted on forming, whether I had really come all this way for that. I took a circuitous route home, past the Memling Cinema and down the street where the church of St Narcissus was. It had relatively up-to-date notices on the board at the front, though it was hard to decide whether an announcement of a pilgrimage (by bus) back in April was sufficient grounds to believe that the iron-spiked gate through which I was reading it would ever be opened again to the curious or devout. I noticed litter had gathered between the gate and the door. Over the bridge, where my canal slid sullenly below, and there was the school. It was getting on for lunchtime. I heard a hand-bell ringing in an echoing inner courtyard, and as I crossed the road to look up at the tall, many-gabled building, its buckling purple brick braced all over with iron Es, Xs and Ss, I saw for the first time the historic uniform the boys wore: black breeches and stockings and black bum-freezers with wide collars and the yellow face of a narcissus flower picked out in braid on the pocket. Two of them who must have been quite senior were lounging in the gateway, like figures in an old print, and managed to look foppish and puritanical at the same time.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  A family friend suggested that I work for him in a medium-sized floor tile distribution business near my hometown. Floor tile is extraordinarily heavy: Each piece weighs anywhere from three to six pounds, and it’s usually packaged in cartons of eight to twelve pieces. My primary duty was to lift the floor tile onto a shipping pallet and prepare that pallet for departure. It wasn’t easy, but it paid thirteen dollars an hour and I needed the money, so I took the job and collected as many overtime shifts and extra hours as I could. The tile business employed about a dozen people, and most employees had worked there for many years. One guy worked two full-time jobs, but not because he had to: His second job at the tile business allowed him to pursue his dream of piloting an airplane. Thirteen dollars an hour was good money for a single guy in our hometown—a decent apartment costs about five hundred dollars a month—and the tile business offered steady raises. Every employee who worked there for a few years earned at least sixteen dollars an hour in a down economy, which provided an annual income of thirty-two thousand—well above the poverty line even for a family. Despite this relatively stable situation, the managers found it impossible to fill my warehouse position with a long-term employee. By the time I left, three guys worked in the warehouse; at twenty-six, I was by far the oldest. One guy, I’ll call him Bob, joined the tile warehouse just a few months before I did. Bob was nineteen with a pregnant girlfriend. The manager kindly offered the girlfriend a clerical position answering phones. Both of them were terrible workers. The girlfriend missed about every third day of work and never gave advance notice. Though warned to change her habits repeatedly, the girlfriend lasted no more than a few months. Bob missed work about once a week, and he was chronically late. On top of that, he often took three or four daily bathroom breaks, each over half an hour. It became so bad that, by the end of my tenure, another employee and I made a game of it: We’d set a timer when he went to the bathroom and shout the major milestones through the warehouse—“Thirty-five minutes!” “Forty-five minutes!” “One hour!” Eventually, Bob, too, was fired. When it happened, he lashed out at his manager: “How could you do this to me? Don’t you know I’ve got a pregnant girlfriend?” And he was not alone: At least two other people, including Bob’s cousin, lost their jobs or quit during my short time at the tile warehouse. You can’t ignore stories like this when you talk about equal opportunity. Nobel-winning economists worry about the decline of the industrial Midwest and the hollowing out of the economic core of working whites. What they mean is that manufacturing jobs have gone overseas and middle-class jobs are harder to come by for people without college degrees.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  But it was the right place. I recognised the Mayfair portraits, the louche studies of Bobby—Bobby who today was nowhere to be seen, banished doubtless under the good behaviour clause—and all the randomness of it was right to me, as that was how it had been before. But when I got to the bottom, and peeled back the last piece of protective tissue, I had to acknowledge that none of the pictures of Colin, those artfully lewd compositions, was there. I searched the drawers above and below as well, but with dwindling hope. Charles called out, ‘What’s he looking for?’ and when Staines replied, ‘I promised him some photographs of a boy called Colin, but I just don’t know where they are,’ I knew he was lying. ‘Colin?’ said Charles. ‘Oh, I don’t think I know that one. Do I know that one?’ I nodded at him to signal that this was the boy I had told him about, the thing that mattered to me; but he was quite inscrutable, full of diplomatic ignorance. Half an hour later, when we shook hands and parted, he wouldn’t meet my eye. ‘Well, that was a mixed success,’ I said to James, as he climbed down into his car, and I leant over the open door. ‘Don’t worry about the Colin thing,’ he said. I drummed on the roof. ‘I want to get him! I don’t seem to have anything else to do.’ ‘Do you want a lift?’ ‘No, I’m going home. Then I’m going to have a swim: one must keep the body if not the soul together.’ ‘See you soon.’ ‘See you my darling.’ It was very quiet at the Corry, when I arrived mid-afternoon. The few people there looked at each other with considerate curiosity rather than rivalry. There was a sense of various different routines equably overlapping. There were several old boys, one or two perhaps even of Charles’s age, and doubtless all with their own story, strange and yet oddly comparable, to tell. And going into the showers I saw a suntanned young lad in pale blue trunks that I rather liked the look of. ABOUT THE AUTHORAlan Hollinghurst is the author of three other novels, The Folding Star, The Spell, and The Line of Beauty, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2004. In addition, he has received the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. He lives in London. [image "Alan Hollinghurst The Sparsholt Affair back ad" file=images/Holl_9780307806604_epub_002_r1.jpg] AAKnopf.com ALSO AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL [image file=images/Holl_9780307806604_epub_L02_r1.jpg] TALKING IT OVER by Julian BarnesThrough the indelible voices of three narrators—two best friends and the woman they both love—Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades. “An interplay of serious thought and dazzling wit.… It’s moving, it’s funny, it’s frightening … fiction at its best” (The New York Times Book Review). Fiction/Literature

