by Joël Dicker
I explained that I was born in Montclair, New Jersey, to a mother who worked in a department store and an engineer father. Only son. Happy childhood and adolescence despite an above-average intelligence. Felton High School. Marcus the Magnificent. Giants fan. Braces on at fourteen. Vacations spent with an aunt in Ohio, grandparents in Florida. All perfectly normal. No allergies, no serious illnesses. Food poisoning from chicken at a Boy Scout summer camp at age eight. Liked dogs but not cats. Sports practiced: volleyball, cross-country and boxing. Ambition: Become a famous writer. Nonsmoker because smoking gives you lung cancer and makes your breath smell. Favorite meal: steak with macaroni and cheese. Occasional consumption of seafood, particularly at Joe’s Stone Crab in Florida, even if my mother says it brings bad luck due to our affiliations.
Pergal listened to my biography without batting an eyelid. When I had finished, he said simply: “Mr Goldman, stop this nonsense, will you? I have looked at your file. I made a few phone calls. I talked to the principal of Felton High School. He told me you were an extraordinary student who could have gone to any of the great universities. So tell me: What are you doing here?”
“I beg your pardon, Dean?”
“Mr Goldman, who chooses Burrows over Harvard and Yale?”
*
My star performance in the amphitheater would change my life completely, even if it almost cost me my place at Burrows. Pergal concluded our interview by telling me that he needed to consider my fate, but in the end, the incident did not have any consequences for me. I discovered years later that Pergal—who believed that a student who caused a problem once would cause problems always—had wanted to expel me, and that it was Harry who had insisted that I be allowed to remain at Burrows.
The day after this memorable episode, I was elected the new editor of the literary magazine, with a mandate to give it a new dynamic. In true Marcus the Magnificent style, I decided that this new dynamic would be to stop publishing the works of Reinhartz and to give myself the cover of each issue. The following Monday, I bumped into Harry at the campus boxing gym, where I had been going regularly since I arrived at Burrows. It was, however, the first time I had seen him there. The gym was normally empty; Burrows students did not box, and apart from me, the only regular was Jared, whom I had persuaded to box a few rounds with me every other Monday because I needed a partner—preferably a weak one, so I would be sure to win. And once every two weeks, I took a certain pleasure in beating him up: the pleasure of forever being Marcus the Magnificent.
The Monday that Harry came to the gym, I was busy working on my guard position in front of a mirror. He looked just as elegant in sweats as he did in his double-breasted suits. Entering the gym, he waved to me from afar and said simply, “I didn’t know you liked boxing too, Mr Goldman.” Then he trained with a bag in a corner of the gym. He was lively and quick, with very good movements. I was desperate to speak to him, to tell him how I’d been summoned by Pergal after his class to talk with him about blow jobs and freedom of expression; to inform him that I was the new editor of the literary magazine; and to say how much I admired him. But I was too intimidated.
He came back to the gym the next Monday, when he watched my biweekly battering of Jared. From ringside he looked on as I pitilessly and methodically taught my roommate a lesson, and after the fight he told me that he thought I was a good boxer, that he himself wanted to start boxing again seriously in order to keep fit, and that any advice I had would be welcome. He was more than fifty years old, but beneath his baggy T-shirt it was possible to discern a broad-shouldered, powerful body: He hit the speed bag skillfully; he was well balanced; his footwork had slowed somewhat, but it was stable; his guard and his reflexes were intact. So I suggested he work with the bag to begin with, and we spent the evening there.
He came back the following Monday, and he kept coming back. And in some ways I became his personal trainer. The connection between Harry and me began in this way, through training together. We often chatted for a while when training was over, sitting side by side on the wooden bench in the locker room, letting the sweat dry on our skin. After a few weeks, the moment I had been dreading arrived: Harry said he wanted to get in the ring with me for three rounds. I didn’t dare hit him, of course, but he lost no time delivering a few jarring right-handers to my chin, knocking me to the canvas on several occasions. He laughed and said that it had been years since he’d done this and he’d forgotten how much fun it was. Having given me a good beating and called me a wimp, he suggested we get dinner. I took him to a seedy student dive on a lively street in Burrows, where we talked about books and writing while eating hamburgers oozing with grease.
