In Real Life Read Online Free PDF

from his other coat pocket and pops a pellet into his mouth. Since Paul gave up smoking almost eight months ago, at Sarah’s strong insistence, he’s been chewing gum – both nicotine and regular – like a maniac. He’s on about two packs a day.
    Is Jonathan Franzen on Twitter? Paul wonders, remembering hazily that in another interview he had possibly spoken out against it.
    As the bus creeps home, Paul imagines Franzen standing in a gigantic, air-conditioned kitchen, stretching his back a couple of times (it’s morning, he’s just wokenup), then cracking the top on a bottle of ice-cold Perrier and walking with it, barefoot on cool blue tiles, down a long white corridor, through a set of sliding glass doors and out onto a warm green lawn, somewhere in America, where the sky above him is bright and still and endless and he is able to lie down gently beneath it and concern himself only with matters relating to the creation of Art.
    â€˜Good day?’ Sarah asks, when Paul gets in.
    Paul stands in the doorway to the living room and thinks about his day: the hours spent preparing his creative writing mini lecture in the morning, almost all of which evaporated from his head the moment he actually needed to say it, his shitty overpriced chicken tikka sandwich for lunch, his class in the afternoon, then Alison’s ‘I read your book at the weekend, btw’, his complete inability to tell Rachel her story was dreadful, the wasted hours wandering around Blue 2 with his head swimming and buzzing, for some reason unable to just choose a table and sit at it, and then this: coming home to a small, damp living room and the smell of drying washing and not even feeling bad or angry or fucked off about it, just nothing , absolutely nothing, like he’s trapped in a Paul-sized envelope of fog, maybe, and thinks: no, I’ve not had a good day.
    â€˜Yeah, pretty good,’ he says. ‘You?’
    â€˜Not bad,’ Sarah says. ‘There’s some soup in the freezer if you like. I’m not eating anything this week.’
    So Paul walks into the kitchen, takes an ice creamtub from the freezer, opens it, and tips the contents – a speckled orange brick of frozen carrot soup – into a pot on the hob. As it begins to hiss, he turns on the little radio on the countertop.
    â€˜We live in a culture now,’ an angry-sounding person says, ‘where people simply don’t want to pay for and support the arts any more.’
    Paul nudges the sizzling brick of soup around the pan with a stained wooden spoon.
    â€˜I’m sorry but that’s rubbish,’ another angry-sounding person on the radio says. ‘People always shared things. They lent each other books, records, CDs. Digital piracy is just a new form of borrowing. We have more access to culture than ever. And I think people are still willing to pay for that culture, if it’s something they really—’
    Paul turns off the radio.
    According to his last royalty statement, only four hundred and twenty-one people were willing to pay for his novel in paperback.
    He thinks again about his new thing, whatever it is, about how impossible it seems to just decide on a single idea and see it through to a satisfying, meaningful conclusion. He doesn’t seem to have a brain that can think in a straight line any more. In its current incarnation, Paul’s new ‘novel’ is actually just a straight retelling of his first serious relationship at university. Oh dear, he thinks. Who the fuck would want to read that?
    He feels sick suddenly. A spinning, dizzying sickness, like the one he gets whenever he tries to smoke weed. He turns off the hob and tips the mostly-still-frozenbrick of soup back into its ice cream tub and returns it to the freezer. He takes a few deep breaths – in, hold , maybe I should start a Twitter account, release – and waits for the panic to subside. Then he goes and stands in