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Northanger Abbey

HERE’S THE FIRST LINE OF MY NEW NOVEL:

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who was born into a wealthy family.”

But it is all a big ruse that the family was wealthy, a ruse that, if you continue reading, will evaporate right in front of your eyes. But for now, suffice it to say that the family was wealthy. At least, that’s what you, the reader, are led to believe thus far, as you’ve only read the first sentence. Do not worry: this is not to mislead you; it’s a source of dramatic tension later on in the story for the reader to think that the family was wealthy, when in fact they were just pretending to be wealthy for appearance’s sake.

Appearances vs. reality is going to be a major theme in this novel, so major that it is going to be one of the book club discussion questions in the back of the book.

So the family, let’s call them the Snooty-Richersons, pretended to be rich for a variety of reasons that will be discussed in detail later on in the novel, which is my latest, which is to say my most current novel or, more specifically, my first novel.

I am writing my first novel!

One reason the family pretended to have money was so that when they sent their son to the fancy private school, Northanger Abbey, the rich kids at the school wouldn’t make fun of him, calling him names like “scoundrel” or “fat ass.”

It’s been duly noted by me, the author, that Northanger Abbey is the name of a novel by Jane Austen, but rest assured, the use of the name “Northanger Abbey” in my novel has nothing to do with Jane Austen. In fact, who’s even read Northanger Abbey in the last twenty-five years? Look at me—I’m writing a novel, and I’ve never read Northanger Abbey, even though I was supposed to in high school, or maybe that was To Kill a Mockingbird. Believe me, it hasn’t kept me from writing. One should always follow his dreams, or in lieu of dreams, take the free “Writing the First Novel” webinar offered by the Learning Annex. Don’t ever let naysayers keep you down, even if your family practically throws you out of the house for refusing to attend anger management classes.

To clarify, this novel takes place in the 1980s because everyone loves the 1980s—that decade is simultaneously cool and retro for the millennials and yet nostalgic for Gen Xers like me. I was in the bank the other day when they started playing the song that was my high school graduation theme, “Dancing on the Ceiling.” I guess they figure that most people cashing checks will have fond memories of high school, but that song plunges me into despair.

Upon looking over my work, I think that it may sound inauthentic for boys to call other boys “scoundrels.” Calling someone a “scoundrel” seems kind of hokey, even for the 1980s. Nowadays, you can get in trouble for using the word “scoundrel,” even in casual conversation. One example would be when you call your local bank teller Robert “a scoundrel” because he questions why you are trying to cash a check with your mother’s name on it.

Here’s a book club question:

“Is it fair to be banned from a bank just for taking action because one’s mother seems to no longer understand the concept of a weekly allowance?”

So the kid’s parents, Fred and Delores, are pretending to be rich so that they can send the kid—his name is Franklyn, or no, better yet, Ralphie—to Northanger Abbey. They mortgage their middle-class home in suburban Chicago so that they can come up with the money for Ralphie to attend Northanger Abbey, which is located in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Fred works as an actuary for State Farm Insurance, which isn’t a bad job, mind you, but it’s a boring job, a job Fred got roped into years earlier when he knocked up Delores while they were both freshmen at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and had to get married. Fred is one of those guys who is genuinely smart, and if he had had better luck and was generally savvier about birth control, he might have invented the Internet or cell phones. But alas, no, he and Delores had to get married, courtesy of Delores getting pregnant and her churchy parents. This will all come out in the middle of the novel, which will be devoted to Fred and Delores’s relationship. There will be some killer sex scenes, so you might want to warn some of your churchier book club members before you all dive in.

You might also want to warn some of the more softhearted book club members that Delores’s story is a very sad one. If you’ve ever cried watching a commercial for Cymbalta, then you will probably bawl your eyes out reading my novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say Delores meets a very unhappy end due to an extreme case of psychosomatic Alzheimer’s disease. If that doesn’t make you want to turn to page one right now, I’m not sure what would.

There are going to be sections of the book written from Fred’s point of view and sections written from Delores’s point of view and sections written from Ralphie’s point of view. The Delores sections are going to be very florid, because Delores is a very florid personality. She is pretending to be a rich housewife, but in reality she is an abstract painter consumed with the idea of painting the outside of the family house so that it blends in with its surroundings, like camouflage. If Delores had her way, you would drive down the street and not even notice the house because it would blend into the neighboring forest preserve. If you didn’t know better, you might think that Delores was a little bit nutty, but you’d be hard-pressed to say that she suffered from a degenerative brain disease, even though that’s what she wants you to think so she can get attention. Anyway, you’ll learn more about Delores’s secret past and tragic present later on because they are integral to the plot. You’ll also learn that Delores used to make a killer vegetarian lasagna back in the day before she conveniently “forgot” how to make dinner.

