the last book I ever read (The Marriage Plot, excerpt four of five)

from Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot:

Zipperstein was in a lively mood. He'd just returned from a conference in New York, dressed differently than usual. Listening to him talk about the paper he'd given at the New School, Madeleine suddenly understood. Semiotics was the form Zipperstein's midlife crisis had taken. Becoming a semiotician allowed Zipperstein to wear a leather jacket, to fly off to Douglas Sirk retrospectives in Vancouver, and to get all the sexy waifs in his class. Instead of leaving his wife, Zipperstein had left the English department. Instead of buying a sports car, he'd bought deconstruction.