“You’re a good student,” he told me. “You’re well read.”
“Thank you. Have you read my short story?”
“Not yet.”
“I would really like to know what you think.”
“All right, then, my friend, if it would make you happy, I promise I will take a look at it and tell you what I think.”
“And whatever you do, don’t hold back.”
“You have my word.”
He had called me his friend, and I was overwhelmed with excitement. I called my parents that very evening to give them the news: After only a few months at school, I was eating dinner with the great Harry Quebert. My mother was so thrilled, she called half of New Jersey to announce that her amazing Marcus—Marcus the Magnificent—had already made close contacts in the highest literary spheres. Marcus was going to become a great writer; there was no doubt about that.
Those dinners after boxing soon became part of the Monday night ritual, and they galvanized my feeling of being Marcus the Magnificent. I had a special relationship with Harry Quebert; now, when I spoke during his classes on Thursdays, while the other students had to make do with a simple “miss” or “sir,” he called me “Marcus.”
A few months later—it must have been January or February, just after the Christmas holidays—I insisted, during one of our Monday dinners, that Harry tell me what he thought of my short story, because he had still not given me his opinion. He hesitated, and then asked, “Do you really want to know, Marcus?”
“Absolutely. And be as critical as you like. I’m here to learn.”
“You write well. You have a lot of talent.”
I blushed with pleasure.
“What else?” I exclaimed impatiently.
“You’re gifted—that’s undeniable.”
I felt elated.
“Is there anything I need to improve, in your opinion?”
“Oh, of course. You know, you have lots of potential, but essentially, what I read was bad. Very bad, in fact. Utterly worthless. And the same is true for all the other stories by you I’ve been able to read in the magazine. It’s criminal, cutting down trees to print crap like that. There just aren’t enough forests for the number of bad writers in this country. Something must be done.”
My blood ran cold. I felt as if I had been sucker punched. So it turned out that Harry Quebert, the king of literature, was also the king of bastards.
“Are you always like this?” I said angrily.
He smiled with amusement, giving me a lordly stare, as if he were savoring the moment.
“How am I?” he said.
“Unbearable.”
He laughed.
“You know, Marcus, I know exactly the type of person you are: a conceited little prick who thinks Montclair is the center of the world. A little like the Europeans thought of themselves in the Middle Ages, before they got on a ship and discovered that most of the civilizations across the oceans were more developed than theirs was, which they attempted to hide by massacring the inhabitants. What I mean, Marcus, is that you are a terrific guy, but there’s a good chance you will just fizzle out if you don’t get your ass in gear. Your writing is good. But you have to reevaluate yourself and work much harder. Your problem is that you don’t work hard enough. You’re too easily satisfied. You line the words up without choo
sing them carefully, and it shows. You think you’re a genius, huh? You’re wrong. Your work is sloppy, and consequently it’s worthless. You’re still at square one. Do you follow me?”
“Not really.”
I was furious. How dare he, even if he was Harry Quebert? How dare he talk like this to Marcus the Magnificent?
He continued: “I’m going to give you a simple example. You’re a good boxer. That’s a fact. You know how to fight. But look at you—you only ever measure yourself against that pathetic, skinny kid whom you batter with such smugness that it makes me want to vomit. You fight him only because you know you’re guaranteed to beat him. That makes you a weakling, Marcus. A chicken. A spineless ninny. A nothing, a zero, a bluffer, a waste of space. You’re just a sham. And the worst thing is that you’re perfectly happy with that. Measure yourself against a real opponent! Show some balls! Boxing never lies: Getting into a ring is a very reliable way of finding out your worth. You floor the other guy or he floors you, but either way you can’t lie, to yourself or to others. You are what is known as an impostor. You know why the magazine ran your stories in their back pages? Because they were bad. That’s all. And why were Reinhartz’s stories so popular? Because they were very good. That might have made you want to surpass yourself, to work like crazy and produce a wonderful story, but it was so much simpler to put on your little performance, to get rid of Reinhartz and give yourself the magazine cover rather than judging yourself honestly. Let me guess, Marcus: You’ve acted like this all your life. Am I wrong?”