Another note about Northanger Abbey, the fictional school: it’s not an abbey at all, but when the school was being built, the rich jerks who commissioned it decided to call it Northanger Abbey, because one of them was supposed to read Northanger Abbey in his high school English class and never did, but he liked the name because it sounded all fancified and snobby. Not to give too much away, but it’s going to turn out that Fred’s great-uncle Jason was that rich jerk. It may not seem like a big deal right now, but it’s all going to fit together like pieces in a puzzle.

Here’s a possible book club question:

“If you were one of the three people on record who read Northanger Abbey, what did you like about it? Or are you just a poseur and a snob like Fred’s great-uncle Jason?”

Metaphors are going to be very important in this novel. Keep your eyes open for a plethora of metaphors to hit you smack on the ass!

Anyway, back to the action: Delores, Fred, and Ralphie drive up to Lake Geneva in their Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon. Ralphie is stuck sitting in the wayback because all of his stuff—including the tennis racket, golf clubs, and ascot collection that Delores bought because she thought Ralphie would need them to impress the cultivated kids at Northanger Abbey—is taking up most of the backseat. Cars are passing the family on the highway and kids keep flipping Ralphie the bird because he is a gawky teenager sitting in the wayback, which looks, if I might say, incongruous.

There are going to be many incongruous parts of this novel. You are also going to find lots and lots of dichotomies: there will be a dichotomy between rich and poor, between majorly drugged out and sober, between defenseless sons and withholding parents, between the idyllic appearance of upper-middle-class success and the chaotic reality of a dysfunctional family with loads of debt and lots of shameful secrets. If dichotomies are your bag, then you are going to love this novel.

In the middle of the drive, Fred pulls off the interstate at a rest stop. He tells Delores and Ralphie that he needs to use the men’s room, but he really doesn’t need to use the men’s room. Fred needs to think, alone, away from his family. Dads tend to spend a lot of time in the bathroom when they should be out taking responsibility for their sons’ stunted emotional growth. Instead, he’s in the stall, contemplating how his life got so messed up. See, Fred didn’t tell Delores this because she would kill him, but he just got laid off from his job at State Farm. It’s the 1980s, and everyone is into conspicuous consumption and shoulder pads, including Delores, who, because she had a kid so early on in life, feels like she deserves all kinds of payback from Fred, even though getting pregnant was both of their faults. Delores usually told Fred when to pull out during intercourse, but that one time she got carried away and forgot to give him the signal.

Delores has expensive tastes, which is incongruous because an abstract painter would seem to be an earthy type of person and someone who wouldn’t be interested in material things, but you haven’t met Delores! She’s an enigma. Delores likes fur coats—big, expensive furs from Saks Fifth Avenue. It’s the 1980s, and fur coats are all the rage. PETA hasn’t made many inroads into the celebrity culture yet, so fur is still fine by most people’s standards. Fred bought Delores a beaver coat one year, which cost him a bundle, but Delores said that she preferred mink and expects one this Christmas, which is only a few short months away.

Fred wipes away the sweat from his brow in the men’s room. He’s sweating because it’s the end of August in northern Illinois and humid as hell, but also because he’s nervous about coming clean about his financial situation. The other big thing we learn in this scene is that Fred lied to the Northanger Abbey bursar in a telephone conversation just that morning, saying that he is bringing the check for Ralphie’s first semester. In reality, Fred doesn’t have the money, even with the Snooty-Richerson suburban home in hock.

Here’s another question for the book clubs:

“What is the etymology of the word ‘bursar’?”

We learn in a later chapter that it was Fred’s fault that he got laid off because he was having an affair with his secretary, Ms. Donna Fulsome, who wasn’t disgusted by giving blow jobs the way Delores was. Apparently someone in the typing pool overheard Ms. Donna Fulsome talking dirty to Fred and blew the whistle on their affair. State Farm didn’t need a sexual harassment lawsuit, so it let Fred go, even though he was great at his job and super smart to boot.

This is compelling! What is Fred going to do?

My next novel is going to be about what could have happened to Fred if he hadn’t screwed up and gotten Delores preggers. I think it might be about Fred creating a superweapon and battling aliens who threaten to dominate Earth. Or it could be a novel about Ralphie accidentally discovering Fred’s secret second family (the Fulsome-Snooty-Richersons) and the recurrent Cymbalta abuse that discovery engenders.

Just as we are wondering what will happen to Fred in the men’s room, the novel jumps ahead and follows Ralphie, now a junior at Northanger Abbey. It’s clear that Ralphie is attending Northanger Abbey, but it’s unclear how that was possible, given that Fred didn’t have the money to pay for it. But that’s not our focus here, because Ralphie is in the midst of an existential crisis. This will be made obvious to the reader by a hundred-pound weight gain since we last saw him at the rest stop on the way to start his freshman year and also his more-than-recreational drug use. He’s getting Ds in his gen ed classes and is considering transferring to Carl Sandburg High School in his hometown of Orland Park, Illinois.

