The End of the Book

by Porter Shreve

  “Sherwood Anderson’s George Willard shimmers back to life in The End of the Book, an artfully plotted evocation of Chicago in two centuries, and two aspiring writers deadened by commerce until—for each—an old love appears to reignite their best and earliest dreams. Porter Shreve delivers a richly layered hat-tip to Anderson’s impact on American letters, and a highly rewarding story at every turn.”

  — PAULA MCLAIN, author of The Paris Wife

  “Porter Shreve’s The End of the Book is a remarkable novel about the huge promises fathers and sons, writers and readers, books and characters, make to each other, and how we break those promises, and how still we keep hoping not to break them, or break them again, or break them completely…. Shreve has written some terrific books, but this is his best yet.”

  — BROCK CLARKE, author of Exley and An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England

  The End of the Book is the story of an aspiring contemporary novelist who may or may not be writing a sequel to Sherwood Anderson’s classic Winesburg, Ohio. Adam Clary works in Chicago for a famous internet company on a massive project to digitize the world’s books, but secretly he hates his job and wishes to be a writer at a time when the book as physical object and book culture itself have never been more threatened.

  Counterpointing Adam’s story is that of George Willard, the young protagonist of Anderson’s book, who arrives in Chicago around 1900 when it was the fastest-growing city in American history. Through alternating chapters, we follow George’s travails, including his marriage to the wealthy daughter of his boss, his affair with his hometown sweetheart, his artistic crisis, breakdown and flight, and along the way we see the echoes and intersections between his life and Adam’s as they struggle in two similar Americas through two similar times in the life of the book.

  The End of the Book

  YELLOW SHOE FICTION

  MICHAEL GRIFFITH, Series Editor

  The End of the Book

  A NOVEL

  PORTER SHREVE

  Published with the assistance of the Borne Fund

  Published by Louisiana State University Press

  Copyright © 2014 by Louisiana State University Press

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  LSU Press Paperback Original

  FIRST PRINTING

  DESIGNER: Mandy McDonald Scallan

  TYPE FACE: Minion

  PRINTER AND BINDER: Maple Press, Inc.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organization, places, circumstances, and events are the product of the author’s imagination, or else they are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual occurrences or individuals, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shreve, Porter.

  The end of the book : a novel / Porter Shreve.

  pages cm. — (Yellow Shoe Fiction)

  ISBN 978-0-8071-5622-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5623-0 (pdf) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5624-7 (epub) — ISBN 978-0-8071-5625-4 (mobi) 1. Fathers and sons— Fiction. 2. Authorship— Fiction. 3. Obsessive-compulsive disorder— Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction. 5. Psychological fiction. 6. Domestic fiction.

  I. Title.

  PS3569.H7395E53 2014

  813’.54— dc23

  2013041043

  The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

  For Bich, Henry, and Julian

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Acknowledgments

  The End of the Book

  1

  My father taught at four universities in four midwestern towns, had three sons by different wives, and wrote two books, one published forty years ago and the other, volume two of the definitive biography of a once-celebrated American writer, always on the verge of completion: next month, end of summer, nothing left but the index and a little fine-tuning. Over the years my half brothers, our mothers, stepmothers, and I had looked into his office, a packrat midden of strewn note cards, manuscript pages, newspapers, boxes, overdue books, empty cans of Diet Rite Cola, and airplane bottles of Malibu Rum. Long before his retirement from Central Illinois, everyone in the family but me had moved far away from the town of Normal, whose name my father daily defied. So I was the one who had to drop in to see how he was surviving.

  This time was no ordinary visit. I’d made a special trip, and though I told myself not to worry I was growing uneasy. I parked the Prius in front of the FORECLOSURE: HOME FOR SALE sign at his curb and climbed over a snowbank. All the neighbors except my father had plowed their driveways and shoveled their walks, so I was up to my knees in snow so soft it squeaked under my sneakers as I high-stepped toward the door. There was his old Mercury Mystique, under a white shell, parked outside the junk-filled garage. It had been three days since Christmas Eve, when a librarian I knew at the university e-mailed, saying she’d heard about the foreclosure and hoped my family was coping over the holidays. I’d seen my father only once since summer, at a diner he liked near campus, but he’d said nothing about trouble with his lender. We talked about the Cubs, as I recalled, whether this would be the season they broke the hundred-year curse. In the end, no such luck: They won ninety-seven games but got swept in the opening round of the playoffs.

  When the e-mail arrived I was staying with my wife, Dhara, at the motel her family ran outside Dayton. I called my father that night, but he didn’t answer, nor did he pick up on Christmas, so to Dhara’s annoyance we headed home the next morning.

  “It’s nothing. I’m telling you, he’s just embarrassed,” she said in the car. “My family’s going to guilt me about leaving early until we see them again.”

  “This isn’t about your family. My father could be losing his house. For all I know, they’ve turned off his heat and he’s freezing in there. Or worse—”

  “Don’t get melodramatic, Adam. It’s one of your least appealing qualities.”

