Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday. Debbie Graber

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СКАЧАТЬ that Ralphie is attending Northanger Abbey, but it’s unclear how that was possible, given that Fred didn’t have the money to pay for it. But that’s not our focus here, because Ralphie is in the midst of an existential crisis. This will be made obvious to the reader by a hundred-pound weight gain since we last saw him at the rest stop on the way to start his freshman year and also his more-than-recreational drug use. He’s getting Ds in his gen ed classes and is considering transferring to Carl Sandburg High School in his hometown of Orland Park, Illinois.

      Here’s another question for the book clubs:

      “How might Ralphie’s life have been different (weight-wise, drug-use-wise, emotional-health-wise) if his parents weren’t shallow yuppies with addictive personalities?”

      At this point, there will be a lengthy digression discussing the pros and cons of transferring to Carl Sandburg High School. Here are a few examples:

       PRO: Carl Sandburg High School has tons of extracurricular activities, such as sports and student-run organizations like the Key Club. Key Club members raise money for the school through fund-raisers, like car washes and candy-bar sales. Being involved in the Key Club prepares one to be a good citizen and even has the potential to help a person get into the college of his choice.

       CON: Carl Sandburg High School is full of douches.

      In the rest of the chapter, through Ralphie’s rambling first-person narrative stream of consciousness, the reader will deduce that Fred and Delores may have both been killed in a car crash. It’s hard to pinpoint because Ralphie is all jacked up on quaaludes. We can also infer that Ralphie is the resident adviser of the Quiet Residential Plaza, also known as the “nerd dorm,” because in the middle of his delusional rant—which, by the way, is occurring at three o’clock in the morning—one of the nerd freshmen on his floor, Janet Goodwin, comes running into his room. Janet says there’s an emergency and that Ralphie better get to her room, stat! Running on pure adrenaline, Ralphie picks his fat ass up off the floor, toppling the three-foot bong he bought while on spring break at South Padre Island earlier that year, and leaps into action.

      Janet Goodwin will later figure in a romantic subplot with Fred and Ms. Donna Fulsome, but I don’t want to give away too much just yet.

      This is exciting! How about the complication of Ralphie being whacked out on drugs and forced to act in an emergency? Here there will be a long description of how the Count Chocula T-shirt Ralphie is wearing stretches tightly over his large gut, and we can practically hear the swish swish his dung-colored corduroys are making as his thighs rub together as he races down the dark but tastefully appointed hallway.

      Delores should have known that corduroy is one of the least forgiving materials you can find on planet Earth. If Delores hadn’t been such a self-involved narcissist, then she would have been invited to play bridge with the other mothers in the neighborhood and thus would have known that bullies like Matt Kelly, who lived next door, specifically targeted boys dressed in Wrangler cords.

      Ralphie gets to Janet’s room all out of breath and finds Fred sitting on her bed, crying. Whoa! No one expected Fred to show up at this point! We thought Fred might be dead, but given that he is sitting on Janet’s bed, we can see for ourselves that he is alive, and apparently Ralphie’s earlier rant was just a hallucination or a delusion. Or was it?

      It turns out Fred is having an existential crisis of his own back home in Orland Park and thought he would drive up to Northanger Abbey to visit Ralphie on a whim.

      “It’s the middle of the night, Dad,” Ralphie says.

      “Is it?” Fred says.

      “Yes. The middle of the night,” Ralphie says.

      “Night. Ah, night,” says Fred, “the darkest part of the day.”

      The best dialogue is always pulled from real life, right? You can’t make this shit up.

      As you might notice, this is a very obscure conversation in which Fred and Ralphie talk about nothing, but there is a ton of subtext regarding Fred and Delores’s crumbling marriage and Ralphie’s self-destructive tendencies learned at the knee of his father. How else do you think boys learn about quaaludes? From their cheating, quaalude-popping dads of course!

      Here’s another book club question:

      “Ever heard of the ‘iceberg’? You’re in a book club—you must have read Hemingway. If not, why not?”

      Here’s another one:

      “Does hearing the song ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ make you wish that Lionel Richie was your father instead of your real father?”

      This inscrutable dialogue will be very important because Fred will tell Ralphie, in a not-very-easy-to-comprehend manner, that he is leaving Orland Park because Delores divorced him in a fit of pique. This too will all be explained in the series of florid chapters written from Delores’s florid point of view. The reader will find out that Delores took the bus to New York City to try her luck in the New York art scene, Andy Warhol and that shit, and over the course of the novel, she becomes a huge success in the folk art community. Too bad she now claims that she can no longer remember her fame and fortune, or, for that matter, her son’s name.

      This novel has something for everyone. It’s got black humor, dichotomies, metaphors, drug usage, suburban angst, semiautomatic weapons, corduroys, an iceberg, and lots, lots more.

      At this point, there is going to be a “meta” chapter about how the novel Northanger Abbey is a satire of gothic novels from the eighteenth century, like The Mysteries of Udolpho. This part of the book is going to pander to literary types who join book clubs to show off how smart they are because they were comp lit majors at Brown like forty years ago.

      In an ironic twist, instead of reading and discussing the book during the book club get-togethers, one of these literary types, let’s call her Mrs. Schnell, spends that time in the kitchen, attempting to seduce her best friend Delores’s son, Ralphie. Mrs. Schnell, while old as dirt, wears an intoxicating perfume that makes saying no to her sexual advances extremely difficult.

      This chapter will have surprising plot machinations, like when a confused Delores breezes into the kitchen and, thinking she’s in the bathroom, pulls down her pants and starts peeing on the linoleum, all while Ralphie is being fellated in front of the fridge. Again, churchy book club types beware!

      According to Mrs. Schnell, “meta” novels are hot right now and one has to try to stay current on literary trends, even if one has never heard of The Mysteries of Udolpho, let alone knows what a gothic novel is. Unless you’re a sixty-something retired high school English teacher who still gives a great blow job, you would probably have no idea. I sure didn’t! And I still don’t.

      Don’t let The Mysteries of Udolpho keep you from reading my book!

      Here’s another book club question:

      “If Delores claims that she pissed on the kitchen floor because she thought she was on the toilet, does she suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s or is she just a crazy bitch?”

      Another chapter is going to address how there is medical evidence that eating certain types of foods can help people with “brain diseases” remember important facts about their lives that they claim to have forgotten. I find that eating sardines makes my brain work better. Sure, the checkout people think I’m a little bit nutty for buying sardines ten tins at a time, but I have found that sardines, СКАЧАТЬ