Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday. Debbie Graber

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СКАЧАТЬ “scoundrel,” even in casual conversation. One example would be when you call your local bank teller Robert “a scoundrel” because he questions why you are trying to cash a check with your mother’s name on it.

      Here’s a book club question:

      “Is it fair to be banned from a bank just for taking action because one’s mother seems to no longer understand the concept of a weekly allowance?”

      So the kid’s parents, Fred and Delores, are pretending to be rich so that they can send the kid—his name is Franklyn, or no, better yet, Ralphie—to Northanger Abbey. They mortgage their middle-class home in suburban Chicago so that they can come up with the money for Ralphie to attend Northanger Abbey, which is located in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Fred works as an actuary for State Farm Insurance, which isn’t a bad job, mind you, but it’s a boring job, a job Fred got roped into years earlier when he knocked up Delores while they were both freshmen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had to get married. Fred is one of those guys who is genuinely smart, and if he had had better luck and was generally savvier about birth control, he might have invented the Internet or cell phones. But alas, no, he and Delores had to get married, courtesy of Delores getting pregnant and her churchy parents. This will all come out in the middle of the novel, which will be devoted to Fred and Delores’s relationship. There will be some killer sex scenes, so you might want to warn some of your churchier book club members before you all dive in.

      You might also want to warn some of the more softhearted book club members that Delores’s story is a very sad one. If you’ve ever cried watching a commercial for Cymbalta, then you will probably bawl your eyes out reading my novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say Delores meets a very unhappy end due to an extreme case of psychosomatic Alzheimer’s disease. If that doesn’t make you want to turn to page one right now, I’m not sure what would.

      There are going to be sections of the book written from Fred’s point of view and sections written from Delores’s point of view and sections written from Ralphie’s point of view. The Delores sections are going to be very florid, because Delores is a very florid personality. She is pretending to be a rich housewife, but in reality she is an abstract painter consumed with the idea of painting the outside of the family house so that it blends in with its surroundings, like camouflage. If Delores had her way, you would drive down the street and not even notice the house because it would blend into the neighboring forest preserve. If you didn’t know better, you might think that Delores was a little bit nutty, but you’d be hard-pressed to say that she suffered from a degenerative brain disease, even though that’s what she wants you to think so she can get attention. Anyway, you’ll learn more about Delores’s secret past and tragic present later on because they are integral to the plot. You’ll also learn that Delores used to make a killer vegetarian lasagna back in the day before she conveniently “forgot” how to make dinner.

      Another note about Northanger Abbey, the fictional school: it’s not an abbey at all, but when the school was being built, the rich jerks who commissioned it decided to call it Northanger Abbey, because one of them was supposed to read Northanger Abbey in his high school English class and never did, but he liked the name because it sounded all fancified and snobby. Not to give too much away, but it’s going to turn out that Fred’s great-uncle Jason was that rich jerk. It may not seem like a big deal right now, but it’s all going to fit together like pieces in a puzzle.

      Here’s a possible book club question:

      “If you were one of the three people on record who read Northanger Abbey, what did you like about it? Or are you just a poseur and a snob like Fred’s great-uncle Jason?”

      Metaphors are going to be very important in this novel. Keep your eyes open for a plethora of metaphors to hit you smack on the ass!

      Anyway, back to the action: Delores, Fred, and Ralphie drive up to Lake Geneva in their Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon. Ralphie is stuck sitting in the wayback because all of his stuff—including the tennis racket, golf clubs, and ascot collection that Delores bought because she thought Ralphie would need them to impress the cultivated kids at Northanger Abbey—is taking up most of the backseat. Cars are passing the family on the highway and kids keep flipping Ralphie the bird because he is a gawky teenager sitting in the wayback, which looks, if I might say, incongruous.

      There are going to be many incongruous parts of this novel. You are also going to find lots and lots of dichotomies: there will be a dichotomy between rich and poor, between majorly drugged out and sober, between defenseless sons and withholding parents, between the idyllic appearance of upper-middle-class success and the chaotic reality of a dysfunctional family with loads of debt and lots of shameful secrets. If dichotomies are your bag, then you are going to love this novel.

      In the middle of the drive, Fred pulls off the interstate at a rest stop. He tells Delores and Ralphie that he needs to use the men’s room, but he really doesn’t need to use the men’s room. Fred needs to think, alone, away from his family. Dads tend to spend a lot of time in the bathroom when they should be out taking responsibility for their sons’ stunted emotional growth. Instead, he’s in the stall, contemplating how his life got so messed up. See, Fred didn’t tell Delores this because she would kill him, but he just got laid off from his job at State Farm. It’s the 1980s, and everyone is into conspicuous consumption and shoulder pads, including Delores, who, because she had a kid so early on in life, feels like she deserves all kinds of payback from Fred, even though getting pregnant was both of their faults. Delores usually told Fred when to pull out during intercourse, but that one time she got carried away and forgot to give him the signal.

      Delores has expensive tastes, which is incongruous because an abstract painter would seem to be an earthy type of person and someone who wouldn’t be interested in material things, but you haven’t met Delores! She’s an enigma. Delores likes fur coats—big, expensive furs from Saks Fifth Avenue. It’s the 1980s, and fur coats are all the rage. PETA hasn’t made many inroads into the celebrity culture yet, so fur is still fine by most people’s standards. Fred bought Delores a beaver coat one year, which cost him a bundle, but Delores said that she preferred mink and expects one this Christmas, which is only a few short months away.

      Fred wipes away the sweat from his brow in the men’s room. He’s sweating because it’s the end of August in northern Illinois and humid as hell, but also because he’s nervous about coming clean about his financial situation. The other big thing we learn in this scene is that Fred lied to the Northanger Abbey bursar in a telephone conversation just that morning, saying that he is bringing the check for Ralphie’s first semester. In reality, Fred doesn’t have the money, even with the Snooty-Richerson suburban home in hock.

      Here’s another question for the book clubs:

      “What is the etymology of the word ‘bursar’?”

      We learn in a later chapter that it was Fred’s fault that he got laid off because he was having an affair with his secretary, Ms. Donna Fulsome, who wasn’t disgusted by giving blow jobs the way Delores was. Apparently someone in the typing pool overheard Ms. Donna Fulsome talking dirty to Fred and blew the whistle on their affair. State Farm didn’t need a sexual harassment lawsuit, so it let Fred go, even though he was great at his job and super smart to boot.

      This is compelling! What is Fred going to do?

      My next novel is going to be about what could have happened to Fred if he hadn’t screwed up and gotten Delores preggers. I think it might be about Fred creating a superweapon and battling aliens who threaten to dominate Earth. Or it could be a novel about Ralphie accidentally discovering Fred’s secret second family (the Fulsome-Snooty-Richersons) and the recurrent Cymbalta abuse that discovery engenders.

      Just as we are СКАЧАТЬ