  “The man is capable of anything,” I said. “No one should be spending Christmas alone.”

  “He’s not going to kill himself, if that’s what you’re suggesting. He’s fine. You’ll see. But what you’re going to do with him—that’s another story.”

  I dropped Dhara off around noon at our apartment in Chicago, said I might be gone a night or two. She reminded me, though I needed no reminder, that our first anniversary was coming up on New Year’s Day, a dinner we couldn’t afford at one of the most expensive restaurants in America. I promised to return in plenty of time, then made my way here, a couple hours southwest on I-55.

  I’d seen my father fewer than a dozen times since he moved into this split-level, bought four years before at the height of the boom on a zero-down, low-interest loan—Instant Approval! Act Now!—that had ballooned beyond the means of a seventy-eight-year-old retiree with a lifetime of bad habits. It was the first house he ever owned. A child of the Depression, he used to pay with cash, buy in bulk, collect the pennysaver. He loved a bargain and drove my mother crazy with Saturday-morning yard-sale rounds where he’d come home with a trunk full of
other people’s castoffs.

  Do we need another popcorn maker?

  That one cost me a dollar, barely used.

  And what are you going to do with forty-five volumes of the 1961 World Book Encyclopedia?

  It’s the Braille edition. A classic. I got it for a song.

  I couldn’t believe my father had bought his own place. The apartment building where he’d cooped up since his last separation got sold to developers who planned to renovate and double the rent, and that’s when it dawned on him that if he owned a house no one could turn him out on the street. Instead of steering him toward assisted living or another rental where at least a building manager could keep an eye on him, I’d said there was never a better time to buy—mortgage brokers didn’t care about credit history anymore. Infuriating as he’d always been, this man who used to lock his office door and leave an empty chair at dinner or disappear for long weekends on “research trips” to the Newberry, which my mother and I knew was closed on Sundays and Mondays, I felt sorry for my father now, whose career had peaked in 1968, who bore his steady decline on his shoulders like some nearsighted Atlas, and whose failures reminded me daily of my own suspended dreams.

  I wanted my father to have something to call his, so when he got the pre-approved loan and started driving around town with a realtor who looked like an escort crossed with a mortician, I forgot that he was too dissipated to be living alone, his memory too much like his office: a dusty repository of missing and scattered papers. Before I had much time to think, my half brothers were flying in from the coasts to help with the move. My father hadn’t seen Michael in three years, so I arranged a weekend for them in Chicago. I put them up in my apartment and bought them tickets to the Cubs while Eric and I tackled the mess, decided what to take to the curb and what to haul to the new house. In the end, we lost our nerve and moved everything we’d wanted to throw away into our father’s garage, afraid that the shock of a clean, orderly space would be too much for his heart to take.

  He’d had a triple bypass the year before, and cracks had begun to appear in the walls he’d spent a lifetime building around himself. I’d always been the one to call him, but after the surgery he started phoning me at odd hours, could even turn wistful about the book that had bedeviled him for decades, his parental deficiencies, and his marriage to my mother, whom he called his twin flame and the great regret of his life. Perhaps he was trying to console me, or more likely to comfort himself because my mother was no longer alive, and thus could forever represent the one who got away. But not long after he settled into his new house, rue gave way to routine; he burrowed in, stopped calling or answering the phone, and grew irascible at my unannounced visits.

  A smattering of blue-sleeved copies of the New York Times and the Daily Pantagraph, the local paper, dotted his stoop. My heartbeat quickened as I picked them up, six in all, and brushed off the snow. My father always started his day with the papers, used to read aloud from the obituaries and from local stories that caught his eye—KID LOSES ARM PLAYING CHICKEN WITH A TRAIN; LOTTERY WINNER GOES BROKE OVERNIGHT—while my mother rinsed the breakfast dishes and rushed to school to run the library.

  I rang the doorbell and peered through the glass sidelights. The hallway was dark and empty. I rang again and heard only the muffled silence of white-blanketed suburbia, post-holiday, woodsmoke brushing the air, my father’s house the odd hermitage in a family subdivision. I couldn’t hear the bell working, so I tried the knocker. The name of the people who last lived here—The Fishers—remained etched in the brass. I wondered why my father wasn’t coming to the door, why his newspapers had been growing cold for three days, his walk and car buried under snow, and it occurred to me that I should have gone to the hardware store last time I visited and brought back a new door knocker or, better yet, had one engraved: Clary.

  Dr. Roland Clary, Professor Emeritus at Central Illinois University, formerly of Indiana University, Oberlin College, and the University of Michigan, author of what might have been the essential biography of Sherwood Anderson, had he only finished. Several major newspapers and journals reviewed the first book favorably. “In this judicious, assiduously researched biography, Mr. Clary reminds us why the author of Winesburg, Ohio remains relevant today,” wrote the New York Times. “The second volume is sure to be anticipated by scholars and literary readers alike.”

