Trying to figure out how to write dialogue. Thought I’d go back and read something by a writer I think is good. And I keep getting lost in the narration. Had to read this, like, 3 or 4 times.

«Amélie joined us one afternoon, having completed most of her work securing locations. The woman who out-thinned and out-tanned the rest was there, as she had been every day, lying on her towel when we arrived, still there when we left, her skin the dark oily sheen of roasted hazelnuts.

“Like a nun marries God,” Vito said, “she has married Apollo.”

“Is that the name of her plastic surgeon?” Amélie asked.

I laughed, my own implants barely contained in the triangles of my white bikini. Mine were expensively done. But it could be on account of something more subtle—an assumption Amélie made about me, and about herself, that we were both too clever and naturally pretty to stoop to paying for shortcuts—that she would not suspect my breasts aren’t real.

“She reminds me of someone,” Amélie said. “A woman I once knew who was addicted to tanning, and always on some starvation diet. She was very tortured. She died from drinking too much water.”

“What do you suppose got into her?” Vito asked.

“I think she mistook water for selfhood. Like those people who get into yoga and think you can just breathe and it will solve all your problems. Life is more than water and air.”

“There’s beer,” I said, as I opened a fresh one a waiter had just delivered.

“If your tortured friend had chosen beer,” Vito said, holding his up to mine, “she might still be alive.”»

Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner https://bookshop.org/p/books/creation-lake-rachel-kushner/21003229?ean=9781982116545&next=t