Michel Houellebecq, The Map and The Territory: A Novel, translated from the French by Gavin Bowd (New York: Knopf, 2012) ("Aging, and especially apparent aging, is in no respect a continuous process. Life could rather be characterized as a succession of levels, separated by sudden falls. When we meet someone we have lost sight of for some years, we sometimes have the impression that he has aged; sometimes, on the other hand, that he hasn't changed at all. This is a complete fallacy, since decay is still secretly making its way inside the organism before bursting out into broad daylight." Id. at 149-150. "Quite ironically, he had interrupted his medical studies between the first and second years because he could no longer bear the dissections, nor even the sight of corpses. Law had immediately interested him a lot, and like almost all his classmates he considered a career as a lawyer, but his parents' divorce was to make him change his mind. It was a divorce between old people, he was already twenty-three, and their only child. In young people's divorces, the presence of children, whose care they have to share, and who are loved more or less despite everything, often lessens the violence of the confrontation; but in old people's divorces, when there remains only financial and inheritance interests, the savagery of the fight no longer knows any limits. He had then realized exactly what a lawyer is, he had got a full sense of that mixture of deceit and laziness which sums up the professional behavior of a lawyer, and most particularly of a lawyer specializing in divorce. The procedure had lasted more than two years, two years of endless struggle at the end of which his parents felt for each other a hatred so violent that they were never to see or even phone each other for the rest of their lives, and all that just to reach a divorce agreement of depressing banality, that any cretin could have written in a quarter of an hour after reading Divorce for Dummies." Id. at 185-186.).
Alan Lightman, Mr. g: A Novel About the Creation (New York: Pantheon Books, 2012) ("As I remember, I had just woken up from a nap when I decided to create the universe." Id. at 3.).
Barry Unsworth, The Quality of Mercy: A Novel (New York: Nan A Talese/ Doubleday, 2011).
