Fool (Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries)

by Frederick Dillen

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1999 by Frederick G. Dillen

  Introduction and Reading Group Guide copyright ©2012 by Nancy Pearl

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  A Book Lust Rediscovery

  Published by AmazonEncore

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612183688

  ISBN-10: 1612183689

  Contents

  Introduction

  ATHLETE

  VICTOR

  PILGRIM

  LOVER

  FOOL

  Readers’ Guide for Fool

  Discussion Questions

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  About the Author

  About Nancy Pearl

  About Book Lust Rediscoveries

  Introduction

  I was doing my regular gig on Steve Scher’s morning show, Weekday, on KUOW 94.9 FM in Seattle many years ago when a caller asked me how many pages she should read before she gives up on a book. Thus was born what has come to be known as Nancy Pearl’s Rule of 50:

  Life’s too short to read a book you don’t love. If you’re 50 or younger, give a book 50 pages before you decide whether or not to keep reading it. When you turn 51, subtract your age from 100 and that’s the number of pages (which, of course, gets smaller every year) to read before you bail on a book you’re not thoroughly enjoying. When you turn 100, you are free to judge a book by its cover, whatever the attendant dangers of doing so are.

  The Rule of 50 (which ended up in a similar form on Starbucks Grande cup #169 in their “The Way I See It” series a few years ago) has long been a dependable guide in my reading life. I appreciate it more and more with each passing year, but sometimes, when I start a new book, I can tell almost immediately—certainly within the first few pages, and sometimes as quickly as the opening paragraph—whether or not I’m going to fall in love with it.

  No matter how cautious I am in other areas of my life (not that there’s much to my life besides books and reading), I admit with no shame that when it comes to reading, I not infrequently find myself tumbling head over heels into an all-consuming and satisfying relationship with a novel or work of narrative nonfiction. I should point out here that (in accordance with The Rule of 50) I only read books that I am passionate about, or at least thoroughly enjoying (by page 33, in my case). I long ago gave up slogging through a book in the hope that it might get better. But, as a kind of corollary to the Rule of 50, I also realized that even if I wasn’t enjoying a particular reading experience, it could be due to my current mood, so that giving up on a book didn’t mean that I couldn’t go back to it and try it again a few days, weeks, months, or even years later. It took me three attempts, over the course of two years, to finally see what almost everyone else saw—evidently immediately—in George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, Song of Ice and Fire. Count me in now as a big fan.

  My love for Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children didn’t develop at once, either. I remember trying to read it at least twice before I was able to appreciate it. Now, of course, including Midnight’s Children as I do among my very favorite novels, I am extremely grateful to the Random House sales rep who recommended it to me in 1981 when I was working at Ken Tracy’s late and much lamented Yorktown Alley Book Store in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I wish I remembered her (or his) name, so I could offer a belated thank you.

  But I don’t even remember why I first picked up Frederick Dillen’s Fool in 1999, the year it was published. I have no recollection of anyone recommending it to me, and I was unfamiliar with the author—I hadn’t yet read his debut novel, Hero. But I discovered, to my delight, that Fool was one of those books that had me at “hello.” I felt that first delicious inkling of book love before I got to the end of the first page: my heart started beating a little faster while my reading slowed. By the time I got to page three, I was well and truly hooked.

  But hooked by what, exactly? Answering this is something I think about a lot. Pretty much whenever I’m not reading, playing Angry Birds or Plants vs. Zombies, or trolling the shelves of libraries and book stores looking for something to read, I think about what makes someone connect with a particular work—that whole mysterious business surrounding the question of why we like the novels that we do.

  It’s clear to me, based on my experience as a bookseller and a librarian, that the specific plot details—what the book is about—have little to do with the pleasure that a reader takes in a book. If a bookstore customer or library patron told me that he or she loved Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and wanted another novel just like it, I wouldn’t suggest another novel about a midwestern college baseball team with a gay subplot. Instead, I’d look for other novels with characters so well-conceived that they seem absolutely real; characters so alive that when the novel ends you feel bereft of their presence in your life. (Three good suggestions here would be Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides, The Brothers K by David James Duncan, and Matthew Quick’s The Silver Linings Playbook.) It’s the feelings or emotions that you experience while you’re reading a book that you remember, not the details that make up the plot.

  So I’m happy to tell you what Fool is about: Barnaby Griswold’s life changes almost overnight when he’s found to have acted perhaps slimily (but not illegally) by selling short a stock; his wife leaves him, his daughters ignore him, his friends desert him, and he earns the eternal enmity of the investors who lost loads of money because of what he did. How does middleaged Barnaby cope with this avalanche of disasters?

  I have to tell you, though, that I’m afraid this description gives you little or no sense of what it is about the novel that drew me to it. Even adding the adjectives “humorous” or “witty” somewhere in the above description wouldn’t particularly illuminate what it is about the novel that makes it so special.

  Now try this one:

  “‘For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister,’ are the last words Barnaby Griswold’s father ever says to him. Yet a fluffmeister is Barnaby’s default position in life, as much as he may try to be an athlete, a lover, or a pilgrim.”

