Here are some choice quotes from English critic/novelist  Adam Mars-Jones'   new novel Pilcrow which James Woods reviews for the LRB.

‘The privilege of my situation, in which boredom lay so close to over-excitement that there was hardly any space between, was that snot qualified as a toy.’

'Hugs, for instance, ‘were emergency measures, not for every day. I wasn’t used to them. I’d hardly experienced them . . . Hugs might just as well have been kept in the medicine cupboard, so as not to lose their effectiveness by over-use.’

'Being suburban was much worse than being working-class, because suburban people had their roots in the working classes, and were denying their own people just as St Peter did to Jesus.’