Back with Rob, Dick, and Barry. This time I was struck by the parallels between Rob's life - recently adrift at the age of 35 - and my own. While these three always felt like contemporaries, only as I have gotten older can I begin to understand the creeping germs of hopelessness that come with age. It helps make sense of Barry's motivation to join his 'hip young gunslingers,' and Dick's monomania for new music. Rob looks around his apartment, his store, and his emotional life and begins to recognize a dustiness; a clutter to things that have been kept too long. Laura recognizes his inability to put one foot in front of the other and how the comfort of routine simultaneously keeps him grounded and unhappy. Rob's revisiting of his top-five, desert-island, most memorable split ups (in chronological order) are a rare case where his dwelling on the past actually catalyzes his freedom from it. Throughout the book Laura is really the only catalytic force. She moves Rob to confront himself and in doing so the possibility that they might have a life together. Laura is movement and action; Rob, Dick, and Barry are comfort and routine. Our lives need both.