  Why, as I shivered under a purpling sky, was I imagining my father’s obituary, and wondering where, if anywhere, it might run? Did the world care about books anymore? Who would note the passing of an obscure academic, chronicler of a mostly forgotten writer’s life? A writer’s writer, my father used to say. Even he conceded that while Sherwood Anderson influenced generations of storytellers and for a time was a godfather to Hemingway and Faulkner, he was not in their league, but for that one odd book about a town of outcasts—grotesques, Anderson called them. Believe me: I knew that book well. And I knew my father well enough to realize that by devoting his days to the study of these grotesques he had himself become one.

  I banged on the door with my fist. Through the glass I saw the orange tabby, Wing Biddlebaum, round the corner and offer an insouciant meow. I studied the cat’s face for signs of trouble, but he had the puffed, squint-eyed look of having just awoken from a long nap. He sat on the hallway tiles, licked his paws, and when I continued knocking, walked away with a vexed switch of the tail.

  I took out my cell phone and dialed, and I could hear my father’s phone ringing inside. It rang and rang, and still no answer. He was the last holdout against answering machines, voice mail, said cell phones were a swindle and a public menace. A few years before, I had set him up with an e-mail account, but he didn’t bother using it. And he called the famous company where I worked the grand colonizer of the Information Age. I had to admit I didn’t disagree.

  Stepping back, I looked up to the second-floor windows. The curtains were drawn, but a single bulb lit one of the rooms, and I felt relieved that his power was still on. At least he wasn’t freezing to death in there. But even on my unannounced visits he did always come to the door, slippered and cardiganed, his ashy pallor blending with his incongruously tidy beard.

  Why wasn’t he answering?

  Maybe he was taking a nap. Not that I’d ever known him to do so. But his engine was running down, and he did seem tired last I saw him. Never felt better, he’d lied. But if he were napping he wouldn’t have left the light on.

  Now I was beginning to panic. I pounded the door harder, wondered if I should call the police, see if one of the neighbors had a key.

  Why hadn’t I thought to get my own key made?

  I remembered reading about the Collyer brothers, the reclusive hoarders of upper Fifth Avenue who filled their brownstone floor to ceiling with junk. When a patrolman, summoned by a worried neighbor, broke in through a second-story window, it took him two hours to crawl to the corpse of Homer Collyer, slumped amidst the rubbish in a tattered blue robe. It seemed that Langley Collyer had gone missing, so a search fanned out across the city while police combed the house. Over the course of three weeks they cleared away three thousand books, decades of newspapers, and countless curiosities—a clavichord, bowling balls, an X-ray machine, dressmaking dummies, a horse’s jawbone—more than eighty tons of trash before they discovered Langley, long dead, and, it turned out, just ten feet away from where they’d found his brother.

  If Dhara were here she’d say I was overreacting. But I was my father’s lone caretaker, and he was the closest family I had, so I braced myself for the worst. I trudged through the snow to the back of the house and tried to look in, but the windows were mostly frosted over and the rooms dark. I spotted a ladder beside the neighbor’s garage, dragged it back, and leaned it against my father’s house.

  I climbed to the second floor and rapped on the storm windows, pulled off my gloves and tried to slide my fingers under the frames, but they were cased in ice.

  I was blowing into my hands and thinking about breaking
a pane with my elbow like a B-grade action star when I heard the creak of the back door opening, then a familiar splenetic voice: “Get the hell down from there!”

  In his living room, my father and I had it out:

  “What did you think you were doing? Trying to give me a heart attack?”

  “Why didn’t you answer the door? I’ve been sick with worry.”

  “No one’s been sick with worry over me since my mother dropped me in the Pensaukee River and thought I was drowned. You think I’m some old sentimentalist?”

  “I’ve been calling for days, Dad. I’ve been out in the cold for the last half hour trying to get your attention.”

  “Well, you got it, all right, with your cat-burglar routine.”

  “Why did you ignore me?” I asked.

  “I didn’t know it was you.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  His friends had all retired and taken to the skies—celestial, or the fly-ways that end in warm weather. “I’ve been getting nothing but calls and visitors.” He flicked on a light and I saw the tide of unopened mail and papers spilling out of the dining room that he called his office.

  I was still in my coat and it was too cold in there to remove it. “What kind of visitors?”

  “Predators and harpies, ‘cawing their lamentations in the eerie trees.’”

  “People from the bank?”

  “It’s none of your goddamned business.”

  Manuscript boxes filled the camelback sofa he’d had since the seventies when we lived in Bloomington. The dusty almond aroma of old books mingled with the smell of buttered popcorn, which my father had long subsisted on. I would have sat down, having traveled all day, but there was nowhere to plant myself. Every chair and settee was stacked with books. On his walls he’d hung more photographs, creepy sepia portraits of other people’s families, scored over the years at estate sales. My mother had drawn the line on this one fetish. Your own ancestors I can understand. But who are these people?