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I get my first flying book at around eight the next morning. One doesn't instantly identify the sound of a flying book. The light, fluttering sound of airborne pages is followed by a jarring thud as the book caroms off the living room picture window and lands in the front yard. I roll off the couch in my father's den, nauseous and without any discernible center of gravity, and peer groggily out the living room window, expecting to see another dazed or broken bird lying bewildered on the lawn. Instead, I am greeted by my own face smiling pretentiously up at me from the dust jacket of a hardcover copy of Bush Falls, which lies facedown and spread open, the upper portion of the book's spine indented from its collision with the window. The street in front of the house is completely deserted.

There is the sound of soft breathing behind me, and I turn around to find Jared sleeping on the living room couch in jeans and a black T-shirt that says "Bowling for Soup." I don't remember seeing him there when I came in last night, although that can hardly be considered conclusive. "Hey, Jared," I mumble. Four beds upstairs, and we both slept on couches.

"Hey," he grunts back, not opening his eyes.

"You'll be late for school."

He opens one eye."Doesn't really pay to go, then, does it?" The eye closes.

He'll get no argument from me. I head upstairs for a shower, pausing only long enough to doff my shorts and perform some spastic dry heaves over the toilet. The light hits my eyes like needles, so I shower in the dark, leaning against the cold tiles in an effort to wake myself up. The hot water pummels my scalp soothingly, cascading in torrents down my face and shoulders, and my mind wanders. I think about Wayne and then my father and the scrapbook I found last night. It's unbelievable to me that before yesterday they and the Falls were such a remote part of my life, distant memories more than anything else. Now they threaten to consume me, the protective barrier of the last seventeen years dissipating like a mirage.

I step dripping into my bedroom, feeling hungover and old, to find Jared clipping his toenails on my bed. "Look at you," he says with an inquisitive smirk, taking in my battered face and bruised ribs.

"You look. I'm too tired."

"You know," he continues disinterestedly. "Statistically speaking, blocking at least some punches in a fight will usually lead to a more favorable outcome."

"I'll take that under advisement."

There's another bang from downstairs, and we both look out the window to see a green station wagon disappearing around the corner. On the lawn there is now a second copy of Bush Fallssplayed out fairly close to the first one. "What's up with that?" Jared asks, not concerned, just mildly curious, and then leans back to resume clipping his toenails.

My cell phone rings, and Jared picks it up off the night table and tosses it to me. It's Owen, calling to see how things are going. I update him on my father's condition, and he clucks and murmurs in all the right places. "And how has it been otherwise?" he asks pointedly. "You know, your return to the Falls?"

"Pretty crazy."

"I knew it!" he exclaims gleefully. "Do tell, do tell."

I quickly relate all of the events of the past day, listening to Owen's delighted gasps while Jared watches me, listening raptly, smirking when I include the incident of his coitus interruptus. "So let's review," Owen says when I'm done, not even trying to conceal his merriment. "In the last twenty-four hours, you've returned to your hometown, where essentially everybody hates you, you've been reunited, however awkwardly, with your estranged family, you've walked in on a sexual liaison, gotten in trouble with the law, been assaulted on two separate occasions, and met up with an ailing friend and gotten drunk with him. Am I leaving anything out?"

I consider telling him about the flying books, but I haven't gotten my mind wrapped around that one yet, so I leave it out. "That's pretty much it," I say.

Owen whistles softly. "I wonder what you're going to do today."

"You make it sound like I planned all of this."

"Au contraire, mon frère. For the first time in god knows how long, it's spinning wonderfully out of your control."

"And what the hell does that mean?"

But Owen has to go. "Listen, I'm late for something.We'll talk later."

"Wait."

"What?"

"Did you finish the manuscript?" I ask hesitantly.

"It's interesting that you refer to it as 'the' manuscript," Owen says. "Most writers, passionate about their work, will always refer to it in the possessive, as in 'my' manuscript."

