Anyone's Ghost: A Novel (Penguin Publishing Group) - Softcover

Thompson, August

 
9780593656587: Anyone's Ghost: A Novel (Penguin Publishing Group)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059365658X ISBN 13: 9780593656587
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

Longlisted for The Center For Fiction's 2024 First Novel Prize • Named a Best Book of 2024 by Elle, Vogue, and Debutiful

“This new novel is a real heart-squeezer. Beautiful, one of a kind and perfectly titled.” —Matt Berninger, The National

“Anyone’s Ghost is about so very many things: the pains of growing up, friendship and pining, drugs, sex, the frustrations of masculinity and the thrill of testing death itself. But more than any of that, it is an overwhelmingly beautiful love story. This book will make you cry.” —Jonathan Safran Foer

An extraordinary debut novel in which the transforming love and friendship between two young men during one unforgettable teenage summer in rural New England haunts them into adulthood

It took three car crashes to kill Jake.

Theron David Alden is there for the first two: the summer they meet in rural New Hampshire, when he’s fifteen and anxious, and Jake’s seventeen and a natural; then six years later in New York City, those too-short, ecstatic, painful nights that change both their lives forever—the end of the dream and the longing for the dream and the dream itself, all at once.

Theron is not there for the third crash.

And yet, their story contains so much joy and self-discovery: the glorious, stupid simplicity of a boyhood joke; the devastation of insecurity; the way a great song can distill a universe; the limits of what we can know about each other; the mysterious, porous, ungraspable fault line between yourself and the person you love better than yourself; the beautiful, toxic elixir of need and hope and want.

Brimming with rare, radioactive talent, August Thompson has written a love story that is electrically alive and exquisitely tuned.

In the words of Jonathan Safran Foer, “This book will make you cry.”

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

August Thompson

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Prologue

It took three car crashes to kill Jake.

I was there for the first two—one when I was fifteen and he was seventeen and we were driving like we shouldn’t have been, late and drunk at the end of our New Hampshire summer, the other six years later in a hurricane-?thrashed Manhattan when we talked about death and fate as a kind of nervous foreplay.

I am standing in a heartless Airbnb in what I am told is downtown Fort Worth, looking out of the moony living room window. I can see the wings of the angels atop the Bass Performance Hall and the generic Southwestern roof of the Cheesecake Factory. I’m tying one on solo, drinking the Lone Stars I bought from Buc-ee’s, my little way of honoring Jake. I can’t stop reading and rereading the details of the third and final crash on my phone, hoping, in that obscure, pathetic way, that the data on the Arlington Citizen’s obit page will rearrange itself between reloads. The one song of Jake’s I still have, “NH, NH,” plays with tin-can-and-string quality from my phone’s speaker. My therapist, Rebecca Piacentini, LCSW—I always call her “Doctor” out of reverent habit—says this type of indulgent behavior is “very much not a good idea.” It’s getting late enough to be early.

My Airbnb is a town over from tomorrow’s celebration of life. The celebration was planned by Jake’s mother, his useless father, and his widow, Jess, the woman I never wanted Jake to marry. I came here on a Klonopin-warm flight to witness their grief and understand how it matches my own.

I can see my reflection, the pink scars on my face deepened by the uncanny blue of my phone. The obituary reloads. I am nearly thirty years old and this is the first obituary I’ve ever really read, and I can’t tell if that’s lucky or an indictment of the dead in my life.

I’m struck by how nonviolent and flat the language is.

Jake was thirty-one. He was survived by his parents, his wife. He was loved. It’s odd, tonally so far from his personality. Do all obituaries play it safe, or do some become honest—“he bled out slowly, wishing for death”? Do obituaries ever have a sense of humor—“Jake died as he lived, staying up all night and fucking around”?

I know from other research, the rudimentary sleuthing I’ve become obsessed with—calls to the coroner’s office and reading up on the half-life of amphetamines—that there was speed in his system under all that whiskey. And I keep thinking that maybe the crash wasn’t an accident but a natural coda to a thirty-one-year attraction to death.

My thoughts dilate.

I reopen the message that told me of the third crash—I can’t believe I’m telling you this—from an acquaintance I would have forgotten about completely if it weren’t for the internet’s insistence on keeping people around.