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  Charles puffed and muttered something about a tifty. ‘Come and have a drink,’ I said to both of them, and I took Charles’s wrist to lead them through the crowd. I could see, as I swivelled round to pass Norman a glass of wine, that he would always be recognisable. His broad cheekbones, large mouth, grey eyes and blond hair, now indistinctly grey, were elements in a formula of beauty, whatever disappointments and desertions might have taken place. Charles was politely inscrutable, but I sensed that he was pained to be disabused. He turned away from the ‘grocer’s boy’ who had needlessly returned to destroy the sentimental poetry with which he had been invested. I felt sorry for them both. And then, drunk again, hated the past and all going back. ‘I share a house with my sister,’ Norman was explaining to me. ‘It’s very near the middle of Beckenham, quite convenient for the station and the shops.’ ‘You should have brought her today,’ said Charles loftily. Norman flushed at this, and looked around hectically at the straining torsos and ecstatic mouths upon the wall. ‘Can I come and see you soon, Charles?’ I asked. ‘I’ve been picking my way through the books, and I’ve almost got up to the end. I need some briefing.’ ‘Briefing, tomorrow?’ His eye had been caught by Staines, and I watched his attention waver and then switch abruptly away. Staines reached a ringed hand to him and I heard Charles saying ‘… splendid evening, most memorable …’ I kept up with him and squeezed his arm: ‘I’ll come for tea, as before’—and he patted my hand. Then I was talking to the thick-set man, laughing overmuch so as to charm, and with my shirt half unbuttoned, running my hand over my chest. He was keen on photography, had his reservations about Staines—I agreed with him brutally—but liked Whitehaven. I told him Whitehaven had photographed me, but I saw that he thought I was taking a rise out of him. ‘Well, have you done any modelling?’ I asked. Aldo came up and said, ‘Oh, let’s be going.’ He looked tipsy and abandoned. It was only when the three of us were virtually through the door that I realised his words had been addressed to the thick-set man rather than to me. ‘Nice meeting you,’ said the thick-set man; and other perfectly pleasant remarks were exchanged before the two of them strolled away, arm in arm. I lurched off furiously to the hotel. 11‘Sugar?’ ‘I don’t, thank you.’ ‘I rather do these days. I’ve given in.’ Charles discarded the tongs, and shovelled up roughly half a dozen sugar-lumps in his bowed, flat fingers. We sat and sipped as Graham came in again with more hot water, and Charles watched his manservant with confident gratitude. At Skinner’s Lane everything was running like clockwork. ‘I have my own teeth,’ he added.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Within hours, the man’s house began to flood, and someone came to his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” A few hours later, as the waters engulfed the first floor of the man’s home, a boat passed by, and the captain offered to take the man to safety. The man declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” A few hours after that, as the man waited on his roof—his entire home flooded—a helicopter flew by, and the pilot offered transportation to dry land. Again the man declined, telling the pilot that God would care for him. Soon thereafter, the waters overcame the man, and as he stood before God in heaven, he protested his fate: “You promised that you’d help me so long as I was faithful.” God replied, “I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter. Your death is your own fault.” God helps those who help themselves. This was the wisdom of the Book of Mamaw. The fallen world described by the Christian religion matched the world I saw around me: one where a happy car ride could quickly turn to misery, one where individual misconduct rippled across a family’s and a community’s life. When I asked Mamaw if God loved us, I asked her to reassure me that this religion of ours could still make sense of the world we lived in. I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos. Not long after Lindsay’s childhood modeling dream went up in flames, I was in Jackson with Mamaw and my cousin Gail on August 2, my eleventh birthday. Late in the afternoon, Mamaw advised me to call Bob—still my legal father—because I hadn’t heard from him yet. After we moved back to Middletown, he and Mom divorced, so it wasn’t surprising that he rarely got in touch. But my birthday was obviously special, and I found it odd that he hadn’t called. So I phoned and got the answering machine. A few hours later, I phoned once more with the same result, and I knew instinctively that I would never see Bob again. Either because she felt bad for me or because she knew I loved dogs, Gail took me to the local pet store, where a brand-new litter of German shepherd puppies was on display. I desperately wanted one and had just enough birthday money to make the purchase. Gail reminded me that dogs were a lot of work and that my family (read: my mother) had a terrible history of getting dogs and then giving them away. When wisdom fell on deaf ears—“You’re probably right, Gail, but they’re soooo cute!”— authority kicked in: “Honey, I’m sorry, but I’m not letting you buy this dog.” By the time we returned to Mamaw Blanton’s house, I was more upset about the dog than about losing father number two.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  During my argument, the court’s five judges looked at me with curiosity but asked few questions. I chose to interpret their silence as agreement. I hoped they saw so little support for the conviction that they didn’t think there was much to discuss. Judge Patterson’s only remark during the oral argument came at the end, when he slowly but firmly asked a single question that echoed through the mostly empty courtroom. “Where are you from?” I was thrown by the question and hesitated before answering. “I live in Montgomery, sir.” I had foolishly discouraged McMillian’s family from attending the oral argument because I knew that the issues were fairly arcane and that there would be very little discussion of the facts. Supporters would have to take off from work and make the long drive to Montgomery for an early morning argument. Since each side had only thirty minutes to present, I hadn’t thought it worth the effort. When I sat down after the argument, I regretted that decision. I would have appreciated some sympathetic faces in the courtroom to signal to the court that this case was different, but there were