"What's your point?"

"It seems you're already distancing yourself from your work."

"Oh, fuck off," I say. "Did you read it or not?"

"I did."

"And?"

"I have," he says, inhaling as he searches for the right word, "issues."

"So I gathered," I say dejectedly. "What do we do now?"

Owen sighs. "Well, we could make some changes and I'm sure I could still sell it, but I'm not convinced your interests are best served that way."

I allow the implications of that to sink in for a moment. "It's really bad, isn't it?"

"You're a good writer, Joe."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. Just say it sucked."

"If I thought it sucked, I would tell you it sucked." Owen takes another deep breath. "Listen, we've discussed this. You know the second one's always a bitch. There's too much riding on it. It's almost worth writing just to get it the fuck out of the way."

"So we just forget about it and move on to book number three?"

"That idea is not without merit."

"And why won't book three be just as bad? I can't even figure out where this one went wrong."

"Ah, but I already have," Owen says grandly. "That's why you pay me the big bucks."

"Would you care to enlighten

me?"

"I could, but muddling through on your own is a critical journey for you as a writer."

"You are so full of shit," I say, annoyed.

"It's true, it's true," he admits.

"Then what good are you?"

"That, my friend, is a whole other conversation," he says with a chuckle. "I'll call you back.

I snap the phone shut and toss it onto the bed in disgust. "Problems?" Jared says.

"Just the usual." I notice his T-shirt again. I know I'll regretit, but I ask anyway. "What's 'Bowling for Soup'?"

"A band."

"Never heard of them," I say. This doesn't appear to shock my nephew in the least. And there it is, out in the open for all to see. I am officially an old fart. "What kind of band are they?" I ask, determined to prove that I'm at least generally up to speed.

"Kind of a mixture of pop and SoCal punk."

"SoCal?"

"Southern California," he explains. "Take the punk rock from your generation, like the Ramones or the Sex Pistols—" "They were before my time," I point out weakly.

"Whatever," he says. "Anyway, take that stuff, add better musicians and production values and better songwriting, and that's basically SoCal punk.

"Like Blink 182," I say.

"Like Blink before they sold out," Jared says, wrapping up his toenail clippings in a tissue and tossing it into the wastebasket behind me, and for a brief instant I hate him.

"Fenix TX?" I try.

Jared looks up at me, surprised, and I feel a little better.

"You listen to Fenix?

"Doesn't everybody?"

My cell phone rings again while I'm tying my shoes. "Could you get that?" I say.

Jared flips open the phone, and even from where I'm crouched across the room, I can hear Nat's voice shouting through the plastic. "Oops," he says with a grin, leaning forward to hand me the phone. I listen for a few more seconds, and then she hangs up. "Man," Jared says. "Does anybody like you?

"You like me, don't you?"

He grins sadly at me and says, "I don't count, man."

My arrival makes the front page of The Minuteman, above the fold, no less. Jared has retrieved the paper from its plastic blue mailbox at the edge of the driveway and now tosses it onto the counter in the kitchen while I'm mixing some Folgers into a mug. "You're famous again," he says with his trademark grin. "Controversial Author Returns" is the headline in the top left corner. Below it is a grainy reproduction of my book jacket author photo. With mounting unease, I sit down and read the article.
 

After a 17-year absence, author Joseph Goffman returned to Bush Falls yesterday. Goffman's best-selling novel, Bush Falls, angered many residents here when it was released in 1999. The book was loosely based on a number of incidents alleged to have taken place in Goffman's senior year at Bush Falls High. Although the book is classified as fiction, the author's use of these incidents,as well as characters clearly based on wellknown residents of the Falls, caused a great deal of controversy when the novel was first published. Many locals viewed the book as nothing short of libel, written with deliberate malice and the intent to damage reputations. The novel and its author were widely condemned in raging editorials in this newspaper and on local radio and television stations as well. The recent film version, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kirsten Dunst, has done nothing to assuage the collective anger felt toward Mr. Goffman. 