It makes sense, in its way, to have learned of Jake’s dying through a DM, that delivery system so efficient and impersonal and arbitrary. It matched the near-silence he and I had kept up for almost a decade.

I rotate between looking at my phone and thinking about the lies I’ve told Louvinia—who I call Lou when I love her most. I’m afraid that maybe this is too much. That she’ll realize she’s been waiting for a full, present, nonexistent me. Even after all those times I promised there was nothing to wait for.
 
1

A month before I met Jake for the first time, I came home to a New Hampshire without women. It'd been a year since my mother had left my father and taken me to Venice, California. She hired a lawyer, and after months of mutual bloodletting, my parents reached a seasonal agreement. I was to spend my semesters in Los Angeles and my summers, from the last day of school to the night before Labor Day, in New Hampshire.

After my mother left, my two best friends, the neighbor girls from across the street, moved away. Without them, I can hardly remember any women that summer outside of the postal worker, waving as she drove past in her doorless Jeep. My house had always been a place of women-aunts, cousins, family friends. Now there was only a cat, my father, the brown-spotted Dalmatian Dr. Chips, and me. Theron David Alden-that talismanic namesake left from my grandfather-fifteen and still a year from a ten-inch growth spurt that would leave lipstick-purple stretch marks on my back and improve my quality of life profoundly.

Dad's new pickup idled in the little loading area at the Manchester airport. It was moss green and roughed up. I couldn't tell if this was a heightened affect-he'd long been obsessed with hiding the small wealth he'd accumulated from his one-man architecture firm, posturing with blue-collar locals as if he were "just one of the guys"-or if this was an evolution meant to reduce my mother's alimony. The Lexus traded in for a used pickup, the profit vanished. A kind of Cayman shuffle.

"How we doing, Davey boy?" Apparently, he'd picked up smoking again. His words came out gray, and he leaned over to pop open the passenger door. He threw a thumb back to the open bed of the pickup. I had a suitcase of band T-shirts and a pair of jeans.

I was exhausted. My flight east was convoluted, threading across the country, catching connections in Albuquerque and Philadelphia. I could've flown direct from LAX to Logan, adding an hour to my dad's drive, saving my mother money and grief. But Dad refused. He told my mother if I wanted to fly into Boston, I could figure out how to get to New Hampshire myself. This was the bland struggle my parents had developed, where victories weren't about how much one could win but how much the other could lose.

"It's David, Dad," I said as I climbed into the front seat, scooting the dog over. I hated being called Davey. We Aldens typically went by our middle names. Our first names were awkward New England traditions-a family tree of Wards and Esthers and Vernons and even one poor Ezekiel. For years I suffered under the diminutive-Davey, the negligible. After the age of seven, Davey felt like an insult. Even when accoladed David, I always felt detached from the averageness of these names. It was the basest of teenage needs, but I wanted something, anything, that would let me feel remarkable.

"What's this?" Dad said.

"What's what?"

"Why are you talking like that?"

"Like I normally do?" I lied. I'd started forcing my voice a half step lower than it was to sound more manly.

"Either you went through puberty on that plane ride or there's something wrong with you. Do I need to take you to the doctor?"

I ignored him and put my head to Dr. Chips. When I was a kid, I thought if I pushed my skull hard enough against his, he could hear what I was thinking. Now he seemed too old to notice anything. He had a pink pot belly and a hind hip he mothered.

My father had changed a lot in the nine months since I'd seen him, too. He wore a simplified wardrobe of matching denim and sported an Uncle Sam goatee-sure signs that a man has been unsupervised, and maybe unloved, too long. His face had become severe, his skin ruddied. He was thinner. He'd always been thin, but now he seemed depleted.

I was sad, though I'd never show it, that this was the grim calendar I'd live by now. Every nine months, I'd come see Dad lessened and the dog more tired.

As he drove down Interstate 93, Dad slapped my shoulder hard, four times in a row. His hands felt as big and leathery as catcher's mitts. "Glad you're here, boy. Are you happy to be back home?"

"I guess," I said.

Dad held a silence and then matched my...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2025
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059365658X
ISBN 13 
9780593656587
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
https://www.edel.com

Neum�hlen 17
Hamburg
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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