Checker and the Derailleurs

by Lionel Shriver

  So they will learn to take good luck with gratitude, finding in the midst of this mire occasional examples, as Checker Secretti will always remain, of delight, no longer a suspect quality, no longer to be revealed as empty. Single evenings with the radio on and their feet propped on the kitchen table will arrive like checks in the mail.

  And they will learn about satisfaction, that Eaton Striker didn’t understand it. That while admitting Rachel’s voice is “thin” provides a kind of blue-black pleasure, a special crooked smile, Howard will never forget that the richest moment of his life was underwater, holding on to Checker Secretti’s hand in the middle of a whirlpool under Hell Gate and feeling the drummer pull him lower, and lower, and still not letting go.

  INDEX OF SONG TITLES

  Note: Entries in this index, carried over verbatim from the print edition of this title, are unlikely to correspond to the pagination of any given e-book reader. However, entries in this index, and other terms, may be easily located by using the search feature of your e-book reader.

  The Checker Time-Buying Service 212

  Fine (Caldwell Sweets) 159

  Here Is the Party 214

  Hundred-Dollar Peanuts 215

  In the Pocket 68

  Perpendicular Grates 6

  Too Much Trouble 222

  Walkmans Make Creepy Squealy Sounds 118

  You Think I’m So Great I’m Not 150

  P. S. Insights, Interviews & More…

  About the author

  Meet Lionel Shriver

  About the book

  Writing Checker and The Derailleurs

  Read on

  Have You Read? More by Lionel Shriver

  Excerpt: Double Fault

  About the Author

  Meet Lionel Shriver AH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since, Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.

  I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann”—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.

  “I wanted out of the United States.”

  In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in 1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that in those days addictively commanded equal parts love and loathing. As We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.

  Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.

  At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (The Female of the Species), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (Checker and The Derailleurs), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (Ordinary Decent Criminals), demography and AIDS in Africa (Game Control), inheritance (A Perfectly Good Family), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (Double Fault), terrorism and cults of personality (The New Republic, my real seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (We Need to Talk About Kevin). My latest, The Post-Birthday World, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and snooker, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.

  “I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty-two years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.”

  For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty-two years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.

  Lesser known facts:

  I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for dark roast coffee, dark sesame oil, dark chocolate, dark meat chicken, even dark chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.

  Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.

  I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid” flak-sid, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying flassid anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.” Or, “You mean, you gave it to whom,” or, “You mean, that’s just between you and me.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.

  I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to be 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.

  “I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to be 110.”

  Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar, now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye bryne cye” ( = how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.

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  About the book

  Writing Checker and The Derailleurs

  EVERY ONCE IN A WHILE I meet someone who’s read Checker and The Derailleurs, a book that seems to inspire a distinctly collusive passion. Previous to this reissue, I’ve been abashed to learn that apparently Checker is a “cult novel,” its furry, rifled paperbacks passed hand-to-hand; considering the modest sales record of its initial printing, that would be a very small cult indeed. Since I have a particularly tender relationship to this novel, I’m grateful to HarperCollins for giving it a second life.

  As a rule, I don’t let working titles out of the house; they’re commonly so ghastly. Yet while my editor wisely dissuaded me from using the manuscript’s original title—it has kooky religious connotations—The Ecstatic did aptly capture its protagonis
t. I wanted to write about a character who lived his life to the fullest and was able to savor small, simple pleasures to a degree that made him irresistibly attractive to other people.

  “I have a particularly tender relationship to this novel…”

  While writing the novel, I was living alone in Astoria, Queens, a block from the roiling East River and across the street from the charming Astoria Park. I loved the neighborhood, then still retaining the vestiges of Italian and Greek immigration (much of Astoria has since gone Hispanic): delis with halva and feta, bakeries with big sesame-encrusted breadsticks, tiny manicured front gardens with Virgin Mary statuettes. It was one of those rare New York niches where not many novels had been set.

  I stayed up late in those days, playing Joni Mitchell and Kate Bush loudly enough that neighbors would thump on my floor. Often restless after midnight, I’d escape my tiny rent-stabilized apartment to run headlong beside the river and up and down the hillocks of the park. Some summer nights I’d slip a swimming suit under my cutoffs and sneak over the fence to glide through the park’s huge blue night-lit public pool. During the day, when I wasn’t cycling between my freshman composition classes in three different New York boroughs, I thought I was writing about a fictional drummer. Looking back, I get it: I was writing about myself. Rather, about the best of myself.

  That is a self, I am sad to say, who no longer streaks out after midnight for the sheer thrill of the breeze through her hair or leaps in midair lunges down the steep hill beside the baseball field. Oh, I still run, but only as a discipline, a dreaded trudge that I’m always glad to see the back of when I return. I no longer sneak into municipal pools after they’ve closed. Thing is, I was once capable of the ebullience that Checker Secretti exudes in spades. If I paid for those manic phases with equally extreme funks, the even keel of middle age is terribly dreary in comparison.

  In Checker, I wanted to write about not only joy but goodness, although goodness, as opposed to virtue, may be joy by another name. It’s difficult to do justice to goodness, a quality that can be surprisingly off-putting; it’s often confused with prissy rectitude, mere obedience, or posey, self-aggrandizing righteousness. Using Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot as a model, I gathered that goodness was best made appealing by putting it in danger. Thus Eaton Striker was born—Checker’s envious nemesis, a Salieri-like creature who would become Checker if he could but, lacking Checker’s savoir faire, would opt for second-best: to destroy him.