Coach Thomas Dugan was one of those singled out for a negative portrayal in the novel."I don't care about what he wrote about me," commented Dugan at the time. "But the condescending, offensive way in which he wrote about our beloved team and its history, which has meant so much to so many of the good people of this town throughout the years, is unforgivable. He's insulted every boy who ever played for the Cougars, and all of the good people who support them."

"This is a guy who's gotten rich by lying about the people in this town," said Deputy Sheriff Dave Muser, a former classmate of Goffman's who feels he personally suffered from a negative portrayal in the novel. "It's a slap in all of our faces that he thinks he can just walk back into the Falls. He should know he's no longer welcome here." 

Alice Lippman, whose women's book club meets monthly at Paperbacks Plus, was similarly outraged. "We selected Bush Falls when it first came out, and I don't think there was a single member of the book club who wasn't morally outraged by it. I hope I run into Mr. Goffman, so that I can tell him in person what an awful, destructive man he is." 

Goffman's father, local businessman Arthur Goffman, suffered a stroke this past Monday while playing basketball in the Cougars alumni league. Although father and son are reportedly estranged, it is his father's condition that is presumably the reason for Goffman's return to the Falls.

There is no byline, and I wonder if Carly wrote the article. If not, as editor in chief she'd at least have reviewed it before it went to press. I scan the article carefully, searching for any slant, any choice of words that might render some clue as to what her attitude toward me might be, but I come up empty. I discard the paper and, for the first time since my return, really allow myself to think about Carly, something I've been deliberately avoiding up until now. I would be hard-pressed to conjure up the images of women I dated a few weeks ago, but reconstructing Carly's face on the canvas of my mind takes absolutely no effort.

And now, sitting in my father's kitchen, I recall easily the taste of her kisses, the expression on her face as I clumsily worked to undo the buttons of her blouse that first time, a delightful combination of naked desire and affectionate humor. I told her I loved her, my chest quivering from the absolute truth of it all, and she kissed me deeply and said it right back. We lasted eight months, barely a pinprick on the overall time line, but when you're eighteen, time isn't nearly as crotchety and relentless as it becomes soon thereafter, and eight months is nothing less than a lifetime.

I push myself away from the table and head outside, stepping over the battered copy of Bush Falls lying faceup on the front walk, resolved to leave the books where they've landed. I'm opening the car door when I see that sometime during the night someone keyed my Mercedes, a handful of nasty, jagged streaks that traverse the car door in a clumsy, serpentine path, decimating the paint job. I study the scarred metal for a moment, the indecipherable hieroglyphics of vandalism, then climb into the car, taking pains not to disturb my bruised rib cage any more than is absolutely necessary. I drive off, still thinking about how far I've unwittingly drifted from the boy I used to be and wondering at how little I have to show for it.

Chapter One

Just a few scant months after my mother's suicide, I walked into the garage, looking for my baseball glove, and discovered Cindy Posner on her knees, animatedly performing fellatio on my older brother, Brad. He was leaned up against our father's tool rack, the hammers and wrenches jingling musically on their hooks like Christmas bells as he rocked gently back and forth, staring up at the ceiling with a curiously bored expression. His jeans and boxers were bunched up around his knees, his hand resting absently on her bobbing head as she went about her surprisingly noisy oral ministrations. I stood there transfixed until Brad, sensing my arrival, looked down from the ceiling and our eyes met. There was no alarm in his eyes, no embarrassment at having been caught in so compromising a position, but only the same look of tired resignation he always seemed to have where I was concerned.

That's right. I'm getting a blow job in the garage. It's a safe bet you never will. Cindy, whose back was to me, noticed me a few seconds later and became instantly hysterical, cursing and shrieking at me as I beat a hasty, if somewhat belated, retreat. I was thirteen years old at the time.

