Book: The Believers
Quotes of Book: The Believers
There were some people with a gift for conviction - a talent for cutting a line through the jumbled phenomena of world affairs and saying, 'I'm in: this is my position.' Audrey had it. All of the Litvinoffs had it, to some extent. It was a genetic thing, perhaps. Jean had seen a film once, about a troop of French soldiers in World I who were charged with getting a cannon to their fellow soldiers, trapped under enemy fire. For weeks, they carted the cannon around the countryside as their number slowly dwindled. Some were killed. Some deserted. Some collapsed from exhausted. But no matter how desperate the situation became - even when it emerged that the cannon itself was probably defective - the captain of the group kept going forward, refusing to give up. Audrey's attachment to her dogma was a bit like that, Jean thought. For decades now, she had been dragging about the same unwieldy burden of a priori convictions, believing herself honor-bound to protect them against destruction at all costs. No new intelligence, no rational argument, could cause her to falter in her mission. book-quoteHow had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then, encouraged it and celebrated it. She had carved out a minor distinction for herself as a 'character': the cute little English girl with the chutzpah and the longshoreman's mouth. 'Get Audrey in here,' they used to cry whenever someone was being an ass. 'Audrey'll take him down a peg or two.'But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party at that could be switched on and off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back - that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant - it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted. book-quote