I think I'm going to like this book. I started it last night and 100 pages longer was mildly annoyed I couldn't stay awake for another 100.
"At this late date, would it be fair to say that people, after a fashion have come to doubt the building blocks of life itself? That we suspect our food? That we fear our children? And that as a result we live individually today atop pyramids of defensive irony, squinched into the tiny pointed place on the top and looking balefully out at the landscape below? In such a time of dark views and darker diagnoses, I'll forestall all second-guessing and declare it up front: I loved him. I'd grown up across the street from him. In my own way, I worshipped him. With the slavish adoration of a child, I'd tried briefly to be him. Although we were both boys the same age and although we chaffed and teased each other constantly, below it ran an awareness on my part that there was always something quicksilvery, musical, more sharply drawn about him that set him apart from the rest of us."