Here’s another question for the book clubs:

“How might Ralphie’s life have been different (weight-wise, drug-use-wise, emotional-health-wise) if his parents weren’t shallow yuppies with addictive personalities?”

At this point, there will be a lengthy digression discussing the pros and cons of transferring to Carl Sandburg High School. Here are a few examples:

PRO: Carl Sandburg High School has tons of extracurricular activities, such as sports and student-run organizations like the Key Club. Key Club members raise money for the school through fund-raisers, like car washes and candy-bar sales. Being involved in the Key Club prepares one to be a good citizen and even has the potential to help a person get into the college of his choice.

CON: Carl Sandburg High School is full of douches.

In the rest of the chapter, through Ralphie’s rambling first-person narrative stream of consciousness, the reader will deduce that Fred and Delores may have both been killed in a car crash. It’s hard to pinpoint because Ralphie is all jacked up on quaaludes. We can also infer that Ralphie is the resident adviser of the Quiet Residential Plaza, also known as the “nerd dorm,” because in the middle of his delusional rant—which, by the way, is occurring at three o’clock in the morning—one of the nerd freshmen on his floor, Janet Goodwin, comes running into his room. Janet says there’s an emergency and that Ralphie better get to her room, stat! Running on pure adrenaline, Ralphie picks his fat ass up off the floor, toppling the three-foot bong he bought while on spring break at South Padre Island earlier that year, and leaps into action.

Janet Goodwin will later figure in a romantic subplot with Fred and Ms. Donna Fulsome, but I don’t want to give away too much just yet.

This is exciting! How about the complication of Ralphie being whacked out on drugs and forced to act in an emergency? Here there will be a long description of how the Count Chocula T-shirt Ralphie is wearing stretches tightly over his large gut, and we can practically hear the swish swish his dung-colored corduroys are making as his thighs rub together as he races down the dark but tastefully appointed hallway.

Delores should have known that corduroy is one of the least forgiving materials you can find on planet Earth. If Delores hadn’t been such a self-involved narcissist, then she would have been invited to play bridge with the other mothers in the neighborhood and thus would have known that bullies like Matt Kelly, who lived next door, specifically targeted boys dressed in Wrangler cords.

Ralphie gets to Janet’s room all out of breath and finds Fred sitting on her bed, crying. Whoa! No one expected Fred to show up at this point! We thought Fred might be dead, but given that he is sitting on Janet’s bed, we can see for ourselves that he is alive, and apparently Ralphie’s earlier rant was just a hallucination or a delusion. Or was it?

It turns out Fred is having an existential crisis of his own back home in Orland Park and thought he would drive up to Northanger Abbey to visit Ralphie on a whim.

“It’s the middle of the night, Dad,” Ralphie says.

“Is it?” Fred says.

“Yes. The middle of the night,” Ralphie says.

“Night. Ah, night,” says Fred, “the darkest part of the day.”

The best dialogue is always pulled from real life, right? You can’t make this shit up.

As you might notice, this is a very obscure conversation in which Fred and Ralphie talk about nothing, but there is a ton of subtext regarding Fred and Delores’s crumbling marriage and Ralphie’s self-destructive tendencies learned at the knee of his father. How else do you think boys learn about quaaludes? From their cheating, quaalude-popping dads of course!

Here’s another book club question:

“Ever heard of the ‘iceberg’? You’re in a book club—you must have read Hemingway. If not, why not?”

Here’s another one:

“Does hearing the song ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ make you wish that Lionel Richie was your father instead of your real father?”

This inscrutable dialogue will be very important because Fred will tell Ralphie, in a not-very-easy-to-comprehend manner, that he is leaving Orland Park because Delores divorced him in a fit of pique. This too will all be explained in the series of florid chapters written from Delores’s florid point of view. The reader will find out that Delores took the bus to New York City to try her luck in the New York art scene, Andy Warhol and that shit, and over the course of the novel, she becomes a huge success in the folk art community. Too bad she now claims that she can no longer remember her fame and fortune, or, for that matter, her son’s name.

This novel has something for everyone. It’s got black humor, dichotomies, metaphors, drug usage, suburban angst, semiautomatic weapons, corduroys, an iceberg, and lots, lots more.

At this point, there is going to be a “meta” chapter about how the novel Northanger Abbey is a satire of gothic novels from the eighteenth century, like The Mysteries of Udolpho. This part of the book is going to pander to literary types who join book clubs to show off how smart they are because they were comp lit majors at Brown like forty years ago.

In an ironic twist, instead of reading and discussing the book during the book club get-togethers, one of these literary types, let’s call her Mrs. Schnell, spends that time in the kitchen, attempting to seduce her best friend Delores’s son, Ralphie. Mrs. Schnell, while old as dirt, wears an intoxicating perfume that makes saying no to her sexual advances extremely difficult.

