"It was longer before."
"Mm."
"We started getting coffee. He recommended a book that turned out to be terrible. I made him buy me dinner to apologize."
Zero, across the table, exhales a small delighted breath.
"What was the book," Richard asks.
"...The Goldfinch."
"The Goldfinchis a masterpiece," Richard says, scandalized.
"It's—" Wren starts, and then visibly remembers she is at a dinner table being a guest, and recalibrates. "It's very—it has a lot of—I think it's a little—" She is dying. I watch her die. "...long?"
"It is a modern classic."
"It's long, though," she tries again, weakly. "I'm not saying it's bad, I'm saying it's—structurally—there's a lot of—"
"She hated it, Dad," Zero says, around a mouthful of roast. "Look at her. She's doing six kinds of diplomacy. She thought it was a brick. Let the woman breathe."
Wren makes a small betrayed sound. "I didn’t say—"
"You didn't have to. Your whole face said it." Zero points his fork at her, pleased. "Booksellers always hate the big famous ones. It's a rule."
Richard puts his fork down. He looks at Wren with the slow brightening face of a man who has just discovered an unexpected adversary on a topic he’s been losing sleep over.
"You can't possibly think it's too long. The length is the point—"
"Oh, here we go," Margot says, to no one.
"—the length isimmersive, the length is the architecture—"
"Richard," Margot says.
He stops. Resets. The brightening goes out of his face and is replaced by something stiffer. Topic: dropped.
"It's no matter," he says. "It's a generational thing. Nobody under thirty has the patience for a real book anymore—you're all raised on the small and the immediate." He says it pleasantly, which is somehow worse. "And honestly, Wren, that's no tragedy. Literature is a retirement. It's what a man gets to have once the serious work is done—the firm built, the money made, the house paid for. You read for pleasure once you've earned the leisure to. Until then it's—" a small dismissive turn of his fork "—a hobby. A pleasant one. Not a foundation. I tell Max the same thing."
I nod. I remember the face he made when I mentioned my creative writing class. I wonder how he’d react if he saw all my journals upstairs.
"It's sound advice, Max."
Next to me, Wren has gone very slightly still. Not hurt, I don’t think. She works at a bookstore most evenings; she has just been told,courteously, that the thing she has built her small hard-won life around is a thing real people doaftertheir lives are finished. I watch her decide not to say any of the things I can see her holding.
Zero is not so disciplined.
"Dad thinks reading is golf," he says, to Wren, confidingly. "You're allowed to enjoy it once you're sixty and useless. Before that it's suspicious."
"It is not suspicious, Zero, it is a question of priorities—"
"Mm.Priorities." Zero takes a slow sip of his beer, then turns, far too innocently, to the other head of the table. "Margot. Settle it. You think a person should put off the things that feed them until they've made their money and bought their house? You agree with him?"
Margot, who has been monitoring this dinner the way air traffic control monitors a storm, does not walk into it.
"I think," she says, evenly, reaching for the green beans, "that this roast is getting cold while everyone at this table would rather be right than fed."
"That's not an answer."