none. An assistant attorney general then presented the State’s arguments—capital cases on appeal were managed by the attorney general, not the local district attorney. The State’s lawyer argued that this was a routine capital murder case and that the death penalty had been appropriately imposed. Following the oral argument, I still had hope that the court would overturn the conviction and sentence because it was so clearly unsupported by reliable facts. State law required credible corroboration of accomplice testimony in a murder case, and there simply wasn’t any in Walter’s case. I believed that the court would have a hard time affirming a conviction with so little evidence. I was wrong. — I drove to the prison to deliver the news. Walter didn’t say anything as I explained the situation, but he had a strange, despairing look on his face. I had tried to prepare him for the possibility that it could take years to get his conviction overturned, but he had gotten his hopes up. “They aren’t ever going to admit they made a mistake,” he said glumly. “They know I didn’t do this. They just can’t admit to being wrong, to looking bad.” “We’re just getting started, Walter,” I replied. “There is a lot more to do, and we’re going to make them confront this.” I was telling the truth: We did have to press on. Our plan was to ask the Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider its decision, and if that turned out to be a dead end, we would seek review in the Alabama Supreme Court. And we had uncovered even more evidence of Walter’s innocence. After filing the appeal brief, I’d continued investigating the case intensively. If we hadn’t come up with so much new evidence to prove Walter’s innocence, I think the court’s ruling would have been even more overwhelming.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I knew that for her, as for all us prodigals, those pieces of gold were not true-ringing specie marked with the head of a Caesar, but a magic substance, a personal currency stamped with the effigy of a chimera and the likeness of the dancer Bathyllus. I had ceased to exist for her; she was alone. Almost plain for the moment, and puckering her brow with delightful indifference to her own beauty, like a pouting schoolboy she counted and recounted upon her fingers those difficult additions. To my eyes she was never more charming. The news of the Sarmatian incursions reached Rome during the celebration of Trajan's Dacian triumph. These long-delayed festivities lasted eight days. It had taken nearly a year to bring from Africa and from Asia wild animals destined for slaughter in the arena; the massacre of twelve thousand such beasts and the systematic destruction of ten thousand gladiators turned Rome into an evil resort of death. On that particular evening I was on the roof of Attianus' house, with Marcius Turbo and our host. The illuminated city was hideous with riotous rejoicing: that bitter war, to which Marcius and I had devoted four years of our youth, served the populace only as pretext for drunken festival, a brutal, vicarious triumph. It was not the time to announce publicly that these much vaunted victories were not final, and that a new enemy was at our frontiers. The emperor, already absorbed in his projects for Asia, took less and less interest in the situation to the northeast, which he preferred to consider as settled once and for all. That first Sarmatian war was represented as a simple punitive expedition. I was sent out to it with the title of governor of Pannonia, and with full military powers. The war lasted eleven months, and was atrocious. I still believe the annihilation of the Dacians to have been almost justified; no chief of state can willingly assent to the presence of an organized enemy established at his very gates. But the collapse of the kingdom of Decebalus had created a void in those regions upon which the Sarmatians swooped down; bands starting up from no one knew where infested a country already devastated by years of war and burned time and again by us, thus affording no base for our troops, whose numbers were in any case inadequate; new enemies teemed like worms in the corpse of our Dacian victories.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  I told Edie she must see it, perhaps in turn not noticing her reluctance, but after a few yards of terrified mice in wheels and tethered hawks hopping and snapping at their leg-chains she turned away tense with anger and distress. "I'm sorry, darling, I c a n ' t . . . I don't know how you can." "No, let's go somewhere else." I took her arm and we went to the lane's end, and left into the square by the theatre. "This is where I fell in love with Luc," I said, doggily marking each place with an amorous association. "It's like a bloody Jubilee Walkway," said Edie. "Except you've only been here five minutes." "Sorry to be a love-bore. You just happen to have caught me on my last mad fling before old age sets in." "Hmm." She swung away to take in the buildings. "Are you treating me to the theatre tonight?" "Well, we could. It does take up a lot of valuable drinking-time." "I have a hip-flask." "And I don't know if you'll like it. There's an opera season—Saint-Saens's Henry VIII and Gretry's La Siffleuse." "The second one would be lovely. It sounds like something for Sir Perry." This was a reference to our local old man of letters back home, Sir Perry Dawlish, known, up to a point, for a monograph on "Whistling in Literature". We ambled past the side of the theatre, drawn by the noise of a piano and a woman's voice. From an open rehearsal-room window a melancholy soprano came floating down: "Dans cette brumeuse Angleterre je meurs sous un pale soleil . . . " We listened until a stamp and a cry of "Shit!" precipitated a bad-tempered reprise. "It must be poor dear Catherine of Aragon," said Edie solicitously. "One knows how she feels." "Have you been writing anything?" she asked, much later on, in the Cassette. This was a reference to our local young man of letters, Edward Manners, groomed early for a career in print, and already considered by most to be a lost cause. "What a very insensitive question." "Sorry, darling. Do you want another beer?" "After that I certainly do." And it had caused me a genuine twinge of bleak unease. Left alone, I gazed down the busy bar and thought how attractive and interesting everyone looked: it was the onset of any thing-will-do time—often of course (one tended to forget) a mutual compromise. There was a parting of the crowd and a couple shunted through: I dwelt on them for a second or two before I placed them. In front was the shatteringly pretty lad I suspected of servicing the Spanish girls, and propelling him with a hand on his neck was the assistant from the camp clothes-shop—I'd seen him here before—the one who had sold me my bad-taste Orst tie.