It's entirely possible that Cindy would have handled herself with a bit more aplomb had she known that years later the incident would be immortalized in the first chapter of the best-selling autobiographical novel that I would write and, as with most successful books, in the inevitable movie that would follow shortly thereafter. By then she was no longer Cindy Posner, but Cindy Goffman, having married Brad in their senior year of college, and I think it's fair to say that this inclusion in my book did nothing to improve our already tenuous relationship. The book is titled Bush Falls, after the small Connecticut town where I grew up, a term I use loosely, since the jury's still out on whether I've actually ever grown up at all.

By now you've certainly heard of Bush Falls, or no doubt seen the movie, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio and Kirsten Dunst, and did some pretty decent box office. Or maybe you read about the major controversy it caused back in my hometown, where they even went so far as to put together a class action libel suit against me that never went anywhere. Either way, the book was a runaway best-seller about two and a half years ago, and for a little while there, I became a minor celebrity.

Any schmuck can be unhappy when things aren't going well, but it takes a truly unique variety of schmuck, a real innovator in the schmuck field, to be unhappy when things are going as great as they are for me. At thirty-four, I'm rich, successful, have sex on a fairly regular basis, and live in a three bedroom luxury apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. This should be ample reason to feel that I have the world by its proverbial short hairs, yet I've recently developed the sneaking suspicion that underneath it all I am one sad, lonely son of a bitch, and have been for some time. While there is no paucity of women in my life these days, it nevertheless seems that every relationship I've had in the two and a half years since the publication of Bush Falls has lasted almost exactly eight weeks, following the same essential flight pattern. In the first week I pull out all the stops—fancy restaurants, concerts, Broadway shows, and trendy nightclubs— modestly avoiding any high-minded banter concerning the literary world in favor of current events, movies, and celebrity gossip, which are of course the real currency in the New York dating scene, even if no one will admit it. Not that being a celebrated author isn't worth something, but stories about Miramax parties or how you hung out on the set with Leo and Kirsten will get you laid much faster and by a better caliber of woman.Weeks two and three are generally the best, the time you'd like to bottle and store, primarily due to the endorphin rush of fresh sex. At some point in the fourth week, I fall in love, briefly considering the possibility that this could be The One, and then everything pretty much goes to shit in slow motion. I waffle, I vacillate, I get insecure, I come on too strong. I conduct little psychological experiments on myself or the woman involved.You get the picture. This goes on for a couple of painfully awkward weeks, and then we both spend week seven in the fervent hope that the relationship will magically dissolve on its own, through an act of god or spontaneous combustion—anything to avoid having to actually navigate the tediously perilous terrain of a full-blown breakup. The last week is spent "taking some time,"which ends with a final, perfunctory phone call finalizing the arrangement and resolving any outstanding logistics. I'll drop the bag and Donna Karan sweater you left in my apartment with the doorman, you can keep the books I lent you, thanks for the memories, no hard feelings, let's stay friends, et cetera, ad nauseam. I know it bespeaks poor character to blame others for your problems, but I'm fairly certain this is all Carly's fault. Carly Diamond was my high school girlfriend, the first—and, to date, only—woman I've ever loved.We were together for our entire senior year, and loved each other with the fierce, timeless conviction of teenagers. That was the same year that all the terrible events described in my novel occurred, and my relationship with her was the lone bright spot in my dismally expanding universe.

If you want to get technical about it, we never actually broke up. We graduated high school and went to different colleges, Carly up to Harvard and me down to NYU.We tried to do the long-distance thing, but my adamant refusal to return to the Falls for our mutual vacations made it difficult, and over time we simply grew apart, but we never formally dissolved our relationship. After college, Carly came to New York to study journalism, at which point we embarked on one of those long, messy postgraduate friendships where you have just enough sex to thoroughly confuse the hell out of each other and ultimately, through a sequence of poor timing and third-party complications, fuck the life out of what was once the purest thing you'd ever known.

