Page 3 of Bad Words

“Bro, this is exactly what I’ve been saying for three years! My theory is that she hates all books now. Like, she’s read too many of them and can’t feel things like ‘enjoyment’ anymore, so she has to take out her bitterness on the nearest target.”

“Maybe. I don’t know … Her other pans don’t feel the same.” I shut the freezer door and pressed my forehead against its cool surface, my frustration flickering out as quickly as it had kindled. “God, what am I going to do? Bill’s never going to sell anything else I write. I have a mortgage to pay.”

Arthur settled against the counter next to me. “Good thing the first one made you an overnight millionaire, right?”

I didn’t answer.

“Hold on,” Arthur said. “Hold on. Parker. Please tell me you didn’t secretly gamble your whole advance on fantasy football or something.”

“No, no. It’s…” I sighed. “So, my agent’s cut was fifteen percent, and forty percent of the rest went to taxes, right?”

“Right.”

“Then I paid off my parents’ places, and zeroed out my sister’s student loans, and—”

“Wait, for real? Elena or Christi?”

“Elena. Christi and my brothers paid theirs off already.” I gestured to the apartment. “And then there’s this place. I did a thirty-five percent down payment to save on interest.”

Arthur had never asked how much our apartment had cost, but he knew as well as anyone else that in this part of New York, a million dollars was pocket change. I could see him doing the math, realizing that my bottomless windfall would be gone within a couple of years.

“I’m so stupid,” I muttered. “What was I thinking?”

Arthur recovered. “Hey. Come on. You didn’t want your family drowning in debt, and you’ve wanted to live in New York your whole life. That’s what you were thinking.” When I didn’t speak, he shook me by the shoulder. “The City thing is going to blow over, okay? The book comes out in … January?”

“February.”

“February! Nobody’s going to remember this in February. Selina Chan is a professional name-caller. You can’t let her get to you.”

Despite everything, the righteous set to Arthur’s chin made me smile. He was a righteous person in general, a perennial activist who could never quite turn off the air of canvassing you for something. I’d always envied his certainty.

Arthur and I had met in a writing seminar at Yale. We’d both been working on irredeemable short stories revolving around “shocking” coincidences, which would have shocked no person with a working prefrontal cortex. He was a book publicist at Macmillan now, and he always managed to discover weird little novels I wound up half in love with. As long as Arthur liked what I was writing, I could cling to my self-respect.

He was still looking at me expectantly.

“Thanks,” I said. “Yeah. Maybe nobody will care.”

“There we go.” Arthur clapped me on the back and looped his shaggy hair into a ponytail. “We’re going to go to that cocktail thing tonight and not even think about it, all right?”

I let out a tired laugh. Arthur had been invited to a party celebrating the hundred-year anniversary of a publisher called Maynard-Roth Editions, and he’d been angling all week for me to join him. Right now, I felt about as sociable as a Carthusian monk, but if I’d learned anything from the last go-around, it was that sitting at home and marinating in self-pity wasn’t actually a useful coping mechanism.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m in.”

Then I retreated to my bedroom, pulled up the City Magazine website, and braced for the worst.

In Parker Navarro’s Sophomore Effort, a Search for Meaning in a Bus Driver’s Daily Route

BY SELINA CHAN

Life is full of punishing routine. Parker Navarro’s new novel, High and Dry, reminds us of this inescapable fact, though likely not in the way he intended. Over these six hundred pages, Navarro invites readers into the life of Dave Hernandez-Gretzky, a Houston bus driver who circles a single route, morning to night. When forty days of rain hit Texas, Dave holds fast to his preestablished patterns, retracing his assigned streets even while the water level climbs across the city.

A fertile enough premise … [U]nfortunately, the Parker Navarro writing High and Dry is very much the same writer who, three and a half years ago, perpetrated These Extraordinary Times, that paean to hysterical realism that felt plucked from the trenches of the early 00s. Navarro would like to use Dave’s routine to skewer the absurd circularity of the way we live. Instead, he winds up doing what he does best: subjecting the reader to hundreds of pages of shapeless musings … [a] maddeningly oblique, nonconfrontational approach to what should be vibrant, dramatic material.… [I]f a writer can’t look uncomfortable realities in the eye, how can he satirize them? How can he expose the absurdity of life if he’s palpably frightened that people might call him absurd? How, most mysteriously, can Navarro write so much and communicate so little?

In one memorable scene, a lost seven-year-old boards Dave’s bus … [a] humane moment cut short by—and I wish this were a joke—the boarding of a mutant alligator who’s acquired the power of speech. Readers of These Extraordinary Times will remember this tic: the way Navarro subverts every promising moment, displaying a kind of miserable hypervigilance that makes even a skilled stylist painful to read. Possibly, if High and Dry were less desperate to make neurotic apologies for its own contents, it could adequately explore any of the thousands of thoughts that fly pell-mell through its shallow and obnoxious protagonist’s head.

With its unforgivable length and wild tonal inconsistencies, this is another novel in search of an idea from an author who mistakes bombast for wit. The most punishing routine of all might be opening a new book by Navarro, still wondering if he’s found something to say.

Chapter TwoSelina Chan