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Within hours, the man’s house began to flood, and someone came to his door offering a ride to higher ground. The man declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” A few hours later, as the waters engulfed the first floor of the man’s home, a boat passed by, and the captain offered to take the man to safety. The man declined, saying, “God will take care of me.” A few hours after that, as the man waited on his roof—his entire home flooded—a helicopter flew by, and the pilot offered transportation to dry land. Again the man declined, telling the pilot that God would care for him. Soon thereafter, the waters overcame the man, and as he stood before God in heaven, he protested his fate: “You promised that you’d help me so long as I was faithful.” God replied, “I sent you a car, a boat, and a helicopter. Your death is your own fault.” God helps those who help themselves. This was the wisdom of the Book of Mamaw. The fallen world described by the Christian religion matched the world I saw around me: one where a happy car ride could quickly turn to misery, one where individual misconduct rippled across a family’s and a community’s life. When I asked Mamaw if God loved us, I asked her to reassure me that this religion of ours could still make sense of the world we lived in. I needed reassurance of some deeper justice, some cadence or rhythm that lurked beneath the heartache and chaos. Not long after Lindsay’s childhood modeling dream went up in flames, I was in Jackson with Mamaw and my cousin Gail on August 2, my eleventh birthday. Late in the afternoon, Mamaw advised me to call Bob—still my legal father—because I hadn’t heard from him yet. After we moved back to Middletown, he and Mom divorced, so it wasn’t surprising that he rarely got in touch. But my birthday was obviously special, and I found it odd that he hadn’t called. So I phoned and got the answering machine. A few hours later, I phoned once more with the same result, and I knew instinctively that I would never see Bob again. Either because she felt bad for me or because she knew I loved dogs, Gail took me to the local pet store, where a brand-new litter of German shepherd puppies was on display. I desperately wanted one and had just enough birthday money to make the purchase. Gail reminded me that dogs were a lot of work and that my family (read: my mother) had a terrible history of getting dogs and then giving them away. When wisdom fell on deaf ears—“You’re probably right, Gail, but they’re soooo cute!”— authority kicked in: “Honey, I’m sorry, but I’m not letting you buy this dog.” By the time we returned to Mamaw Blanton’s house, I was more upset about the dog than about losing father number two.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  What is it with these dads? For clues, we can look to our study. Contrary to what many believe, the amount of past or present acrimony between parents was irrelevant to a father’s willingness to help pay for college. I was very surprised to discover that the fathers who insisted on court-ordered visiting and held the children to a rigid schedule despite the youngsters’ protests contributed partially or not at all to college expenses. When I asked these fathers about their failure to support their children at this juncture, none pleaded poverty or even temporary financial reverses. A few cited their greater obligations to their new family. Some felt a greater obligation to send their stepchildren to college over their biological children. None denied the value of a college education. Most said that they had paid child support over many years in accord with court orders and that they were finished with their legal obligations. “I did all that was required” was the recurrent theme. As I talked to these fathers, I confess that I was shocked by the fact that no one seemed aware of or expressed concern over the hardships being endured by their children regarding the divorce, not being supported in higher education, and the serious consequences for their future economic well-being. Mothers for the most part were worried about the future and tried to contribute money for college. But only a few made the kind of incomes where they could really help, especially when they had more than one child. Others took second or third mortgages on their homes to pay tuition. In none of these families did one or both parents gather around the kitchen table to discuss college and other future plans with their high school—aged children. Those kinds of conversations—what are you planning to do in a career, where do you want to go to school, what do you want to study—were commonplace in comparison group families. Even among the very troubled intact families, young people were provided with funds for college. It was simply a given. I also saw the same kind of commitment in families of very modest means. One father who drove a cab for a living sat down with his sixteen-year-old son and said, “Mike, you are going to college and we will help you.” The boy was moved beyond words. But many children of divorce were not told by their dads, even wealthy ones, that there would be money to help them attend college. And the children were afraid to ask. I remember a lecture that I gave on this subject to law students at Berkeley. When I finished, a young woman in her mid-twenties approached me. “Professor,” she said, “you have just given what to me is the most important lecture of my life.” I was taken aback. “How so?” “I never thought I had the right to even ask my dad for support.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "I've finished it." "Gosh." "I'll get back to my mother's." He stood in his socks in the doorway whilst I turned on the step and looked up at slow-moving cloud and three or four stars. "See you tomorrow," I said. "I've got to read, god knows how I'll manage." "You'll do it beautifully. Do you want a taxi?" "I'll walk a bit and perhaps get the little bus if it comes." "I haven't asked you anything about Belgium and your job and . . . I don't even know why you went." I grinned at him. "Oh, the usual mixture of panic and caprice—" I couldn't explain to him why this was a place to get out of. I stepped forward with a shiver and slipped my arms round him and hugged him and after a second or two he gave me a comforting rough rub between the shoulderblades. I kissed him on the cheek and then pushily kissed his mouth, until he shook his head away. "I can't," he said, "I'm sorry. I mean I'm so sorry about everything." I waited at the bus-stop at the end of Willie's silent road, wishing I had never come, and thinking about him with a sullen charge of sexual violence. The night was damp and autumnal, the suburban birch and