My favourite way to browse for a new novel is to flip to the first page and read the opening sentence. To me, this is the author's big moment. These are the crucial few words that will prompt me to flip further; to read the back blurb, and finally to check the price to determine how interested I am in pursuing this story. Industry folks may talk a lot about having a good elevator pitch--a sum up of the story that can be delivered succinctly in the time it takes to step on at one floor and off at another--but I like opening lines. They're subtle in their revelations. They hint at a writer's style and priorities. They likely give some inkling to the themes that the story will encounter. Consider Pat Conroy's opening to The Prince of Tides:
"Geography is my wound."
Geography as wound is an interesting idea to mull over--individuals and stories not merely being shaped by where they take place, but injured by them. Immediately, I am given clues as to what kind of writer Conroy is, and what sort of story he will tell. Perhaps I am interested enough by this concept and its crafting to read further. (Spoiler: I was.)
Margaret Mitchell grabbed the world's attention with the line:
"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were." The nature of Scarlett O'Hara is the hinge upon which the entire plot of Mitchell's epic novel swings. When asked what Gone with the Wind was actually about, the author replied,
'If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality 'gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.'
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| This author's Gambit is not the authorial gambit you're looking for. |
An opening sentence might even tell you what kind of story you are holding in your hands. The obvious clue of Russian authorship aside, Leo Tolstoy's opener to Anna Karenina reveals its tragic nature.
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Whereas George Orwell's famous sentence, "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.", immediately reveals its dystopian reality.
Opening lines are the author's gambit. They are first overture in a relationship between reader and story. And so, in honour of engaging opening lines, I humbly submit mine for your enjoyment.
The following is an excerpt from my new novel Altruism in Gophers.
Chapter One - How the Damn Foolishness Began
The big-time bad decisions made in life aren’t made in a vacuum. If you are willing to look at the whole picture—dare to examine far enough backward—you’ll find there were a lot of little compromises that preceded them. There was an edifice of choices; a gallows upon which the final choice—the damn foolishness—was only the moment when you put your head through the noose. Few people get married with the assumption that they will commit adultery, but one thing does lead to another if you let it. Few drug addicts start out with heroin because who wants to be a heroin junkie? No one. You step on those paths believing you’re going somewhere else. But there are really only two actions in life. You are either building something or tearing it down. Creating or destroying. That’s it. The only question is how fast you are doing it. Maybe it’s Mach 5, or maybe it’s glacial, but it is happening one way or another. You think you’re treading water—going nowhere—but you aren’t.
Maybe that woman at the office has a really suggestive sense of humour and after a while she’s texting you, and calling to chat when your wife isn’t home. One thing predictably leads to another and the next thing you know, your life shatters to hell because you left your phone unlocked and your wife happened to glance at it when it dinged on the counter while she was washing the lettuce for dinner. It wasn’t leaving your phone unlocked that caused your life to tumble to the ground like a gigantic, wobbly Jenga tower. It was everything selfish and reckless that you did up to that point. The tricky part is that it never really looks like it at the time because—like in that Jenga game—you get away with precariousness for such an impossibly long time.
I didn’t commit adultery. I don’t have a heroin habit. Some people think what I did was a lot worse than either of those things, even though it was essentially a victimless crime. I’m not saying that to justify my behaviour. I’m just pointing out how screwed up the cultural moral sensibility has become.
The first block removed in my personal Jenga game was the news that my parents were moving out in order to separate from me—their son. I am aware that sons usually leave their parents somewhere around the time they get their first real job. (Or, for the folks living biblically, when they get married.) But I never got my first real job. I mean, I’ve had lots of jobs but I never arrived. I’ve never even felt like I was on the cusp of arriving. Instead, there I was, thirty-three and still living at home and, if I am going to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t even that unhappy about it. And, no, not because my mom makes my lunches; she hasn’t done that since I was ten. Rather, it is actually nice to live with people you don’t hate. My friend Robbie once roomed with a schizophrenic drug user who kept going off his meds and starting fires in his closet and trashing the place. Robbie didn’t know about those issues when they first became roommates. There is a crazy that you only find out about up close. While my parents are utterly helpless when it comes to operating their entertainment system, neither of them makes a habit of psychosis, threats, drug use or arson. It’s pleasant to share a meal around a table instead of eating alone, your dinner for one illuminated by the faint glow of the television set left on for the illusion of company. There is something snug and homey about making coffee and knowing my dad will finish off the pot while he talks about the Arian Heresy or the collapse of the Roman Empire or whatever ideas might be percolating in his thoughts.