We still loved each other then, that much was obvious, but while Carly seemed ready to reclaim our relationship, I kept finding reasons to remain uncommitted. No matter how much I loved her—and I did—I was constantly comparing the timbre of our relationship with the raw beauty, the sense of discovery, that had attended our every moment when we were seventeen. By the time I finally understood the colossal nature of my mistake, it was too late and Carly was gone. Losing her once was sad but understandable. Carelessly discarding the second chance afforded me by the fates required such a potent mixture of arrogance and stupidity that it had to have been cultivated, because I'm fairly certain I wasn't always such a complete asshole.

I've never forgiven myself for the head games I played with her during her years in New York, wooing her whenever I felt her slipping away and then pulling back the minute I felt secure again. I allowed her unwavering belief in us to sustain me even at times when I didn't share it, leading her along with promises, both spoken and implied but never fulfilled. By the time I finally began to understand how badly I'd been using her, I had used her up completely. She left New York heartbroken and disgusted, returning to the Falls to accept a position as managing editor ofThe Minuteman, the town's local paper. Every time I think I've gotten over her, I find myself waking in the middle of the night, pining for her with such desperation that you would think it was only yesterday and not ten years ago that she left.

Since then not a day goes by that I am not haunted by a vague but powerful sense of regret, every woman I date serving as a reminder of what I allowed myself to lose. So in a way, it's because of Carly that I'm alone in bed in the middle of the night when the phone rings, its electronic wail piercing the insulated silence of my apartment like a siren. Generally speaking, when people call you at two in the morning, it won't be good news. My first thought, as I swim up through the dense wormwood haze of alcohol-induced sleep, is that it has to be Natalie, my borderline-psychotic ex-girlfriend, calling to scream at me. I don't know what damage I could have possibly done to her apparently fragile psyche in eight weeks, but her latest therapist has convinced her that she still has significant unresolved issues with me and that it behooves her, from a mental wellness perspective, to call me, day or night, whenever it occurs to her to remind me what an insensitive jerk I was. The calls started about four months ago and now come fairly regularly, both at home and on my cell phone, thirty-second installments of furious invective with abundant smatterings of vulgarity, requiring absolutely no participation from me. If it happens that I'm unavailable, Nat is perfectly content to leave her colorful harangues on my voice mail. She's always been drawn to radical therapy, much as lately I seem to be drawn to women who require it. The phone keeps ringing. I don't know if it's been two rings or ten; I just know it isn't stopping. I roll onto my side and rub my face vigorously, trying to coax the sleep from my head. The skin of my cheeks feels like putty, loose and fleshy, as if the night's prior excesses have dramatically aged me. I went out with Owen earlier, and, as usual, we got supremely shit-faced. Owen Hobbs, agent extraordinaire, is my emissary not only to the literary establishment but to all conceivable manner of chaos and debauchery. I never drink except when I'm with him, and then I drink like him, voraciously and with great ceremony. He's made me rich, and he gets fifteen percent, which has turned out to be a better foundation for a friendship than you might think, usually worth the thrashing hangovers that always follow what he terms our "celebrations." A night with Owen inevitably takes the shape of a downward spiral upon which in retrospect I can identify only a handful of the spins and turns as I nurse my wounded body back into the realm where consciousness and sobriety rudely intersect. And while I'm still loosely ensconced in that precariously optimistic place where drunkenness has departed and the hangover is still mulling over its options, I nevertheless feel nauseous and off-kilter.

The phone. Without moving my head from where it lies embedded in my pillow, I reach out in the general direction of my night table, knocking over some magazines, an open bottle of Aleve, and a half-filled mug of water,which splashes mutely on the plush ecru carpeting. The cordless is actually on the floor to begin with, and when I finally locate it and hoist it up to my immobile head, cold droplets of spilled water seep into my ear canal like slugs.

"Hello?" It's a woman's voice. "Joe?"