  Gets much closer to the heart of the novel, I think. Cherl Petso, one of my former students at the University of Washington’s Information School wrote that description, or annotation, as we call it in library-land, after she finished reading Fool. It tells us almost nothing about the details of Fool’s plot, yet it certainly conveys to me the essence of what makes the novel so good: the humor (“fluffmeister”) combined with a tinge of sadness (“the last words Barnaby Griswold’s father ever says to him”) and the knowledge that we’re going to encounter a novel that describes a journey to self-understanding (“as much as he may try to be an athlete, a lover, or a pilgrim”) and probably acceptance (“a fluffmeister is Barnaby’s default position in life”). In fact, reading over Cherl’s annotation right now makes me want to pick up the book—which is sitting next to the computer I’m writing this on—and start reading it again.

  The reasons why we love a particular novel range from the exalted (“It changed my life”) to the prosaic (“It was a pageturner”) and everything in between. I’ve never read a novel that I can honestly say changed my life, although there have been many times that I’ve looked at the world a bit differently afte
r finishing one. So my reasons for adoring Fool probably fall somewhere in between those two extremes. Here are the reasons I noted when I reread Fool for consideration in the Book Lust Rediscoveries series:

  I love how Frederick Dillen uses commas to keep a thought going, and going, and going, instead of chopping it up into pieces with periods.

  I love the scene involving a riding lawnmower.

  I love the quandary Barnaby faces during a game of cards with his former mother-in-law: “what to do when you can please people no matter how you fluff.”

  I love his relationship with Ada, his former mother-in-law.

  I love Happiness, Ada’s caregiver.

  I love that Barnaby and Marian spend an afternoon at the zoo in Oklahoma City. It was at that zoo, in fact, that my younger daughter Katie was bitten by an emu.

  I love that a large portion of the book takes place in Oklahoma City and that Barnaby takes Ada out to dinner at a restaurant called the Corner Box where the majority of the diners are senior citizens. There was a restaurant just like it in Tulsa (I don’t know if it’s still there, but I rather doubt it), and when my parents and in-laws came to visit, we would often take them there for the early bird specials. Believe me, Dillen’s description is spot-on.

  I love Barnaby in all his imperfection and ultimate humanness, and for all his imperfections and humanity.

  I love the word “fluffmeister.” I’m hoping that I’ll have had at least one chance to use it in conversation by the time you read this. (You’ll have to read the book to find out what it means, exactly. It’s a question ripe for discussion with your fellow Fool readers.)

  Fool will, of course, affect each of you differently; no two loves, or lovers, are alike. But I hope you’ll find as much pleasure in reading it as I did.

  I hope you enjoy Fool as much as I did.

  To my wife Leslie and to my daughters Abigail and Tatiana With thanks to Joe Regal

  In celebration of A.D. (1936–1999)

  ATHLETE

  Barnaby Griswold loafed and drank his way through good schools, but those were the days, God bless them, when the world made room for boys from families with the right balance of propriety and financial resource. Not that Barnaby didn’t take any lessons whatever from his education, but the real work of his youth had been to learn once and for all that he was intelligent only to the near side of cunning and that the fundamental truth of his life lay in foolishness. Books and study and logic and meditation were all fine for other people and for respectable decoration, but Barnaby was a fool no matter what his father had hoped and no matter how Barnaby had tried, briefly, to turn out otherwise, no matter how Barnaby continued occasionally pretending for his father whose last words to Barnaby were, “For Christ sake don’t become a fluffmeister.”

  Those words reverberated as intended, but they were too late. The words that took precedence were “Know thyself,” words uttered, for all Barnaby knew, by one of his own ancestors. Barnaby was a fool, and he had learned it early. What was more, and more important, he had learned that the world reserved an agreeable place for fools who were prepared to stand up and claim their entitlement. He thought of that entitlement as a happy welfare with better neighborhoods, fun really. He had made his living as a fluffmeister, and it had been a good living. More and more, in fact, Barnaby wondered if his father had objected to his career not because of the despicable reflection on any individual who chose to labor in the vineyards of fluff, but because the work paid well enough to suggest a world and life that were out of kilter. Barnaby’s father, who abhorred disorder and secretly distrusted life, insisted that fundamentally the world and life were good and right, insisted that it behove (behooved?) every decent man, gentleman or no, to insist likewise. Barnaby, on the other hand, who enjoyed things, knew there was much to be had in celebrating a deal, in New Jersey say, even a terrible deal, with appalling new friends and one of those green-and-eggplant sunsets.

  Now, on Sunday of the Labor Day weekend, on the shore well north of Boston, on the old Richardson court at the crest of Winott Point with thirty-five polite Pointers for audience, the matter at hand involved whipping Dicky Kopus until he bled, until he ran away home.

  Why? Because Barnaby’s life as he knew it was over. Technically it had been over for some time, as everyone watching understood, but after today, there would not even be a home to which Barnaby himself could run away. In circumstances like these, men resurrected their lives by winning something physical, especially men like Barnaby who had never won at the physical things as children. If you wanted the good life back, you had to become a champion. Not an easy dictum, but true, and let there be no doubt about what Barnaby wanted. The good life, his own good life specifically, was central to his very nature.