Enraged, I cried, “You know nothing, Harry! Everyone liked me in high school! I was Marcus the Magnificent!”
“Look at you. You don’t know how to fall! You’re afraid of falling. And that is why, if nothing changes, you will become an empty, boring person. Look at yourself in the mirror, for Christ’s sake, and ask yourself what the hell you’re doing at Burrows! I read your file! I talked to Pergal! He was that close to throwing you out, my little genius! You could have gone to Harvard, Yale, the whole Poison Ivy League if you’d wanted, but no, you had to come here, because the Lord God gave you a pair of balls so small that you didn’t have the guts to measure yourself against real opponents. I also called Felton. I talked to the principal—that poor dupe—who was on the verge of tears as he told me about Marcus the Magnificent. By coming here, Marcus, you knew you would be that invincible character you created out of nothing, that character who is not equipped to face the real world. You knew in advance that here there was no risk of falling. And that, I think, is your problem: You have not yet grasped the importance of knowing how to fall. That’s precisely what will cause your downfall if you don’t pull yourself together.”
After saying this, he scribbled an address in Lowell, Massachusetts (fifteen minutes by car from Burrows), on his napkin. He told me it was a boxing gym where, every Thursday, there were fights open to everyone. And then he was gone, leaving me to pay the bill.
The following Monday Quebert did not show up at the gym, and the same thing happened the Monday after that. In the amphitheater, he called me “sir” and acted disdainful. Finally I decided to go see him at the end of one of his classes.
“Aren’t you coming to the gym anymore?” I asked.
“I like you, Marcus, but as I already told you, I think you’re a pretentious little crybaby, and my time is too precious to waste it with you. You do not belong at Burrows and I have no reason to be in your company.”
And so the following Thursday, I borrowed Jared’s car and drove to the boxing gym Harry had told me about. It was a vast hangar in an industrial zone. A frightening place, crowded inside, the air stinking of sweat and blood. In the central ring, a particularly ferocious fight was taking place, and the numerous spectators massed close to the ropes were screaming like beasts. I was scared, and I wanted to run away, to admit defeat, but I never got the opportunity. A huge black guy, who I discovered was the gym’s owner, appeared in front of me. “You here to box, whitey?” he asked. I said yes, and he sent me to change in the locker room. Fifteen minutes later, I was facing him in the ring for a two-round fight.
I will never forget the beating he gave me that evening. I thought I was going to die. I was massacred as the crowd cheered wildly, thrilled to see the nice little greenhorn student from New Jersey get his face smashed in. Despite the state I was in, I made it a point of honor to hold on until the end of the second round. It was a question of pride, waiting for the final bell before collapsing to the ground, a K.O. When I opened my eyes again, barely conscious but thanking God that I was not dead, I saw Harry leaning over me with a sponge and a bowl of water.
“Harry? What are you doing here?”
He dabbed at my face delicately with the sponge. He smiled.
“My dear Marcus, you have a pair of balls beyond belief. That guy must weigh sixty pounds more than you. You fought magnificently. I’m very proud of you.”
I tried to get up, but he dissuaded me.
“Don’t move like that. I think you’ve broken your nose. You’re a good guy, Marcus. I suspected you were, but now you’ve proved it. The way you fought tonight, you’ve proved that the hopes I’ve had for you since our first meeting were not in vain. You’ve demonstrated that you’re capable of surpassing yourself. From now on, we’re going to be friends. I’ve been wanting to tell you: I have no doubt at all that you will be a great writer. And I’m going to help you.”