"Who's this," I say, lifting my head slightly so as to move the mouthpiece somewhere in the general vicinity of my mouth. It's not Nat, which means some speaking on my part might be required.

"It's Cindy."

"Cindy," I repeat carefully.

"Your sister-in-law."

"Oh." That Cindy.

"Your father's had a stroke." My brother's wife blurts this out like a premature punch line. In most families, such monumental news would merit a thoughtfully orchestrated presentation carefully constructed to minimize shock while facilitating gradual acceptance. Such grave news would probably warrant a personal delivery from the blood relative, in this case my older brother, Brad. But I am family to Brad and my father only in a strictly legal sense. On those rare occasions when they do acknowledge my existence, it's out of some vague sense of civic responsibility, like paying taxes or jury duty.

"Where's Brad?" I say, keeping my voice just above a whisper as people who live alone do needlessly at night.

"He's over at the hospital," Cindy says. She's never liked me, but that isn't entirely her fault. I've never actually given her any reason to.

"What happened?"

"Your dad's in a coma," she says matter-of-factly, as if I've asked her the time. "It's quite serious. They don't know if he's going to make it."

"Don't sugarcoat it, now," I mutter, sitting up in my bed, which causes pockets of violence to erupt among the trillions of neurons rallying like soccer fans in my left temple. There follows a pause. "What?" Cindy says. I remind myself that my particular style of irony is usually lost on her. I take a quick emotional inventory, searching for any reaction to the news that my father might be dying: grief, shock, anger, denial. Something.

"Nothing," I say.

Another uncomfortable pause. "Well, Brad said you shouldn't come tonight but that you should meet him at the hospital tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," I repeat dumbly, looking at the clock again. It already is tomorrow.

"You can stay with us, or you can stay at your father's place. Actually, his house is closer to the hospital."

"Okay." Somewhere in my diminishing stupor, it registers that my presence is being requested or, rather, presumed. Either way, it's highly unusual.

"Well, which is it? Do you want to stay with us or at your dad's?"

A more compassionate person might wait for the shock to wear off before pressing ahead with the petty logistics of the whole thing, but Cindy has little in the way of compassion where I'm concerned.

"Whatever," I say. "Whatever's better for you guys."

"Well, it's usually a madhouse here, with the kids and all," she says. "I think you'll be happier in your old house."

"Okay."

"Your father's in Mercy Hospital. Do you need directions?"

Her question is quite possibly a deliberate dig at the fact that I haven't been back to the Falls in almost seventeen years.

"Have they moved it?"

"No."

"Then I should be fine."

I can hear her shallow breathing as another uncomfortable silence grows like a tumor over the phone line. Cindy, three years older than me, was the archetypal popular girl in Bush Falls High School. With lustrous dark hair and an exquisite body sculpted to perfection in her cheerleading drills, she was unquestionably the most universally employed muse of the wet dream among the teenaged boys in Bush Falls at that time. I myself made often and effective use of her in my fantasies, fueled in no small part by what I saw in the garage that day. But now she's thirty-seven and a mother of three, and even over the phone, you can hear the varicose veins in her voice.

"Okay, then," Cindy finally says. "So, we'll see you tomorrow?"

"Yeah," I say.

As if it happens all the time.

Chapter Two

There's never been any compelling reason to visit my hometown, and about a million reasons to stay away. My father still lives there, for one, in the four-bedroom colonial where I spent the first eighteen years of my life, and it's been many years since we had any use for each other. Every year, usually around Thanksgiving, Brad calls, inviting me to come stay with him and Cindy, have turkey with the family. But I know he just likes to take the opportunity to feel noble. This is Brad, after all, my older brother by four years, who once sent me to the emergency room by jokingly bearing down on me in our father's weather-beaten Grand Am soon after he'd gotten his driver's license, as I stood innocently shooting hoops in our front yard. The car didn't stop quite where he'd planned, and I ended up with a broken wrist and a separated shoulder, which wasn't what I'd planned either. Later, he claimed that I'd darted out in front of the car without any warning. Whether or not my father believed him was irrelevant, because there was a big game against Fairfield the following night and Bush Falls was counting on Brad to lead the Cougars one game closer to a second state championship. My father would have thought it unseemly to punish the town hero.

