Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [99]
“I’m sorry, James,” I said. I reached into the knapsack and took out the manuscript of The Love Parade. I peeled off the cover page, sat back against the headboard of Sam’s bed. The house slumbered around me. I was encased, sealed off, in the light coming from the bedside lamp. I started to read.
It was a period piece, I found, set during the mid-forties. It opened in some anthracite black town in the barren Pennsylvania hinterlands of James Leer’s innermost soul. The protagonist, John Eager, eighteen years old, lived in a tumbledown house along the banks of a fouled river with his father, a forklift operator at the Seitz mannequin factory, and his paternal grandfather, a fearsome old bastard named Hamilton Eager who was first encountered on page 3, in the act of poisoning the boy’s Chinese pug. John Eager’s mother, a sickly woman who cooked in the mannequin factory lunchroom, had died the previous spring, of pneumonia, her last words to her son “You’re a good-looking boy.”
He was so good-looking that he was invisible, the passage went on.
He had the face of one of the Seitz company hat-forms. Nose like a shark fin. Lips red as a stop sign. Black eyes long-lashed and glassy like the eyes in the head of a deer on a wall. Nothing about his face lingered in the memory of people who saw it. Only a vague impression of handsomeness. In photographs it always looked like his head moved at the instant the picture was snapped.
The book’s first hundred and fifty pages consisted of John Eager’s autobiographical reverie as he rode a Greyhound bus to Wilkes-Barre to buy the gun with which, on page 163, he shot Hamilton Eager between the eyes, in payment for the poisoning of his beloved dog Warner Oland. It was a disturbing and poetic reverie that lingered overlong but at times convincingly on episodes of sexual abuse, rape, incest, deer hunting, arson, the usual James Leer brand of mock-tortured Catholicism, suicide attempts, and the young hero’s moments of ecstasy in the first row of the town’s grand movie house, the Marquis. The reader was not surprised to see John Eager evolve into a lonely young man who told fabulous lies to everyone and nursed a deep devout hatred of himself.
After murdering his grandfather, John Eager put in a surprise appearance at the Homecoming Dance, where he shot and killed a classmate, a bully named Nelson McCool who had been terrorizing the hero all his life, in such various and ever-crueler ways that the reader was relieved to see him finally get his reward. In the wake of these crimes, with blood pooled in the cuffs of his trousers, John Eager knelt to confess his sins, in the church of St. John Nepomuk. Then he fled, climbing onto another Greyhound that took him, in considerably fewer pages than the previous bus journey, to Los Angeles, where he tried unsuccessfully to walk onto the Fox lot, got mugged on the porch of Our Lady Queen of the Angels, and, in a scene at once tender and grim, came to the very brink of turning a trick with a washed-up hero of the silent screen before finally surrendering his unhappy soul to the Pacific Ocean at Venice Beach. In the penultimate scene, on his way out to Venice on the Red Line car, he met a rather pathetic young bottle blonde named Norma Jean Mortensen, in whom he recognized a kindred spirit—a formless aggregate of longing, lies, and self-contempt, hollow at the core—whose cheap, tight sweater, laddered stockings, and naked ambition to become the biggest star in the world helped him, in some way I didn’t quite understand, make up his mind to drown himself.
I read without stopping and finished the book, which came in at two hundred and fifty pages on the dot, in just under two hours. I didn’t know quite how to feel