Too Close to Home

Derek said, “Pretty warped, right? So he finds out that somehow, in the middle of the night, like magic or something, he loses his, you know, his dick, and instead, he’s got a vagina.”

I glanced through the remaining pages, then set them on the workbench.

“You’re not going to read all of it?” Derek said.

“I’ve got the general idea,” I said.

“Because it does get better. Even though it’s weird, in a way, he makes it believable, all the shit that’s happening.”

“I’ve read enough,” I said.

“It’s actually more funny than porno, you know? It’s like how his life completely changes when he’s got, like, no dick anymore. How he starts to see life from the point of view of a woman, how the only way he’s going to be sexually satisfied is to make out with guys, even though he’s not gay or anything, and shit, you can see why I didn’t want to talk about this with Mom around.”

“Sure,” I said, not really listening all that closely to what Derek was saying.

“I can go print out more of it if you want, or I could just make a copy of it and e-mail it to you and you could read it on your own computer, although maybe that’s not a good idea because then Mom will see it and she might freak out or something, right?”

“You don’t have to do any of that,” I said. “I’ve already read this book.”

ELEVEN

It was not actually published as Nicholas Dickless. It was released as A Missing Part. It was a major bestseller about eight years ago. Hit the New York Times list. It didn’t hurt in the slightest that some of the major non-bookstore chains, like Costco and Wal-Mart, refused to carry it out of fear of offending their more conservative customers. It was the best thing that could happen to A Missing Part. Once it got labeled as forbidden, Borders and Barnes amp; Noble and independent bookstores could barely keep it in stock.

I don’t know how many copies it actually sold. A hundred thousand, half a million, a million, did it really matter after a certain point? There was talk at one point of making it into a movie, but that never happened. If it had, I think I would have waited for the DVD. Actually, reading the book was enough, and I hadn’t particularly wanted to do that. But I couldn’t stop myself. I thought maybe reading it would provide some insights into the author, would help me understand why my wife had chosen to sleep with him. But I have to say, once I’d finished it, I was none the wiser.

What I do know is that the book made Conrad Chase a literary star. It catapulted the Thackeray College English professor to national fame and paved the way for him to become that institution’s president. It’s unlikely a guy could write a book like A Missing Part and be made principal of an elementary school, but a college with a fairly left-of-center point of view was a different thing altogether. Granted, someone who’d written a book about a man losing his penis and testicles and ending up with a vagina instead, if he was going to become a college president, you might have at least expected it to be a college in California, and not upstate New York.

But Conrad Chase had brought fame not only upon himself, but Thackeray as well. And while at first the college administration and fellow faculty had responded uncomfortably to Chase’s outrageous novel and were inclined to distance themselves from it, as it soared up the bestseller list, and as critics embraced it as a work of satirical genius and brilliant social commentary, the general feeling on campus was, what the hell, let’s see how we can use this to our advantage.

Chase, who taught early American literature and a course on the plays of Eugene O’Neill, became the college darling. Thackeray had never had a bestselling author before. Chase wasn’t the first professor to get published-everyone who taught there felt tremendous pressure to publish something, at some point, during their careers, even if no one would ever actually read it, which was generally the fate of most of the academic treatises that Thackeray professors produced. He wasn’t the first to publish a work of fiction, but he was the first to receive international recognition.

The administration decided to use Chase’s notoriety to fashion a new reputation for the college. They had already been running a literary festival for a couple of years that they wanted to continue as an annual event. It’s why they had hired Ellen. Now they had their own headliner in Conrad Chase. It made it easier to attract famous authors to Promise Falls. And that’s what the college had been doing for several years, running the thing over four days, setting up lots of different venues where authors could read or talk about their works, bringing in the public. They got Mayor Finley on board, who saw this not only as a way to get Promise Falls more recognition, but also as a way to give his profile a boost.