Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [100]
And yet when I closed the book I could not help feeling that in some way much of it was irremediably false. The impressive use of period details, never misplaced or anachronistic, nonetheless felt dutiful and deliberate—there were dozens of references to hat fashions and big bands and great chrome automobiles—and had clearly been derived secondhand from old movies. Apart from certain disturbing recollections of childhood and early adolescence, and the strange episode with the powdered and ascoted old star, most of The Love Parade seemed to have been crafted out of echoes and fragments and secondhand threads. The people spoke, amused themselves, and reacted to one another like people in movies. The things that happened were kinds of things that happened in movies. Other than along certain emotional tangents there was little in the book that felt as if it had actually been lived. It was a fiction produced by someone who knew only fictions, The Tempest as written by isolate Miranda, raised on the romances in her father’s library.
I set the manuscript on the nightstand beside me. Maybe, I thought, I was not the fairest possible judge of what James Leer had done. In my heart, I knew, I was jealous of the kid: of his talent, although I had talent of my own; of his youth and energy, although there was no point in regretting the loss of those; but mostly of his simply having finished his book. For all its flaws, he could be proud of it. The dynamic of ostracism and imagination and the malfunctioning of a broken family were well presented, and the scene on the streetcar with the inchoate Marilyn, if not entirely convincing, was imagined with a fan’s ardor, and came as a genuine and pleasant surprise. And there was one scene, early on, which had haunted me all through the reading of the rest of the book and which, I found, troubled me still. I reached for the manuscript and opened it to page 52, to the scene in which the narrator recounted, in brutal terms, the August day in 1928 on which old Ham Eager raped his son’s new wife.
So the old man caught her like a pigeon by the neck. He forced her face into the dusty yellow mattress of his bed. All the breath went out of her. He had been down by the road picking blackberries and the ink was on his fingers.
John Eager, the narrator went on, in the same dispassionate tone, was born nine months afterward. The passage as I read it had raised the hairs on my neck, and now I found I was no longer quite sure that James Leer had lied to me, even though I knew that the best liars keep on lying successfully long after they’ve been discovered. I didn’t really believe that Fred Leer was James’s father as well as his grandfather, but still I couldn’t suppress the sudden swell of guilt in my chest for having allowed those two elegant spooks to cart him off. Setting the manuscript aside again, I stood up, and paced around the room, and thought about James Leer.
Why The Love Parade? James seemed to have chosen it, as usual, more for its status as a title than for any evident connection to the plot or characters of his story. There was a kind of sympathetic magic in the way James titled his fictions, as if by producing works called Stagecoach and Greed