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[H]e had taken the passion he felt for Susan and folded it in half, so he no longer had a drowning, helpless feeling when he glimpsed her beside him in bed: her ropy arms and soft, generous ass. Then he’d folded it in half again...Then in half again, so that feeling desire entailed no immediate need to act. Then in half again, so he hardly felt it. His desire was so small in the end that Ted could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both.
This quotation comes from Ted’s chapter and describes the effects his emotional impotence has had on his marriage and his life as a whole. Ted is aware that he has systematically diminished his passion for Susan, his wife, of his own accord. He’s not sure when it started, but after some awkward sexual rejections he took revenge on her by metaphorically “folding [his desire] in half” repeatedly until it became negligible. This act of reduction was an attempt to get the power back into his own hands. He wanted to transform his once overwhelming desire into something small and manageable, allowing him to feel safe and in control. The description of his desire as a "perilous apparatus" suggests that it once had the possibility to endanger his life. By suppressing his feelings, Ted avoids the vulnerability and intensity associated with desire for his wife, which he perceives as threatening. Ted's sense of accomplishment in reducing his desire is fleeting, however, as by the time this passage appears he’s feeling immensely frustrated and hateful toward his wife and family. In attempting to seize power by detaching himself from Susan, he’s actually only lost both his ability to feel desire and his affection for his partner.
“I'm always happy," Sasha said. "Sometimes I just forget.”
Sasha says this quip to Alex at the dinner table during her boring date, when she slips back into her chair having stolen a wallet in the bathroom. She’s wearing what she calls her “yes/no” smile when she returns to her seat, and appears to be in a far better mood than she was when she got up. This quote encapsulates a key element of Sasha’s character: she performs her emotions more than she feels them. Sasha’s assertion that she is "always happy" followed by the odd admission that she “sometimes forgets” suggests the disconnection she experiences from everyone around her. Sasha is pointedly not “always happy,” as she’s in fact always doing things to try and stave off her constant sense of misery and disconnection. What she means here is that she always wants to “look” happy, and that in noticing she seems happier, Alex is pointing out that she seemed insufficiently “happy” before. It’s unclear if Sasha feels things to the extent that other characters do, but she tries very hard to seem as though she does.
“Alex closed his eyes and listened: a storefront gate sliding down. A dog barking hoarsely. The lowing of trucks over bridges. The velvety night in his ears. And the hum, always that hum, which maybe wasn’t an echo after all, but the sound of time passing.
th blu nyt
th stRs u cant c
th hum tht nevr gOs awy”
This passage (which is really the same passage in two different forms) comes from the last paragraphs of the novel's final chapter, “Pure Language.” In it, Alex and Bennie are walking through quiet, darkened New York City to see if they can find where Sasha used to live. Throughout the chapter, Alex and Lulu have been exchanging text messages in the abbreviated text-message-speak that the second half of the passage is written in. The first part of the passage describes Alex’s surroundings as the reader might understand them; the “hum” of the city around him, its colors and textures. The second half rewrites those impressions in the language people are using to communicate in the New York of Alex’s current life, where emphasis is indicated by capitalization and everything is phonetic (for example, the “R” in “stRs” is both where the stress goes in the word and the sound of the letter’s name). Just as language is distilled into smaller, tighter clumps of meaning as it’s converted into text-speak, the way Alex thinks about his surroundings is also stripped down and tightened.
