I am highly amused:
She bought a copy of the New York Review of Books and looked through the Personals. Brains, brains, everywhere... Among dozens of these condensed portraits Puttermesser could not recognize herself. ...As for the examined life - enough! She was sick of examining her own and hardly needed to hear an Eskimo expert examine his. It was all fiction anyhow - these columns and columns of ads. 'Vibrant, appealing, attractive, likable' - that meant divorced. Leftovers and mistakes. 'Unconventional, earthy, nurturing, fascinated by Zen, Sufism, music of the spheres' - a crackpot still in sandals. ...Every self-indulgent type in the book turned up in these ads.
Literature was no better. The great novels, rife with weirdos leading to misalliance - Isabel Archer entangled with the sinister Gilbert Osmond, Gwendolyn Harleth's troubles with Grandcourt. Anna Karenina. Worst of all, poor Dorothea Brooke and the deadly Mr. Casaubon. All these bad characters - the men in the case absolutely, and many of the women - were brainy. Think of Shaw, a logician, refusing to allow Professor Higgins to wed Eliza, in open dread of foreordained rotten consequences. And Jane Austen: with one hand she marries Elizabeth to Darcy, clever with clever, and with the other she goes and saddles Mr. Bennet with a silly wife. People get stuck. Brains are no guarantee. Hope is slim.
[the puttermesser papers - cynthia ozick]
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