*
So it was after this episode in Lowell that our friendship truly began, and that Harry Quebert, my literature professor by day, became Just Harry, my boxing partner on Monday nights, my friend, and my master on certain afternoons during the holidays when he taught me how to be a writer. The writing lessons generally took place on Saturdays. We met in a diner close to campus, and sitting at a large table where we could spread out our books and papers, he read through my work and gave me advice, always encouraging me to start over and to constantly rework my sentences. “A piece of writing is never good,” he told me. “There is simply a moment when it is less bad than before.” Between our meetings, I spent hours in my room working and reworking my stories. And that was how I, who had always skimmed through life with a certain ease, I who had always fooled the world, learned to face up to myself.
Not only did Harry teach me to write, but he also taught me to open my mind. He took me to the theater, to exhibitions, to the movies. To Symphony Hall in Boston too; he said that well-played music could make him cry. He believed that he and I were very similar, and he often told me about his past as a writer. He said that writing had changed his life, and that this had happened in the mid-1970s. I remember one day, when he’d taken me near Teenethridge to listen to a choir of old people, how he opened up the deep recesses of his memory to me. He was born in 1941 in Benton, New Jersey, the only son to a mother who was a secretary and a father who was a doctor. His story began in earnest in the late 1960s, when, having earned his Ph.D. in English at New York University, he was hired as an English teacher at a high school in Queens. But he always felt cramped in the classroom; his sole dream was, as it had always been, to write. He published his first novel in 1972. He had high hopes for it, but it sank without trace. So he decided to begin a new stage in his life. “One day,” he explained to me, “I withdrew my savings from the bank and I went for it. I decided it was time to write a damn good book, and I began looking to rent a house by the ocean where I could spend a few months and work in peace. I found a house, in Somerset, and I immediately knew it was the right one. I left New York in late May 1975 and moved to New Hampshire, never to leave there again. Because the book I wrote that summer opened the gates of glory to me. Yes, Marcus, that was the year, moving to Somerset, that I wrote The Origin of Evil. I eventually bought the house with the advance I was paid for it, and I still live there. It’s a stunning place—you’ll see. You’ll have to come and visit sometime …”
I went to Somerset for the first time in early January 2000, during the college’s Chris
tmas break. At the time, Harry and I had known each other for little over a year. I remember I arrived with wine for him and flowers for his wife. When Harry saw the huge bouquet, he gave me a funny look and said: “Flowers? That’s interesting, Marcus. Is there something you’d like to share with me?”
“They’re for your wife.”
“My wife? But I’m not married.”
I realized then that in all the time we had known each other, we had never spoken about his private life. There was no Mrs Harry Quebert. There was no Quebert family. There was only Quebert. Just Harry. A man who was so bored at home that he became friends with one of his students. I truly understood this when I saw his fridge. Just after my arrival, when we were sitting together in the living room—a beautiful room with wood-paneled walls and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves—Harry asked if I would like something to drink.
“Lemonade?” he suggested.
“Sure.”
“There’s a pitcher in the fridge, made just for you. So go help yourself, and bring me a large glass too, please.”
When I opened the fridge, I saw that it was empty. Inside, there was only that pathetic pitcher of lemonade, carefully prepared, with star-shaped ice cubes, slices of lemon peel, and mint leaves. It was a single man’s fridge.
“Your fridge is empty, Harry,” I said, as I returned to the living room.
“Oh, I’ll go grocery shopping later. I don’t have many guests.”
“You live alone here?”
“Of course. Who do you expect me to live with?”
“A girlfriend?”
He smiled sadly. “No girlfriend. No kids. Nobody.”
That first stay in Somerset made me realize that the image I’d had of Harry had been incomplete: His house by the sea was immense but utterly empty. The revered Harry L. Quebert became Just Harry whenever he went home to his little New Hampshire town. A cornered man, sometimes a little sad, he enjoyed long walks on the beach just below his house and was devoted to feeding the seagulls with the stale bread he kept in a tin box. I wondered what could have happened in this man’s life that he should have ended up this way.