Authors: Mona Simpson
A Regular Guy
ACCLAIM FOR MONA SIMPSON’S
A Regular Guy
“Perfectly pitched…. [A] true reflection of our time.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
“[Simpson’s] best so far…. [Tom Owens] is the ‘regular guy’ of the title, high irony in that he is hardly regular…. He is one of the great fictional creations of our era…. Lyrically rendered.”
—Vince Passaro,
The New York Observer
“Simpson is in her element, with her astute eye and compassion for idiosyncratic detail and characters…. [Simpson writes] wonderfully about oddballs craving normalcy, about parents so busy pursuing their dreams they forget about their children’s.”
—
Chicago Tribune
“Simpson knows the ripple effect that spreads from wealth, the social earthquakes and aftershocks that follow when sudden riches erupt…. Like Austen, for whom the nuances of income are more than just numbers, Simpson knows the prices of things. And, more crucially, the prices of people.”
—
New York
“Simpson has never written a novel so teeming, nor one so technically daring…. Her language is as compelling as ever, and so is her wonderful way of prying into all the crevices of the human heart.”
—
Time
“What’s mesmerizing is the razor-sharp way Simpson unveils delicate levels of human covetousness and greed [and the] lyrical flow of her assured, inventive prose.”
—
Elle
“
A Regular Guy
is rich in scale, funny and bitterly poignant…. A beautifully crafted story.”
—
Miami Herald
“The kind of narrative writing—poetic but rooted in the real sights and sounds and smells of living—of which [Simpson’s] in total command…. My, how imaginative and ambitious a writer is Mona Simpson.”
—
Vogue
“A marvelous chronicler of the fractured American family.”
—
Washington Post Book World
“In her luminous and most brilliantly realized novel to date, Mona Simpson … has finally proven Tolstoy’s axiom wrong for this age: Not all happy families are alike and not every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…. Simpson never loses her fine command of perfectly tuned speech, nor does she ever falter in her subtle observations about relationships between men and women, friends and lovers, parents and their children…. Completely absorbing.”
—
Detroit News-Free Press
“Simpson’s intensity and poetic capabilities are as engaging as they were ten years ago…. This is indeed Simpson territory, and territory worth travelling.”
—
The Boston Book Review
“Simpson captures the subtleties of personality and syntax in beautifully modulated voices … [and] brings emotional surrealism to vivid life with … sympathy and intimate detachment.”
—
Newsday
“Sparks in its confrontations and provocations.”
—
Los Angeles Times
“Wryly comic…. Simpson’s most powerful and moving writing is reserved for the fragile, makeshift alliances that sustain her characters, though she turns her deadly irony even on these.”
—
Sunday Times
(London)
“
A Regular Guy
is a minor classic…. Could it be the start of a wonderful series like Updike’s
Rabbit
quartet? … Mona Simpson’s talent is a match for a task that ambitious.”
—
Scotland on Sunday
MONA SIMPSON
A Regular Guy
Mona Simpson’s work has been translated into fourteen languages. She is a recipient of the Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim grant, and the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University. Since 1988 she has taught at Bard College, where she is now the Sadie Samuelson Levy Professor of Languages and Literature. In 1996 she received a grant from the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Foundation and was selected as one of
Granta’s
Best Young American Novelists. She lives with her husband and son.
ALSO BY MONA SIMPSON
The Lost Father
Anywhere But Here
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 1997
Copyright © 1996 by Mona Simpson
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
Portions of this work first appeared in
Ploughshares
and
Granta
.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Simpson, Mona.
A regular guy : a novel / by Mona Simpson.—1
st
ed.
p. cm.
I. Title
PS3569.15117R44 1996
813’.54—dc20 96-2947
eISBN: 978-0-307-76537-6
Author photograph © Gasper Tringale
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1_r1
For Ye, who now has faith
Contents
Chapter 1: What Existed, Far Away, While He Never Wondered
Chapter 2: The Driving Child
Chapter 3: The Proposal
Chapter 4: A Chain Letter
Chapter 5: Van Castle
Chapter 6: In the House of Women
Chapter 7: The Spanish Influence
Chapter 8: Dying Young
Chapter 9: The European Way
Chapter 10: The Hard Way
Chapter 11: Christmasing
Chapter 12: Cherries
Chapter 13: Matisse
Chapter 14: Money
Chapter 15: Parking
Chapter 16: Who Will Be Queen?
