Since We Fell

What was a strong marriage? What was a good marriage? She knew terrible people who had wonderful marriages, glued together somehow in their terribleness. And she knew fine, fine people who???d stood before God and all their friends to profess their undying love to each other only to toss that love on a slag heap a few years later. In the end, no matter how good they were???or thought they were???usually all that remained of the love they???d so publicly professed was vitriol, regret, and a kind of awed dismay at how dark the roads they???d ventured down became by the end.

Dennis Lehane is probably one of my favorite authors. If not, he is definitely Top 3. I like the way he turns a phrase, his ability to deliver a plot twist, his general world view, his love of the average man/woman.

It had happened before she was born, this wholesale discarding of American industry, this switch from a culture that made things of value to a culture that consumed things of dubious merit. She???d grown up in the absence, in other people???s memory of a dream so fragile it had probably been doomed from the moment of conception. If there had ever been a social contract between the country and its citizens, it was long gone now, save the Hobbesian agreement that had been in play since our ancestors had first stumbled from caves in search of food: Once I get mine, you???re on your own.