The Use of Regret

The sudden death of Perry Gregson's chronically ill little sister impels him to return from a semester abroad in Amsterdam to Southern California, his newfound emotional growth stunted by guilt and the parental modeling from which he had just begun to break free. Years later at the University of Washington he reconnects with his Amsterdam girlfriend, though his failure to have developed a capacity for true intimacy dooms their love. Eventually obtaining a Ph. D. in philosophy and a history professorship, he enters into a relationship with a student, wherein the insidious patterns of Perry's life continue to play out, even as her adoration of Pink Floyd and ways of coping with his existential doubt offer him escape from his cell of self. The intricately interconnected 100+ sections of 'The Use of Regret' are a (re)collection of Perry's life formed by Perry himself as truths and fictions and fantasies in (to quote a seminal mind theorist within the novel) "an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of organized past reactions or experience." With a substratum of meditations on the paradoxical unions of singularity and plurality, separateness and togetherness, language and the non-linguistic, 'The Use of Regret' is Perry's attempt to find within a life already lived, a life in which (as The Cure sang during his childhood) "no one ever knows or loves another," a means to connect with the already-lost, "to atone, to make amends, pay tribute to your failures, you can't really make restitution but you do your best, put in the effort anyway, willingly, that's how you want to be now, no regrets, no regrets."