willow leaves came flitting down on to the tarmac, gathered in puddles or were swept about by the breeze in little dying sallies. I stood reading a notice about August Bank Holiday excursions to Brighton, Eastbourne and Dover. At the top a red bus surged forward in steeply exaggerated perspective and a cheery driver raised his cap—oh, the blind future tense of old announcements! How wrong it was to disclaim our adolescence, to wince at its gaucheries and ignorance, when we would be lucky to recapture its first-hand vividness and certainty. I read the schedule with a quickly gratified eye for misprints, then scuffed around, uncertain whether to start walking. It was the odd economics of time, the way waste demanded more waste, like cruising a boy on the street or just waiting for someone, anyone, up on the common on a summer night, not knowing if further waiting was merely adding to the tally of lost time or if it was the essential prelude to a pleasure that would be all the greater for the falterings of hope that came before it.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Herbert was advised to deny any culpability but ultimately argued that this was reckless murder, not capital murder, which could be punished with life imprisonment but not the death penalty. During the trial, the appointed defense lawyer presented no evidence about Herbert’s background, his military service, his trauma from the war, his relationship with the victim, his obsession with the girlfriend—nothing. Alabama’s statute at the time limited what court-appointed lawyers could be paid for their out-of-court preparation time to $1,000, so the lawyer spent almost no time on the case. The trial lasted just over a day, and the judge quickly condemned Herbert to death. Following the imposition of the death sentence, Herbert’s appointed lawyer, who was later disbarred for poor performance in other cases, told Herbert that he didn’t see any reason to appeal the conviction or sentence because the trial had been as fair as he could expect. Herbert reminded him that he’d been sentenced to death. He wanted to appeal no matter how unlikely the prospects, but his lawyer filed no brief. Herbert was confined on death row for eleven years, until it was his time to face “Yellow Mama.” A volunteer lawyer had challenged the intent questions in a desperate appeal but was unsuccessful. Herbert’s execution was now set for August 18, just three weeks away. After my call with Herbert, I filed a flurry of stay motions in various courts. I knew the odds were low that we would block the execution. By the late 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court had grown impatient with challenges to capital punishment. The Court had justified reauthorization of the death penalty in the mid-1970s on the promise that proceedings would be subject to heightened scrutiny and meticulous compliance with the law but then began to retreat from the existing review procedures. The Court’s rulings had become increasingly hostile to death row prisoners and less committed to the notion that “death is different,” requiring more careful review. The Court decided to bar claims from federal habeas corpus review if they weren’t initially presented to state courts. Federal courts were then forbidden to consider new evidence unless it was first presented to state courts. The Court began insisting that federal judges defer more to state court rulings, which tended to be more indulgent of errors and defects in capital proceedings. In the 1980s, the Court rejected a constitutional challenge to imposing the death penalty on juveniles; upheld the death penalty for disabled people suffering from “mental retardation”; and, in a widely condemned opinion, found no constitutional violation in the extreme racial disparities that could be seen throughout most death penalty jurisdictions.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But for many, it’s worth trying to lift the curtain of silence that has troubled the parent and child relationship for years. My next advice is to delay marriage or commitment until you have learned more about yourself and what you want in a partner. A good relationship cannot be created if you’re expecting to fail. You can learn about people by observing them and by observing yourself together with them. Look around and try to see relationships that are working. You might learn something. You should consider individual or group therapy as a bridge to understanding yourself. You need to learn how to resolve conflict without becoming terrified. In mastering this skill, you’ll gain confidence that you can influence your relationships instead of passively settling for whatever comes your way. Before you settle for disappointment, try to learn about the parts of life that you missed. In the end, each person finds his or her own way. Ultimately, your goal is to close the door on your parents’ divorce, to separate the now from the then. By giving up wanting what you didn’t have, you can set yourself free. For the Parents IN TALKING TO young adults who were raised in unhappy intact families, it became clear to me that their parents could have gone either way—stay together or get a divorce. This older generation of parents certainly had enough legitimate complaints about their spouses to consider divorce. But their marriages were not so explosive or chaotic or unsafe that husband and wife felt living together was intolerable. What can we learn from them? Is their example useful to people today who share similar problems? If this describes you, I think you should seriously consider staying together for the sake of your children. The couples who stayed unhappily married in this study struggled with all the problems that beset modern marriage—infidelity, depression, sexual boredom, loneliness, rejection. Few problems went away as time wore on, but that’s not what mattered most to these adults. Given their shared affection and concern for their children, they made parenting their number one priority. As one woman explained, “There are two relationships in this marriage. He admires me as a wonderful mother. As a wife, I bore him in every way possible. But our children are wonderful and that’s what counts.” If a couple can maintain their loving, shared parenting without feeling martyred, this is a choice to consider seriously. Many people make it. The notion that open conflict is always the hallmark of unhappy marriages is simply not true. That children are aware of their parents’ unhappiness and are themselves unhappy because of it is also not true. It depends on whether the parents are able with grace and without anger to make the sacrifice required to maintain the benefits of the marriage for their children. For those parents who decide to divorce, I have other advice.

