I bet Ted Thompson blends in, wears nice glasses, and dresses like Don Draper on holiday. One thing I know for sure; he writes like a house on fire. Picturing the days and nights he spent on The Land of Steady Habits, maybe at a desk in a remote house in upstate New York, one can’t help but wonder if he did anything else until this was finished. If you read the first few pages of this book as many times as I have, you might also feel like a minor character at the holiday party which bursts through the opening section of the novel. This is where we meet Anders Hill; a lost soul from the pages of John Updike’s Couples but ultimately resembling a gone-to-seed Neddy Merrill of The Swimmer by John Cheever.
Deeply dug into his 60’s, Anders arrives like a fart, and vanishes almost as quickly. His wife’s friends, who were once his, have now pushed him to the curb. We don’t know much about Anders at this moment, other than he can’t take being at the party, it’s hot, and he needs little fresh air. On the back porch he runs across the kid who will come to define his downfall, and shares a little PCP with him. Thompson has updated this suburban nightmare with the applicable vices, off to the races we go, and the kid overdoses…woops! Anders exits with a laugh, and then the story digs in so deep that I couldn’t set this book down. I direct you to page 49: Thompson sums up Anders like this:
“His sons were born, and his father died, replacing the battles of the past with a steady march of paychecks and work weeks, of pre-dawn mornings and pitch black evenings and stacks of shirts in cardboard boxes. It was a rush to get out, risk in everything, gains and losses in a day’s transactions that no man could recoup in his entire working life. There were good days and bad, good hours and bad, responsibility to shareholders and to senior management, to investors and his own family, a ticking clock of quarterly earnings, and an expectation from everyone, especially himself, to plunge headlong into the rolling seas of the global economy and come back each time a winner.”
We come to find out that Anders is crazy rich, like an international phone number, really big. Ingenious, maybe, but he came up with a way to build a series of low-income houses on large plots of land, and then his company turned on the Xerox machine and hit “copy”. We dip in and out of the past, he marries his college sweetheart who he has stolen from his roommate Donny, all three are circling each other at a blue blood training ground somewhere deep in the north-northeast. It didn’t matter to me where they went to college, but I was impressed that Anders paid for it himself. This little trip into the memory factory is a blessed retreat from boiling water that Anders finds himself in at the party.
Helene, Anders wife, the girl in-between, comes to us as an adult. We meet her when she realizes that her loser son Preston has screwed a friend out of a few dollars. Preston was betting on Jai alai, (raise your hand if you have ever seen that game played…it was big where I grew up…) he is a low rent hustler, at best. Helene is shocked by these dealings, but she has also been graced with a certain disease, so she is racing against the clock to put her life right, and for the most part she does. Preston weaves his way through this story like a ghost, and it is truly sad to see just how lost he is. I’ve meet guys like this, we all have; educated, lucky, smart, but lazy with a kitten’s patience, and mostly lacking dignity. He is the boy/man who divides his parents. Preston is the unwanted dance partner for his father who helps usher in the last waltz.
In Thompson’s barren and frozen mid-Atlantic we discover things about ourselves that we never really want to admit are going on, even thriving, somewhere deep in our hearts. When a friend leads Anders to a night of drinking, a moment of deep nostalgia comes over the book. The two men watch the commuter train from New York City arrive at the station, and wish they could be getting off it, instead of sitting alone in a car, the Saran wrap having just been peeled off their new-found “retirement”. A life that can’t continue, a place they can’t go back to, memories that they won’t relive, but want to. That’s nostalgia. When Preston tells his father to send him the bill for all the schools Preston dropped out of, the tuition’s that couldn’t be refunded, bail money, the lawyers to get him out of Dutch, Anders writes up a bill and sends it to him. Anders is a man who set up everything just right, then he got tired of his wife, his kids grew up and he was left with the only thing that he could not escape, his own expectations. All of which seemed like a good idea at the time, but put to good use are anything but.