This chapter will have surprising plot machinations, like when a confused Delores breezes into the kitchen and, thinking she’s in the bathroom, pulls down her pants and starts peeing on the linoleum, all while Ralphie is being fellated in front of the fridge. Again, churchy book club types beware!

According to Mrs. Schnell, “meta” novels are hot right now and one has to try to stay current on literary trends, even if one has never heard of The Mysteries of Udolpho, let alone knows what a gothic novel is. Unless you’re a sixty-something retired high school English teacher who still gives a great blow job, you would probably have no idea. I sure didn’t! And I still don’t.

Don’t let The Mysteries of Udolpho keep you from reading my book!

Here’s another book club question:

“If Delores claims that she pissed on the kitchen floor because she thought she was on the toilet, does she suffer from early onset Alzheimer’s or is she just a crazy bitch?”

Another chapter is going to address how there is medical evidence that eating certain types of foods can help people with “brain diseases” remember important facts about their lives that they claim to have forgotten. I find that eating sardines makes my brain work better. Sure, the checkout people think I’m a little bit nutty for buying sardines ten tins at a time, but I have found that sardines, more than any type of food, give me the kind of creative energy I need to keep writing. I personally love sardines in tomato sauce, but I have been known, in a pinch, to eat the kind in olive oil. My favorite way to eat sardines is with saltines. I keep sardines and saltines in my cupboards at all times. But that’s my creative process—an interesting fact for the book clubs. You heard it here first, because once I become a famous novelist, sardines are going to be the new food favorite that everyone is going to want to eat. A sardine company might even pay me to become its celebrity sponsor.

Another possible book club question:

“Which do you like better: sardines in tomato sauce or sardines in olive oil?”

Here’s another one:

“Are you plagued by dreams where your mother serves you what is supposed to be her delicious vegetarian lasagna but it ends up morphing into a pile of sardines? What do you think that means?”

It’s going to come out in a later chapter that Ralphie is going to end up fighting a lifelong addiction to Hershey’s Bars. Mrs. Schnell, the English teacher who oversaw the Key Club, never checked Ralphie’s candy-bar inventory. Ralphie began to hear strange, urgent voices in his head, telling him to eat all his Key Club bars, and after a while, people started calling him “fatty fat-fat” and “pig face” and “buffalo ass.”

As an adult, it is going to be impossible for Ralphie not to pig out on Hershey’s Bars whenever he encounters them at the grocery store when he is picking up sardines.

I hope that buffalo ass Matt Kelly is homeless somewhere, sleeping under the el tracks.

I’ve just figured out how Fred could afford to send Ralphie to Northanger Abbey! Major plot twist: Fred will find out from an episode of Antiques Roadshow that a grandfather clock he inherited from his great-uncle Jason is worth a million dollars, and that’s how he and Delores will have the money to send Ralphie to Northanger Abbey. Done and done. Fuck Carl Sandburg High School.

CON: Carl Sandburg High School throws totally lame twenty-year reunions that are not worth the fifty bucks borrowed from Delores’s Social Security check. No one even remembered me. Not even Matt Kelly.

Here’s something I just wrote:

“‘Hey, pig face! You have a fat ass!’ said Matt Kelly.

[I just decided that Matt Kelly is going to be the name of a fictional student at Northanger Abbey.]

“‘Is that the best you can do, scoundrel?’ Ralphie said, hoisting his three-foot bong over his head and smashing it on top of Matt Kelly’s dung-colored hair. Matt Kelly fell over, a large red gash apparent in his big, putrid head.

“‘I guess it’s all over,’ said Ralphie, watching as Matt Kelly’s brains ran out over the plush white Stainmaster carpet that came standard in every dorm room at Northanger Abbey.”

There’s been a murder at Northanger Abbey! I did not see that one coming. As a writer, you never feel good about killing off a character, but if it’s in service to the story, then so be it.

I’m going to change Ralphie’s name back to Franklyn. It’s been rough going through life being named Ralphie. I don’t know what my parents were thinking. It’s extremely selfish to saddle a child with that kind of baggage.

Here’s another question for the book clubs:

“Why is Delores still in a book club when she claims she can’t even read anymore? Is she faking dementia to avoid making amends for all the messed-up shit she and Fred dumped on Ralphie growing up? Did she ever love him? Discuss.”

If Mrs. Schnell comes to the book club meeting tonight, I may invite her back to my bedroom to show her the first and only page of the novel and then I’m hoping to bang the hell out of her. I think she’ll be impressed that despite all that has happened to me, I’ve turned out pretty good. I’m writing a novel, aren’t I?

This is going to be the last line of my novel:

“Franklyn’s ghost dusted off his own grave. He sighed and disappeared into the darkness.”

My novel will have something in it for everyone. Believe me.