• From The First Paul: Reclaiming the Radical Visionary Behind the Church's Conservative Icon (2009)

  Substitutionary atonement has become a lens through which many Christians see the meaning of the cross, a filter through which they hear the phrase “Christ crucified.” The problem is not with Anselm’s argument—its logic is impeccable. The problem is that it is not what Paul meant when he made “Christ crucified” central to the gospel. Substitutionary sacrifice was foreign to his thought. Indeed, seeing the cross of Jesus as a substitutionary sacrifice for sin is bad history, bad anthropology, and bad theology. It is bad history because it projects back onto Paul an understanding of the death of Jesus that did not exist in his time. Later in this chapter, we will explain why it is also bad anthropology and bad theology. PAUL’S UNDERSTANDINGS OF THE CROSS As we now turn to the meanings that Paul did see in the cross of Jesus, we make two preliminary points. First, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the death and resurrection of Jesus go together for Paul. Each gives meaning to the other. The cross of Jesus would have had no meaning for Paul without his conviction that God had raised Jesus. Without this conviction, the cross of Jesus would have been for Paul just another execution, another life ended by imperial authority. Resurrection gave meaning to the cross. Paul’s Damascus experience not only transformed Paul, but also transformed, necessarily, his way of seeing Jesus’s death. It was no longer simply an execution, but a revelation. Just as resurrection gave meaning to the cross, so also the cross gave meaning to resurrection. Imagine that Jesus had died a different kind of death. Suppose, for example, that he had died while selflessly and courageously treating victims of a plague and then been raised from the dead. Would his resurrection have the same meaning? Does it matter that the risen one is the crucified one? For Paul, it most certainly matters. The cross gave meaning to Easter just as Easter gave meaning to the cross. Neither would have the meaning it does without the other. Together, they were revelation. Indeed, the plural, “revelations,” is more appropriate, for they revealed more than one thing. Our second preliminary remark concerns the meaning of the word “atonement.” In Christian theology, the “doctrine of the atonement” concerns the meanings of Jesus’s death. For many Christians today, atonement has come to be identified with a particular understanding, namely, substitutionary atonement. When people ask us what we think about the atonement, this is almost always what they are asking about. But atonement has a much broader theological meaning. It needs to be reclaimed if we are to understand the atoning significance Paul saw in the cross. Like many other common Christian words, it needs to be redeemed. Atonement refers to a means of reconciliation . It presupposes a situation of separation or estrangement. How is the estrangement overcome? How does reconciliation occur? This is what atonement is about.

• From Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop (2023)

  There has never been a better time to overhaul our sex lives, and I believe that starts with having less of it, by cutting out the bad stuff and being choosier about the sex we do have. There’s good news on that front: studies seem to indicate the millennials—people born between 1981 and 19961—are having less sex than generations before them. Reporter Kate Julian detailed the phenomenon in a viral 2018 Atlantic article called “The Sex Recession,” which cast a darker light on the trend. There are many theories as to why we’re having less sex, the most likely being that several factors are working in tandem: we’re burned out, exhausted by a grind that may never drag us out of debt, no matter how many hobbies we monetize; we’re on libido-killing antidepressants; we’re passing on the nuclear family or marrying later in life; we’re eschewing human connection because we’re too busy bleep-blooping on our phones. Our attention spans are shot: we can’t read two pages of a book, or write two paragraphs of this one, without checking the Instagram of a Bachelorette runner-up from seven seasons ago. There’s so much porn, truly so much porn, and we can carry it with us wherever we go. From the late ’90s to at least 2016, psychologist Jean M. Twenge found that the average adult went from having sex sixty-two times a year to fifty-four. In her book, iGen, she says that people in their early twenties are far more likely to be abstinent than Gen Xers were at that same age. We’re seeing this phenomenon around the world, from Japan to Sweden, in various forms, including declining birth rates, and it’s affecting all age groups. Teens are starting their sex lives later,2 too, and married couples are having less sex than they were a decade ago. Plus, there are more single people than ever before, who are getting married later or never, and singles typically have less sex than people in relationships. As a chronically single individual, I can corroborate this—we simply don’t have the access! Coordinating sex takes work, especially when you don’t have a live-in partner, which, increasingly, people do not.3 The pandemic has accelerated this trend, with all the barriers to sex becoming steeper for pandemic-related reasons; lockdowns, mass death and illness, and widening inequality have not inspired most of us to feel sexual. According to the 2021 General Social Survey, 26 percent of Americans age eighteen and up did not have sex in the past year.