Kevin Kramer Starts on Monday. Debbie Graber

eyes out reading my novel. I don’t want to give too much away, but let’s just say Delores meets a very unhappy end due to an extreme case of psychosomatic Alzheimer’s disease. If that doesn’t make you want to turn to page one right now, I’m not sure what would.

      There are going to be sections of the book written from Fred’s point of view and sections written from Delores’s point of view and sections written from Ralphie’s point of view. The Delores sections are going to be very florid, because Delores is a very florid personality. She is pretending to be a rich housewife, but in reality she is an abstract painter consumed with the idea of painting the outside of the family house so that it blends in with its surroundings, like camouflage. If Delores had her way, you would drive down the street and not even notice the house because it would blend into the neighboring forest preserve. If you didn’t know better, you might think that Delores was a little bit nutty, but you’d be hard-pressed to say that she suffered from a degenerative brain disease, even though that’s what she wants you to think so she can get attention. Anyway, you’ll learn more about Delores’s secret past and tragic present later on because they are integral to the plot. You’ll also learn that Delores used to make a killer vegetarian lasagna back in the day before she conveniently “forgot” how to make dinner.

      Another note about Northanger Abbey, the fictional school: it’s not an abbey at all, but when the school was being built, the rich jerks who commissioned it decided to call it Northanger Abbey, because one of them was supposed to read Northanger Abbey in his high school English class and never did, but he liked the name because it sounded all fancified and snobby. Not to give too much away, but it’s going to turn out that Fred’s great-uncle Jason was that rich jerk. It may not seem like a big deal right now, but it’s all going to fit together like pieces in a puzzle.

      Here’s a possible book club question:

      “If you were one of the three people on record who read Northanger Abbey, what did you like about it? Or are you just a poseur and a snob like Fred’s great-uncle Jason?”

      Metaphors are going to be very important in this novel. Keep your eyes open for a plethora of metaphors to hit you smack on the ass!

      Anyway, back to the action: Delores, Fred, and Ralphie drive up to Lake Geneva in their Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon. Ralphie is stuck sitting in the wayback because all of his stuff—including the tennis racket, golf clubs, and ascot collection that Delores bought because she thought Ralphie would need them to impress the cultivated kids at Northanger Abbey—is taking up most of the backseat. Cars are passing the family on the highway and kids keep flipping Ralphie the bird because he is a gawky teenager sitting in the wayback, which looks, if I might say, incongruous.

      There are going to be many incongruous parts of this novel. You are also going to find lots and lots of dichotomies: there will be a dichotomy between rich and poor, between majorly drugged out and sober, between defenseless sons and withholding parents, between the idyllic appearance of upper-middle-class success and the chaotic reality of a dysfunctional family with loads of debt and lots of shameful secrets. If dichotomies are your bag, then you are going to love this novel.

      In the middle of the drive, Fred pulls off the interstate at a rest stop. He tells Delores and Ralphie that he needs to use the men’s room, but he really doesn’t need to use the men’s room. Fred needs to think, alone, away from his family. Dads tend to spend a lot of time in the bathroom when they should be out taking responsibility for their sons’ stunted emotional growth. Instead, he’s in the stall, contemplating how his life got so messed up. See, Fred didn’t tell Delores this because she would kill him, but he just got laid off from his job at State Farm. It’s the 1980s, and everyone is into conspicuous consumption and shoulder pads, including Delores, who, because she had a kid so early on in life, feels like she deserves all kinds of payback from Fred, even though getting pregnant was both of their faults. Delores usually told Fred when to pull out during intercourse, but that one time she got carried away and forgot to give him the signal.

      Delores has expensive tastes, which is incongruous because an abstract painter would seem to be an earthy type of person and someone who wouldn’t be interested in material things, but you haven’t met Delores! She’s an enigma. Delores likes fur coats—big, expensive furs from Saks Fifth Avenue. It’s the 1980s, and fur coats are all the rage. PETA hasn’t made many inroads into the celebrity culture yet, so fur is still fine by most people’s standards. Fred bought Delores a beaver coat one year, which cost him a bundle, but Delores said that she preferred mink and expects one this Christmas, which is only a few short months away.

      Fred wipes away the sweat from his brow in the men’s room. He’s sweating because it’s the end of August in northern Illinois and humid as hell, but also because he’s nervous about coming clean about his financial situation. The other big thing we learn in this scene is that Fred lied to the Northanger Abbey bursar in a telephone conversation just that morning, saying that he is bringing the check for Ralphie’s first semester. In reality, Fred doesn’t have the money, even with the Snooty-Richerson suburban home in hock.

      Here’s another question for the book clubs:

      “What is the etymology of the word ‘bursar’?”

      We learn in a later chapter that it was Fred’s fault that he got laid off because he was having an affair with his secretary, Ms. Donna Fulsome, who wasn’t disgusted by giving blow jobs the way Delores was. Apparently someone in the typing pool overheard Ms. Donna Fulsome talking dirty to Fred and blew the whistle on their affair. State Farm didn’t need a sexual harassment lawsuit, so it let Fred go, even though he was great at his job and super smart to boot.

      This is compelling! What is Fred going to do?

      My next novel is going to be about what could have happened to Fred if he hadn’t screwed up and gotten Delores preggers. I think it might be about Fred creating a superweapon and battling aliens who threaten to dominate Earth. Or it could be a novel about Ralphie accidentally discovering Fred’s secret second family (the Fulsome-Snooty-Richersons) and the recurrent Cymbalta abuse that discovery engenders.

      Just as we are wondering what will happen to Fred in the men’s room, the novel jumps ahead and follows Ralphie, now a junior at Northanger Abbey. It’s clear that Ralphie is attending Northanger Abbey, but it’s unclear how that was possible, given that Fred didn’t have the money to pay for it. But that’s not our focus here, because Ralphie is in the midst of an existential crisis. This will be made obvious to the reader by a hundred-pound weight gain since we last saw him at the rest stop on the way to start his freshman year and also his more-than-recreational drug use. He’s getting Ds in his gen ed classes and is considering transferring to Carl Sandburg High School in his hometown of Orland Park, Illinois.

      Here’s another question for the book clubs:

      “How might Ralphie’s life have been different (weight-wise, drug-use-wise, emotional-health-wise) if his parents weren’t shallow yuppies with addictive personalities?”

      At this point, there will be a lengthy digression discussing the pros and cons of transferring to Carl Sandburg High School. Here are a few examples:

       PRO: Carl Sandburg High School has tons of extracurricular activities, such as sports and student-run organizations like the Key Club. Key Club members raise money for the school through fund-raisers, like car washes and candy-bar sales. Being involved in the Key Club prepares one to be a good citizen and even has the potential to help a person get into the college of his choice.

       CON: Carl Sandburg High School is full of douches.

      In the rest of the chapter, through Ralphie’s rambling first-person narrative stream of consciousness, the reader will deduce that Fred and Delores may have both been killed in a car crash. It’s hard to pinpoint because Ralphie is all jacked up on quaaludes. We can also infer that Ralphie is the resident adviser of the Quiet Residential Plaza, also known as the “nerd dorm,” because in the middle of his delusional rant—which, by the way, is occurring at three o’clock in the morning—one of the nerd freshmen on his floor, Janet Goodwin, comes running into his room. Janet says there’s an emergency and that Ralphie better