The End of the Book

“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

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

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

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.