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Fair enough—I worry about those things, too. But this book is about something else: what goes on in the lives of real people when the industrial economy goes south. It’s about reacting to bad circumstances in the worst way possible. It’s about a culture that increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it. The problems that I saw at the tile warehouse run far deeper than macroeconomic trends and policy. Too many young men immune to hard work. Good jobs impossible to fill for any length of time. And a young man with every reason to work—a wife-to-be to support and a baby on the way—carelessly tossing aside a good job with excellent health insurance. More troublingly, when it was all over, he thought something had been done to him . There is a lack of agency here—a feeling that you have little control over your life and a willingness to blame everyone but yourself. This is distinct from the larger economic landscape of modern America. It’s worth noting that although I focus on the group of people I know—working-class whites with ties to Appalachia—I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks. This is not a story about why white people have more to complain about than black people or any other group. That said, I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism. To many analysts, terms like “welfare queen” conjure unfair images of the lazy black mom living on the dole. Readers of this book will realize quickly that there is little relationship between that specter and my argument: I have known many welfare queens; some were my neighbors, and all were white. This book is not an academic study. In the past few years, William Julius Wilson, Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, and Raj Chetty have authored compelling, well-researched tracts demonstrating that upward mobility fell off in the 1970s and never really recovered, that some regions have fared much worse than others (shocker: Appalachia and the Rust Belt score poorly), and that many of the phenomena I saw in my own life exist across society. I may quibble with some of their conclusions, but they have demonstrated convincingly that America has a problem. Though I will use data, and though I do sometimes rely on academic studies to make a point, my primary aim is not to convince you of a documented problem. My primary aim is to tell a true story about what that problem feels like when you were born with it hanging around your neck. I cannot tell that story without appealing to the cast of characters who made up my life. So this book is not just a personal memoir but a family one—a history of opportunity and upward mobility viewed through the eyes of a group of hillbillies from Appalachia.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Undoubtedly he would have suffered greatly had his beloved daughter directly accused him of infidelity. Doubtless Lisa, a sensitive and loving daughter, understood this. As a result it was a dreaded secret, a ghost that stood between them that Lisa, during their many hours together, took great pains never to mention. Like many young people from divorced families, Lisa is preoccupied with the morality of her parents’ behavior. I was startled the first time a teenager walked into my office and demanded to know if her mother was a good woman. But as I have since learned, this is a common concern among children of divorce. Siblings spend years speculating over the probability that there were affairs during or after the marriage. As adults, children of divorce are influenced by their moral judgment of who was wronged by the divorce. No-fault divorce is a legal concept. It was never intended to mean no moral responsibility. Children never subscribe to the idea that no one is to blame for the divorce, although they are too protective of themselves and their parents to say so. As young children they blame themselves, and when they dare, they blame one or both parents. But as adolescents in search of moral values, suspicion of infidelity, other mistreatment, or exploitation can be a serious obstacle to developing a close or honest relationship with the parent they think behaved immorally. For thousands of children and parents the undiscussed past hangs heavily over both generations, keeping them emotionally distant from each other. These moral issues are also kept alive by what happens to each parent in the postdivorce years. The discrepancy between her mother’s loneliness and her father’s happiness broke Lisa’s heart. Thus, despite the lack of overt fighting in this family, Lisa has placed herself years later exactly in the middle. Ironically, this is what both parents sought to avoid by “not fighting.” The ways of a child’s heart are unpredictable and cannot be orchestrated from the outside. Children make moral judgments about their parents. They want and need virtuous parents. They are willing to forgive if asked, but when this fails to happen, they find the silence deafening. After finally breaking up with Jim, Lisa told me that she had several boyfriends but no relationships that lasted more than a year or two at the most. “Look at my life,” she said heatedly. “I have a great career and plenty of money. I’ve always had close women friends. I get along with all my parents. But for some reason I don’t understand, my relationships with men are still bad news. I’m getting pretty discouraged. I have nothing at all against marriage, but it’s not for me.”