  “Thing is, I was once capable of the ebullience that Checker Secretti exudes in spades.”

  Hilariously, given that my parents were both professional Presbyterians, only when a deprecating review slagged off Checker as a painfully obvious retelling of the Christ story did it ever occur to me that my plot might have been influenced by the New Testament. I’m an atheist in theory, but I guess there’s really no getting away from your roots.

  A word about the illustrations: One of my early memories is of being quizzed by a friend of my father’s about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was eight or nine years old, and my enthusiasms were then equally divided between storytelling and crayons. So I told this adult that I wanted to write and illustrate my own books. He treated me to a patronizing chuckle. “But won’t you want to write books for grown-ups?” I said, I guess; I hadn’t thought about it. “Because grown-up books don’t have pictures.” Bam, a hole in my balloon. It took me more than twenty years to prove this family friend wrong, but finally inserting my rapidograph drawings of my characters in Checker was satisfying payback.

  Also, a word about drumming: I like it. I have a curious habit of falling in love with drummers, and have now—knock on wood—settled down for keeps with a drummer who has a long, distinguished career in jazz. (Indeed, my husband read and loved Checker before we met, which helped to grease the romantic skids in advance.) I don’t know of any instrument that’s sexier, that requires more astonishing independence of all four limbs, or that looks, from the outside, like more fun. Delightfully, the drums retain a conspicuous connection to their primitive, childlike antecedents: bashing pots and pans with serving spoons and beating logs with sticks.

  As for the song lyrics, I had an absolute blast writing them, and if anyone is ever inspired to set them to music, they’re welcome to give it a try.

  “As for the song lyrics, I had an absolute blast writing them, and if anyone is ever inspired to set them to music, they’re welcome to give it a try.”

  Among my novels, Checker remains one of my favorites, if only because I fear that I’ll never be able to write a book of this nature again. Innocent, upbeat, bursting with appetite for being alive, and—dare I say it—sweet, this rock-and-roll fairy tale is a rare Shriver novel with a straight-out happy ending. At the time, I imagined that I was writing about “young people” from the perspective of my hoary old age. Only now do I realize that at not even thirty, I was still a baby myself. That must be a signature of being young: that you think you’re not.

  Lionel Shriver

  2009

  Read on

  Have You Read? More by Lionel Shriver

  THE POST-BIRTHDAY WORLD

  American children’s book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a secure, settled life in London with her smart, loyal, disciplined partner, Lawrence—until the night she finds herself inexplicably drawn to kissing another man, a passionate, extravagant, top-ranked snooker player. Two competing alternate futures hinge on this single kiss, as Irina’s decision—to surrender to temptation or to preserve her seemingly safe partnership with Lawrence—will have momentous consequences for her career, her friendships and familial relationships, and the texture of her daily life.

  “A layered and unflinching portrait of infidelity…. Shriver pulls off a tremendous feat of characterization…. Better yet, the author is more interested in raising questions about love and fidelity than in pat moralizing. Readers will wonder which choice was best for Irina, but Shriver masterfully confounds any attempt to arrive at a sure answer.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN

  Eva never really wanted to be a mother—and certainly not the mother of the malicious boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin’s horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

  “Sometimes searing…impossible to put down…brutally honest…. Who, in the end, needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.”

  —Boston Globe

  DOUBLE FAULT

  Tennis has been Willy Novinsky’s one love ever since she first picked up a racquet at the age of four. A middle-ranked pro at twenty-three, she’s met her match in Eric Oberdorf, a low-ranked, untested Princeton grad who also intends to make his mark on the international tennis circuit. Eric becomes Willy’s first passion off the court, and eventually they marry. But while wedded life begins well, full-tilt competition soon puts a strain on their relationship—and an unexpected accident sends driven and gifted Willy sliding irrevocably toward resentment, tragedy, and despair.

  From acclaimed author Lionel Shriver comes a brilliant and unflinching novel about the devastating cost of prizing achievement over love.

  “Shriver shows in a masterstroke why character is fate and how sport reveals it.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “A brilliant tale of doomed love…. This is not a novel about tennis or rivalry; it’s about love, marriage, and the balance of power in relationships.…Double Fault is a compelling and playfully ironic take on the sex wars, blistering with…brilliant writing and caustic la
nguage.”

  —The Observer (London)

  A PERFECTLY GOOD FAMILY

  Following the death of her worthy liberal parents, Corlis McCrea moves back into her family’s grand Reconstruction mansion in North Carolina, willed to all three siblings. Her timid younger brother has never left home. When her bullying black-sheep older brother moves into “his” house as well, it’s war.

  Each heir wants the house. Yet to buy the other out, two siblings must team against one. Just as in girlhood, Corlis is torn between allying with the decent but fearful youngest and the iconoclastic eldest, who covets his legacy to destroy it. A Perfectly Good Family is a stunning examination of inheritance, literal and psychological: what we take from our parents, what we discard, and what we are stuck with, like it or not.

  “Often funny and always intelligent, this is a sharply observed history of the redoubtable McCrea family, shot through with sardonic wit and black comedy.”

  —The Independent

  GAME CONTROL

  Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper, despite (or perhaps because of) his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor’s ear, if the poor are a responsibility, they are also an imposition.

  Set against the vivid backdrop of shambolic modern-day Africa—a continent now primarily populated with wildlife of the two-legged sort—Lionel Shriver’s Game Control is a wry, grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypocrisy of lofty intellectuals who would “save” humanity but who don’t like people.