Chapter 17: Shoes
Chapter 18: Two Rings
Chapter 19: Election
Chapter 20: Lab Nights
Chapter 21: Voting
Chapter 22: Two Parties
Chapter 23: To the Moon
Chapter 24: Three Regrets
Chapter 25: Here
Chapter 26: The Dance
Prologue: Monuments
H
e was a man too busy to flush toilets. More than most people Jane had known, he was oblivious to the issuance from his body that might offend. He didn’t believe in deodorant and often professed that with a proper diet and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor smell.
This inability, not just to pander, but to see any need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people, was unusual in a man who had political aspirations. It was fortunate, for him, that he was wealthy. Also, he was handsome, so even before his prosperity, he had not been lonely in love. His favorite art was art in the classical mode, particularly public art, in the form of monuments. He was as interested in the Louvre itself as he was in the paintings inside, which, beautiful as some were, and arresting, seemed to him just so many details. If a man wants the face of the earth to look different after his life upon it, he must think on a certain scale.
This afternoon he was taking his daughter to see the Eiffel Tower for the first time. Although he had limited patience for many things, he would never tire of showing places to his children—works, gardens
or even states of feeling he had known. Someday, he would show her Italy. Next winter he intended to teach her how to ski. That, for the most part, made up what he believed a father should do for his children: introduce them to the wonders of the world.
And it was true, years later, long after she’d forgotten walking into the powder room while he was talking cross-continentally to his girlfriend too long on the phone, Jane remembered her father’s tall form, riding with her in the crushingly crowded elevator, to the second-to-top landing of the Eiffel Tower, then walking up the metal stairs in his slant way, standing on the top balcony, his longer-than-most-fathers-of-his-day hair whipping against his round forehead, lips pressed together in a kind of patriotic awe, a smile breaking down towards her. That was him. His hair disheveled by wind, his voice raised to be heard over nature, he strode at the very end of the balcony like the mascot on a ship, invested in the future of the world. He was an American industrialist, a believer in the potential accomplishments of state, and, in a way he couldn’t explain, proud. He was her father. And they saw all of the planned city of Paris spread below them.
He whispered, “I’m kind of thinking of running for office. Hey, doesn’t this remind you a little of the Statue of Liberty?”
He had just told her he might run for office. She assumed he meant running for president. It never occurred to her then that the choice would be anyone’s but his.
That evening, in the hotel, he picked her book out of her hands, flipped through and then returned it. “Have you read anything by Abraham Lincoln?” he asked, dismissing the book issued by her old school. “You should read his speeches. I feel I can learn from people like Abraham Lincoln. See, I think it’s individuals who make history.” He paused a moment. “I think sometime when you’re older, you’re going to understand a lot better.”
“Understand what?”
“I don’t know, why I’m so busy. Why I wasn’t always around when you might have wished I was.” He knocked the cardboard cover of her book. “In school you study history; well, Genesis probably made a few of the great inventions of our time.”
“It’s a company.”
“It’s a company but it’s more than a company.” He fixed a look on her. She was too young to break in at the moment an adult would have, to force his own claims upon himself. His eyebrows went the way they did when he was serious. “You’ll understand when you’re older. A lot more about me.
“Here,” he said, on the top landing of the tower, “we’ll remember this.” He pulled out two candy-colored franc notes, big bills, folded one into a paper airplane and sailed it down, over the metal railing. “Now yours.”
“I’m keeping mine,” Jane said.
Over the years, he took her to see the Empire State Building, the Lincoln Memorial and his favorite mountain lodge, built in the 1930s. He showed her Yosemite, his favorite place on earth, save home.
She led him, once, to an old abandoned factory at night.
“You like this?” he said, features like an owl’s. “Why?”