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  Their expectations crowded on to me and became a reason in themselves. "Were the police involved the last time?" I said. He had the story all ready. "Yes, they brought him back to school in the first lesson." " actually done anything wrong?" "Drink. Drugs. Smoking. Theft. Trespassing. Swearing at a policeman." "You're supposed to be talking English," I said, to hide the shock this incident still caused me. I didn't want him to find the words to go on about it. The imagined scene was too tender and painful, too much my own dark possession. "I have the idea you didn't like Luc very much." He was silent, turned to gaze through his smeared side-window at the hidden farms. "He set fire to my hair," he said at last. "Oh my god." "Altidore and Dhondt. Dhondt was worse, but Altidore always did what he said. They set fire to my cape and gave me an asthma attack." It was a wonder he wasn't done for arson as well. "But that's terrible," I said; I was cross and disappointed and very slightly excited. "Yes, it is. I had to go to hospital as you know. Altidore had already had his warning before he ran away." "But you think it was . . . Dhondt who was really behind it." I was lost in this horrible vision of Luc as a coward and a bully. It must have been Dhondt with his dreadful gorged cudgel who had driven him on. "Turn left, Turn left!" shouted Marcel, as if I were stupid beyond redemption. We came to a nondescript town—it didn't even have a name: the sign lay in the verge beside a lorry's water-logged tyre-ruts. Marcel announced that he was hungry, and I wished he hadn't come with me: I saw my quest hindered by his needs and robbed of its proper comfortless urgency. We sat in an empty cafe and looked out over the empty square. Marcel ate a cheeseburger greedily—he laid claim to his food as though his fat had its independent demands; but it delayed and solaced him too. I half watched him, half kept an eye on the warmemorial and the passers-by in the precipitate dusk. Then the rain ceased—there was a brief brightening, hurried glimpses of light above the housetops, yellow cloud-grottoes from which winged faces might momentarily tumble above a holy victory or a martyrdom. The pavement dazzled. I smiled at Marcel and his clown's mouth of ketchup. The truth was I didn't know how to talk to him—I only had the stock resources of the language lesson, the useful topics, the factitious interest. I got out my cigarettes and then thought smoke might upset him. "I'm just going outside," I said. I strolled across the square, jittery but slow.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  One thing about Matt, he always gets what he wants. Though even he looked a bit shagged out. Then the kid kept kissing him, and Matt was groping him between the legs—white jeans, you know—I'm saying I didn't fancy him but come to think of it he was completely gorgeous. I just prefer dark men," he said, with a bat of the eyelids, and slid off to answer another customer. I was still perplexingly calm, though I pulled on the cigarette fiercely, and stared at the threadbare pommel of the bar-stool next to me, where he had sat so untouchably that evening. It was the arch ingenuousness of his remark "That guy Matt must be gay" that came to me first; and then Matt's obscene and encouraging gesture behind the boy's back. I finished my drink quickly but thoughtfully and I was almost at the door when it flung open with consummate timing to admit the busy world of Ronald Strong. I thought for once I would speak to him, my mind was clear and fuelled, I stopped with an ironic glance—but he looked me up and down in an expressionless second and swept past. I went on out with a dull, half-audible "Fuck you". As I walked across town I was shocked but composed, as one is at first after a death one knew was coming. The horrible fact had been with me, known to me all along—it was none the less plausible for having been imparted in a dream. Out towards Matt's, those wide neglected streets, the houses shaken by lorries, the pavements and windows silted and blinded with dust. I was watching my own purposefulness curiously, wondering when it would falter. Matt cared about nothing, and so was oddly invulnerable—he was the great facilitator, he would say he was "only getting the kid ready" for me, and perhaps that was true, perhaps he'd set him up to the whole thing. I pondered whether Matt could be involved in his disappearance—I couldn't see the point. I'd thought I was about to break with him for good, to limp away in the laughable shreds of my dignity, but maybe that was pointless too; he liked me but he wouldn't miss me, whereas I was snagged with a sentimental respect for the part he had played in my fiasco. I went on past the end of his road. I was dawdling alongside parked cars that the street-lamps filled with shadow, though sometimes there was a box or a child's shoe cross-lit all night in the back of a shooting-brake. How sombre and secure those welled interiors looked, with only a pane of glass to keep everything else out. Of course I'd always wanted a car, but never a car that I could afford—I scorned the prospect of days in the drive, daubing at the rust on a Maxi or an 1100.

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  I told them you were coming down but decided that just you and I should talk.” It didn’t surprise me that word had gotten around and that people were talking about Walter’s new attorney. I had talked to enough people in the community to know that people would be discussing my efforts on Walter’s behalf. My guess is that Judge Key had already characterized me as misguided and uncooperative simply because I didn’t get off the case, as he had directed. Chapman had a medium build, curly hair, and glasses that suggested he didn’t mind looking like someone who spent time reading and studying. I’d met prosecutors who dressed and presented like they would rather be out hunting ducks than running a law office, but Chapman was professional and courteous and approached me with a pleasant demeanor. I was intrigued that he would immediately give voice to the concerns of other people in law enforcement and was initially encouraged that he meant for us to have a candid conversation free of distractions and posturing. “Well, I appreciate that,” I said. “I’m very concerned about this McMillian case. I’ve read the record, and to be honest I have serious doubts about his guilt and the reliability of this conviction.” “Well, this was a big case, there’s no doubt about that. You do understand that I didn’t have anything to do with the prosecution, don’t you?” “Yes, I do.” “This was one of the most outrageous crimes in Monroe County history, and your client made a lot of people here extremely angry. People are still angry, Mr. Stevenson. There’s not enough bad that can happen to Walter McMillian for some of them.” This was a disappointing beginning—he seemed completely convinced of Walter’s guilt. But I pressed on. “Well, it was an outrageous, tragic crime, so anger is understandable,” I replied. “But it doesn’t accomplish anything to convict the wrong person. Whether Mr. McMillian has done anything wrong is what the trial should resolve. If the trial is unfair, or if witnesses have given false testimony, then we can’t really know whether he’s guilty or not.” “Well, you may be the only person right now who thinks the trial was unfair. Like I said, I wasn’t involved in the prosecution.” I was becoming frustrated, and Chapman probably saw me shift in my seat. I thought about the dozens of black people I’d met who had complained bitterly about Walter’s prosecution, and I was starting to see Chapman as either naive or willfully indifferent—or worse.