Review published in 3:AM Magazine: http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/century-of-dislocation/ ( )

An typical novel by an extraordinary writer who is both unbelievably humorous and heartbreaking depending on the sentence, or paragraph, or page. I find her prose hard to stay engaged with in the long run — it's not straightforward storytelling and isn't meant to be — but I always find many things to treasure about them. Oddly, one excerpt contains some of the funniest sports commentary I've read in a very long time.

Both books I have by Adler are quite short but have taken me forever to read. ( )

But the nearest analogue, as a business, to the law lies not in business but in the military, as it prepares for war.

There was all the difference in the world between the beneficiaries of what they were on the boards of and anyone who actually depended on them.

How many thought that she was going to be raped? Seriously, though. The narrator goes off by herself to a foreign country only to drive around in the middle of the night and interact with a lot of shifty men, and not once during the whole of it does she get raped. Her thought processes and justified paranoia focus on possible abuses of her person, true, but they are for the most part judicially and/or economically based. Maybe her being a woman was not supposed to play as big a role in the narrative as that, but considering how this meditation on law and free will and the eternal bet has been served up as a "love story", why not go the whole nine yards objectification-wise?

So there is this pressure now, on every sentence, not just to say what it has to say, but to justify its claim upon our time.

I was listening to a group in one of my classes riddle on the ethicality of states taxing the lottery when one person attempted to indict the lottery entirely by talking about the encouragement of gambling addiction. A fair point, but if you want that argument to float here in the US, talk to me when you've taken on credit scores and the stock market. Those mainstays of livelihood are just two stigmas birthed by that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality that today has evolved into that right person at the right place at the right time for that right interview for that right career for that right income for the right amount sufficient for not living on the streets. Today's politicians have the legal right to lie and none whatsoever for the guarantee to water, which shows our priorities when it comes to crime and punishment.

But we do not normally mistake progressions of weakness, the loss of the simple capacity to escape, for the onset of love.

It does not surprise me Adler has a degree in law, but it does surprise me that she writes so candidly about what that really means. See, it's all a matter of money, but no one's allowed to talk about it or allude to it or give those who enforce it anything less than a free pass to abuse these rights they so assiduously protect. What's left is a don't-poke-the-sleeping-bear awareness, or if you do make damn sure you have all the documents, all the legal fees, all the personal connections, and all the time in the world. Justice isn't a science, but considering the vaster quantity of lives and, much more value in the US these days, financial welfare at stake, you'd think it'd depend less on cash-fueled theatrics and jargon-dismembered story time.

And yet if you have acquired a profound aversion for just such a place simply because of an obstacle that once was there, or an incapacity to discern that the obstacle no longer exists, or an indifference as to whether it exists or not, or if the habit of pointless jumping, or detour, or even turning back dejected has become for you the path itself, or if you have a superstitious need to treat the spot as though the obstacle remained, or even a belief that the discovery that the obstacle is gone is in itself a punishable offence, if any of these things is true for you, then you are lost.

It's [The Trial], except with more emphasis on be kind/helpful/amazing/resourceful to everyone, you never know who'll clear your way to Heaven but you're damn certain who's biblically equipped to reduce your life to a zero-sum of a single fuck up and send you straight to Hell.

The courts may only consider concrete, instant cases that actually, concretely come before them—and even those cases can be brought only by those who have “standing” to bring them, in other words, by the actual participants, with the most vital and demonstrable interest in the case.

Ideally, in other words, in its historical dimension, such a problem appears to have existed forever; and in its contemporary manifestation to be inextricable from every other problem in the world. Ideally, too, there should have grown up, over time, a number of industries and professions nominally dedicated to the eradication of the problem but actually committed, consciously or unconsciously, but almost inevitably out of self-interest, to the perpetuation of the problem, and any misconceptions of it, for all time.

"...negotiating with Jake for time, for attention, and for love" my ass.

Or not worry about it, after all, everybody has them. And cars are dangerous, germs are dangerous, writing is dangerous, and reviewing is dangerous, and editing is dangerous, and some of those doctors were. So I’m not a coward or a hypochondriac so much, with respect anyway to risks of certain others. I’ve taken on a bully or two, in my professional capacity, and on occasions of another sort risked my physical self. But this buying of a gun, this simple, in some ways quotidian purchase, is the most extreme, the worst, most extremest, I can’t find the word for it, thing I’ve ever done.

In those days, she said, we still believed in publicity, that it matters. She laughed again. I said, What do you mean? What do you now think matters? And she said, Violence.

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