  “Play tennis, Barnaby,” called a grown man’s voice from among the fans, and Barnaby waved and smiled and called back, “Play tennis, Barnaby,” and everybody laughed.

  Unfortunately, however, Barnaby had just double faulted to lose an important game.

  More unfortunately, Kopus had won the first set and now, with Barnaby’s double fault, had gone ahead in what might be the final set. If Kopus held his own serve in the next game, he’d win the match.

  The only blood so far was Barnaby’s, from where he’d scraped his knee trying for a lob. When the scrape happened, Kopus apologized as if he was responsible for Barnaby’s big feet and spastic coordination. Then every time they’d changed ends since the scrape, Kopus had asked if the knee was holding up.

  “You sure?”

  “It’s fine, Richard. Just a scratch.”

  In fact it did hurt, but the worse part was that before drying, the blood had run down his leg and made a black mat of one side of his sock, which let Kopus offer condolence and concern with an extra load of horseshit sincerity. With his thick eyebrows up and with the welts of his low forehead plowing fleshy compassion, Kopus’s sincerity could be appreciated by the audience even if they couldn’t hear the practiced dialogue that came along with the package.

  Though they could hear very well. Everybody, even the old ladies, just sat as always on the grass of the slope up from the edge of the court to the driveway. True, the owner of the court, the ancient patriarch Richardson, sat in the shade on the porch of the big house, beyond the drive, but he couldn’t have heard anything even if Dicky Kopus had shouted it at him face-to-face, and God knew Kopus was a shouter when he wanted to be. Also a racket thrower, though there wouldn’t be any of that during the finals of the Winott Cup, not with a couple of once-removed Winotts watching, with Jerry Childs, the new tennis association martinet, sternly pretending to officiate.

  Cheating, yes. Kopus was a famous cheater, and he had set things up early in the match by calling two unimportant serves from Barnaby out, which they were, and then seconds later shaking his head and loudly congratulating Barnaby and admitting untruthfully but with great fraudulent good spirit that the serves were in. All to convince the audience that Dicky Kopus was a man who could be believed in the event that, late in the match, crucial shots from Barnaby, good shots, had to be called out.

  The bad news was that Kopus hadn’t had to cheat.

  Barnaby was giving it away.

  And now they had to change sides, and Barnaby would have to receive Kopus’s serves facing toward the harbor. The lawn rolling downhill behind that end of the court brought the screen of trees lower than the height of a toss for serve, and at the end of summer, today, you could lose the ball in the sky. Which made it all the more irritating that Barnaby had double faulted when he himself had that advantage. Double faulted, for Christ sake, to set Kopus up for the match.

  So Barnaby smiled and waved and called, “Play tennis, Barnaby.” He looked at the ball he’d just served into the net, as good as handing the championship to Kopus, and he started a loose-jointed, happily dejected walk toward the sidelines, toward the end of his ruined and still unrestored life, toward the crowd which, despite its prurience, finally moved with the fir
st gatherings of blankets and searchings for wandered children, the first concrete thoughts of cocktails before the big party down at the stone beach below the Winott boat hut. Barnaby Griswold was through, and at some point for ladies and gentlemen, decorum suggested one look away.

  But then?

  Barnaby did understand that limping would be bad form. He headed toward the grass and the crowd, toward the end of the net and toward the watercooler and the two aluminum-and-plastic-web chairs there where he and Kopus could sit during their change of sides, and he imagined his father saying, “If you’re going to lose, lose. For Christ sake don’t limp.”

  So he gave a slight but noticeable limp. He made it to his chair, and he sat down heavily enough for all to see the weight of his forty-six years and of this match (not to mention the catastrophic rest of things). Among the faces of the audience, as Barnaby turned his back on them to sit, the ghost of his father’s face was frozen in shame, and Barnaby himself, in a pretense of shame, stared down at the red plastic, push-pump watercooler that sat between his own expensive sneakers and the net post.

  He didn’t look at Kopus to see if Kopus had registered the limp. The point was to avoid Kopus’s eyes. The point was exactly eye-averted shame of the first order. Kopus himself, needless to say, would manufacture a limp to explain away any meaningless Thursday afternoon doubles loss before Memorial Day, but Kopus knew that Barnaby would not. Kopus knew that for Barnaby to double fault and then put on a limp, in the finals of the Winott Cup, and then sit staring at the watercooler before the last game, Kopus knew that was giving up and crying about it, all of it, in the most humiliating way for Barnaby. Kopus knew that in some circumstances Barnaby needed to maintain an honest posture and a gentleman’s elevated demeanor. Kopus knew that right now Barnaby was in every respect a broken man. At least Barnaby hoped Kopus knew.

  And here Kopus came, unable to resist, swimming with his swarthy, mackerel face into Barnaby’s line of sight, bending over ostensibly to thumb a cup of water out of the cooler but really to look up into Barnaby's humiliated eyes.