(the) American (Novel of)

Coldness and Civility
Michael and Ryan’s breakup so I won’t add any of the new details
here—you’re sure to be able to invent better ones on your own in any
case. I don’t know if you’ve talked to Ryan about Corey. Trust me that
there is not one thing I could tell you that you couldn’t anticipate. Very
predictable.) I am demanding, indeed, your help at achieving a very
particular and simple aim. So I think we have plotting to do. Ryan was
quite mean to Michael. Remember he left him right after the contract
fell through and didn’t wait even two weeks before moving dishy little
Corey in. I think that we should find someone Corey cannot resist and
send him his way. It is just the right shade of mean and it will not be
our fault if Corey falls for our lure. So we will be quite blameless, we
can avenge our Michael, and we can exact covert revenge on Ryan. So
are you in? I’ll call you with details. Will you help me?
Did you believe that I was serious, Marianne? Had you chosen
the man? If you believed that I wanted to do something like that you
are more lost in a fantasy world than is healthy, darling. I think you are
oversteeped in your novels of manners. You must read for more than
plot and you must remember the humor with which they were, if not
written, read. (Although I am perhaps not being totally fair. I am
thinking of course of Jane Austen’s total disdain for Laclos and Richardson
coupled with her inability to not love them and reference them. 9 But
from that position, she recognized that they were indeed novels, dear,
pieces of fiction about the end of civilization as some particular groups
knew it. I mean look, there she is bridging the vulgarity of the eighteenth
century and the fussiness of the nineteenth reading these mannered
novels descriptive of other cusps. You cite the Idiot at me and
that too, it strikes me, is a novel of manners, although I realize I am in
the minority position writing that down, committing it to print. It
seems to me that you assimilate the characters into your consciousness
as some sort of exemplars of model behavior, but darling, surely you
notice the moral bankruptcy of these men and women.)
Second parenthetical. It is interesting to me that the novels you
choose to reference are so sanctioned. You never refer to anything that
is not a classic. For the points you made throughout your last much too
long last letter—Marianne, sweetness and light, you must write shorter
letters to me, I am a very busy woman—Genet’s Funeral Rites would
have been much more appropriate. I know that before I begin you will
be thinking that there is no certain love there. Jean is dead. How can
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