It isn’t all upside, though. There is a measure of societal judgment that accompanies living at home so long, but as any old person will tell you, the more you age, the less you care. There was a nine-month period when I was twenty-seven that it really bothered me, but after I got over that, I wore my residence like a badge of distinction. I was the punchline of so many jokes. I was the acceptable prejudice. I was an object of contempt to the sneering classes. Within a century, bachelors like myself had gone from being known as the respectable and unobtrusive sons who seamlessly and competently took over the running of the family homestead, to cultural pariahs. It isn’t the same for girls. They can stay at home with their parents and nobody thinks anything of it. Nobody makes jokes about them living in their mom’s basement. It’s pretty sexist, if you think about it. We at-home boys really need some loser male suffragettes (suffragers?) to take up the cause. We won’t, though. Girls are much better at getting up in arms over bullshit nothings than we are. That is why you only see the really angry omega males in the dark corners of the internet railing against women while gorging on their masochistic pornography habit.
Those aren’t my people.
If guys are going to actually fight something, there’s probably going to be blood spilt, or else what’s the point? The right to live with our parents sans scorn hardly seems worth all that hullabaloo—blood crying out from the ground and whatnot. We want something worth fighting for—worth dying for, really—but even I can see that the right to live with Ma and Pop without mockery shouldn’t make that cut. What is worth blood and guts and death is the real question. Unfortunately, I’ve spent a good deal of time amassing a list of what doesn’t apply, rather than what does. I mean, I’ve got some inklings—certain intangibles like principles and so forth—but the call to die for your principles doesn’t come up as often as one might think, at least, not in Calgary. The worthy tangibles are people. A wife, if I had one. Kids. I occasionally craft daydreams about exacting a terrible revenge on those who threaten my imaginary family. But I don’t have a family. I just have dreams.
“Doesn’t it—you know—put a cramp on your love life?”
Everyone wants to know this, like it is any of their business. I see this question mark appear over a person’s head within sixty seconds of his finding out that I have lived at home into my thirties. As though living by myself would be some kind of guarantor of a happening lifestyle; like I’m Christian Slater in the ’90s or Will Smith in Bad Boys, and random scantily clad women are always showing up at my door in their lingerie at comedically inconvenient moments. Nobody really lives that life. None of my friends have, and not for lack of trying, either. Real life involves a lot less potential and a lot more humiliation and self-loathing. All the single people I know binge-watch Netflix in their underwear while glumly eating endless bowls of Cheerios for dinner. At least with my mom around I bother to wear clothes.
So—no, it barely affected my love life at all.
I’ve had relationships. In a fit of unqualified optimism a couple of years back (three years, two months and sixteen days, but who’s counting?), I even asked Cassandra if she wanted to marry me. She said yes with a blushing look about her and I felt—unoriginally—that I was the luckiest guy in the world. But while other newly engaged couples planned their nuptials, Cassandra and I inadvertently (yet painstakingly) undertook the destruction of Us. By the time we limped to our respective corners, our breakup was a textbook example of what David Foster Wallace was talking about when he wrote that acceptance was more a matter of fatigue than anything else.
So, neither my career nor my relationships have ever managed to generate any real traction. And since the Cassandra Incident, which escalated into a personal end of days, I’ve been content to weather the post-apocalyptic landscape alone. Alone is survivable. I reimagined myself as a confirmed bachelor of the black-and-white era of fedoras and nightcaps (the drink, not the kerchief from ’Twas the Night Before Christmas). I was Cary Grant or Clark Gable. Suave, witty and untethered by the romantic machinations of women who think not knowing what they want is an attractive quality. And inevitably, time just kept passing, as it does, without marker or notice and the next thing I knew I was being pushed out of the familial nest by my parents.
My dad refers to these confirmed bachelors as “beta males.” He subscribes to that anthropological theory about human interaction and relational hierarchy in which men and women have to strive to attain alpha status. Age does not confer it. It is only achieved through the selfless raising of children; the sacrificing of one’s own desires on the altar of parenthood for the success of the offspring. The beta members of the group are the unmarried juveniles. They may have great potential for alpha-hood, but they haven’t had to strive and self-sacrifice yet, so in beta-dom they shall remain. The only other category is the already mentioned anti-social omegas. They are at the bottom of the social ranking and are unlikely to do or accomplish much except occasionally take a shotgun into a mall and start firing in a hate-fuelled rampage. In such a scheme, it seemed to me that being a beta was A-okay. Especially in light of the fact that my attempt to join the alphas had been a colossal failure. Beta was my -dom. My mother didn’t see it that way, though. As I began to care less about my advancing age, she began to care more. She regarded it as a failing (possibly in her parenting), or a sign that I was intentionally avoiding maturity. I wasn’t. It’s just that things didn’t work out. They really didn’t work out.
Hooked? Want to read the back blurb? Flip through some more pages? Check out the price? Altruism in Gophers is available on (almost) all Amazon marketplaces. Check it out here:
