He could purchase the appearance of a dutiful family, and so he never had to build the real thing.

Every genuine human need he had, he met with a convincing counterfeit, and the counterfeits were good enough to fool everyone except the two people who mattered: his mother, who saw straight through them, and eventually himself, sitting alone on a terrace, discovering far too late that a life assembled entirely out of purchases is a life with no one in it.

He had the best of everything.

He simply had no one to hand it to.