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...чтение «Преступления и наказания» изменило его, «Преступление и наказание» стало раскатом грома, что грянул с небес и расколол его на сотню кусков, а когда Фергусон вновь собрал себя воедино, он уже не сомневался в будущем, ибо если книга может быть вот этим, если вот это с человеческим сердцем, умом и самыми глубокими чувствами к миру может сделать роман, то писать романы – уж точно лучшее, чем может заниматься в жизни человек, ибо Достоевский научил его, что выдуманные истории могут зайти гораздо дальше простого наслаждения и развлечения, они могут вывернуть тебя наизнанку и сорвать тебе макушку, они могут тебя ошпарить и заморозить, раздеть тебя донага и вышвырнуть на рвущие ветра Вселенной, и с того самого дня, после того как Фергусон все свое детство пробарахтался, потерявшись во все более сгущавшихся миазмах оторопи, он наконец понял, куда направляется, – или хотя бы осознал, куда хочет двинуться, и не раз за все последовавшие годы не пожалел он о своем решении, даже в самые тяжкие времена, когда казалось, будто он вот-вот свалится с самого края земли.

...It was the last of those titles [Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky] that put a stop to Ferguson’s crude fantasies about becoming the next Clarence Darrow, for reading Crime and Punishment changed him, Crime and Punishment was the thunderbolt that crashed down from heaven and cracked him into a hundred pieces, and by the time he put himself together again, Ferguson was no longer in doubt about the future, for if this was what a book could be, if this was what a novel could do to a person’s heart and mind and innermost feelings about the world, then writing novels was surely the best thing a person could do in life, for Dostoyevsky had taught him that made-up stories could go far beyond mere fun and diversion, they could turn you inside out and take off the top of your head, they could scald you and freeze you and strip you naked and thrust you out into the blasting winds of the universe, and from that day forward, after flailing about for his entire boyhood, lost in an ever-thickening miasma of bewilderment, Ferguson finally knew where he was going, or at least knew where he wanted to go, and not once in all the years that followed did he ever go back on his decision, not even in the hardest years, when it looked as though he might fall off the edge of the earth. He was just fifteen years old, but already he had married himself to an idea, and for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, young Ferguson meant to pledge his troth to that idea until the end of his born days.

That was the real difference, Ferguson concluded. Not too little money or too much money, not what a person did or failed to do, not buying a larger house or a more expensive car, but ambition. That explained why Brownstein and Solomon managed to float through their lives in relative peace—because they weren’t tormented by the curse of ambition. By contrast, his father and Uncle Don were consumed by their ambitions, which paradoxically made their worlds smaller and less comfortable than those who weren’t afflicted by the curse, for ambition meant never being satisfied, to be always hungering for something more, constantly pushing forward because no success could ever be big enough to quell the need for new and even bigger successes, the compulsion to turn one store into two stores, then two stores into three stores, to be talking now about building a fourth store and even a fifth store, just as one book was merely a step on the way to another book, a lifetime of more and more books, which required the same concentration and singleness of purpose that a businessman needed in order to become rich. Alexander the Great conquers the world, and then what? He builds a rocket ship and invades Mars.