Meet the family.

My mother, Linda, was a manic-depressive, diagnosed too late, who gracelessly killed herself by jumping into the Bush River Falls and drowning when I was twelve years old. I can sometimes remember her as she was before the onslaught of her insanity and the subsequent barrage of antidepressants that failed to ease the pain as they slowly choked the vitality out of her—a tall, soft-spoken woman with smiling eyes and an impish grin that always made you feel like you were in on some private joke together. When she kissed me good night, she called me Jo Jo Bear. Her laugh was infectious; her frequent tears a vexing mystery. Brad, my father, and I bobbed violently in the thrashing wake of her suicide, utterly incapable of relating to one another without her gentle feminine presence to corral us.

Ultimately, Brad and my dad found a common ground in basketball. Brad was a star forward for the Bush Falls Cougars, and in Bush Falls you could aspire to nothing greater. He led the Cougars to two state championship titles, breaking a busload of scoring records along the way. He fucked many cheerleaders. That was pretty much all there was to Brad back then, fucking and basketball. Not bad work if you could get it. But I couldn't, and thus Brad could not relate to me but simply viewed me with a mixture of bemused pity and disdain. As far as I was concerned, Brad was a moron, shallow and one-dimensional, and I wanted nothing more than to be him. My father, Arthur, had been a somewhat less spectacular player for the Cougars himself, and he never missed one of Brad's games, home or away. Afterward, they would discuss plays, relive highlights, and watch the UConn games.

If it isn't painfully obvious yet, I never made the team.

Our tragically diminished household had no use for an increasingly cynical kid with a spastic crossover dribble and no outside shot, and I grew to despise the exclusive nature of their devotion to the Cougars and all things basketball. The question of who was responsible for setting in motion this cycle of alienation and resentment is your classic chicken-orthe- egg conundrum, but either way the gulf between us continued to widen, and if my father ever attempted the daredevil feat of crossing it, his efforts were so minuscule as to be invisible from my side of the chasm. Brad was awarded an athletic scholarship to the University of Connecticut and left for college the same year I entered Bush Falls High as a freshman, leaving my father and me alone to fill the inexorable silence that gripped our house in a stranglehold.

I never planned on going back to Bush Falls; that much is obvious. Otherwise, I never would have written a novel that trashed everyone there so thoroughly. The truth is, though, I never actually believed I'd get it published. So I wrote a book about my hometown, about Carly and Sammy and Wayne and the terrible events of my senior year, liberated by the notion that it would never see the light of day. Then Owen Hobbs called me one evening and told me that it was "fucking brilliant." Not too many people can pull off using expressions like that. Owen can, because Owen is fucking brilliant.

Statistically speaking, it's damn near impossible to write a best-seller. It's also remarkably difficult to piss off an entire town. Overachiever that I am, I managed to accomplish both feats in one fell swoop. When it comes to alienation, I'm something of a prodigy.

So I never planned on going back to Bush Falls. But I never planned on my father having a massive stroke, either, as he played in his Senior Alumni Basketball League in the high school gym late one Friday night. According to Cindy, he'd been standing about three feet to the left of the top of the key, in what he called his sweet spot. He never missed from there. He went up for a jump shot and came down unconscious, sprawled out on the glossy hardwood floor. All the eyewitnesses, ex-jocks in varying states of decline, will forever after make a big deal out of the fact that the shot was good. Like that makes a fucking bit of difference. Sweet spot indeed.

Excerpted from THE BOOK OF JOE © Copyright 2005 by Jonathan Tropper. Reprinted with permission by Delta, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved.

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