Free Double Fault by Lionel Shriver Page B

proposed? "How about Friday night? We'll take the seven-twenty from Port Authority."
      "I'm sure I can squeeze you and your young man into my busy social calendar."
      "Listen, Daddy," she added effortfully. "I really like this guy. Could you…be friendly?"
      "Willow, I'm always—"
      "I mean, don't be quite such a gloomy Gus? Like, don't rain on any parades for one night."
      "Gloomy! After an electrifying week of teaching budding car mechanics commonly confused words, I'm sure to be happy as a clam."
      "Oh, never mind," said Willy, and hung up with a sigh.

      "When you first talked about your father, I thought he was some working-class stiff," Eric swung the Chateauneuf du Pape in its plastic bag, "not an English professor."
      "I'm sorry if I seem dismissive of his job," Willy mumbled. "But that's the product of careful coaching."
      They were standing in line at Gate 413. Willy was relieved that the bus was late. Her stomach knotting, she now wished they'd brought two bottles of wine.
      "When I was a kid my father sensed I admired him," Willy went on, "since any little girl would. I must have been—oh, eleven, alone with my father in the car. He explained that most of his classes could barely read, so if teachers were judged by the quality of their students my father was, I quote, 'the bottom of the barrel.' He announced that with a weird, vicious pleasure."
      "What's his problem?" asked Eric as the line began to move. "Bloomfield College isn't a great school, but it's not disgraceful."
      "To Chuck Novinsky it is. I didn't understand until I was fifteen. Nobody had told me. I was pottering in the attic when I found a box of duplicate hardbacks. Unappealing cover—plain; I think it was cheap. In the Beginning Was the Word , by Charles Novinsky."
      Eric chuckled. "A little inflated, if you don't mind my saying so. What was it, criticism?"
      Willy glanced at her fiancé in the light streaming through the door of Gate 413. A fresh feeling came off of him that had nothing to do with having ironed his shirt for the occasion. His mental basement wasn't knee-deep in naysaying bilge; the storage in his parents' ritzy East Side apartment wouldn't breathe musty disillusionment.
      "A novel," she said sorrowfully, climbing into the bus and snuggling by a window. "Begpool Press, 1962—never heard of them."
      "Did you read it?"
      "I had a feeling that I shouldn't mention the books to my father. So I sneaked up to the attic with a flashlight."
      "Was it any good?"
      "I don't know," she puzzled.
      Had her father's book been any good? Naturally the novel had commented on the nature of literature, and there wasn't a soul who wanted to read about that; likewise it celebrated the power of language, a power he now derided. The plot was playful, about a novelist whose every printed word came to life. (She loved it when a mixed metaphor gave rise to a grotesque behemoth slouching toward the narrator's house until he frantically rewrote it.) But the prose clanked with thesaurus plunder, a whole paragraph conceived to accommodate stereotropism . Still, the slim volume seemed an eager, trusting effort and couldn't have deserved the scathing reviews shoved down the side of the box.
      "The reviews were hideous." Willy shuddered. "All in local papers, fly-by-night magazines. Probably by young journalists trying to make a name for themselves, and so acrobatically snide. One reviewer called In the Beginning Was the Word so awful that it was 'a bit of a giggle.'"
      Newly curious, Willy had located a second box, where four different rubber-banded typescripts were crammed into waterlogged cardboard, their pages folded and specked with roach eggs. She'd been reluctant to paw those reams, once treasure, now trash—thousands of offbeat adjectives mined from Roget's , only to slump in this carton and rustle with insects. She'd scanned only the most recent manuscript, on top, heartbreakingly