Leading the Cheers

For travelers, history has a way of appearing crystallized. It's all too easy, when visiting someone else's country, to discern the links between the ideas of the past and the way people live now. And in Justin Cartwright's Leading the Cheers, London ad man Dan Silas is happy to make such links. British by birth, he attended high school briefly in Michigan, then returned to his native soil. Now his class has asked him to be the keynote speaker at their 30th reunion. Dan is in just the right mood to make such a trip; he's recently sold his wildly successful agency and broken up with his young girlfriend. "What carried me far in advertising was a glib up-to-dateness, and its roots obviously go back a long way. It is this cheapness which I am endeavouring to slough off. I will avail myself, without cynicism, of the offer to buy a commemorative brick from the old high school."

For Dan, America has come to represent a kind of lost, earnest innocence: you can practically hear the fife-and-drum music in the background as he rolls into town for the reunion. No less rosy are his memories of his best friend, Gary, and his high-school sweetheart, Gloria, with whom he first coupled on Thomas Jefferson's bed at Monticello on a class field trip. "In my memory, Gloria and Monticello are for ever joined." But now she claims he fathered a daughter that fateful afternoon, a daughter who's been murdered by a serial killer. Meanwhile, Gary has gone off the deep end, convinced he's an Ojibway Indian and leading ceremonies in a tipi in his mom's backyard. Dan's attempt to reconcile his Edenic memories with the bitter realities wrought by 30 years of history yield a singularly woeful comic novel. At times Justin Cartwright's narrative seems filigreed with ideas and ironies; at other times it seems concerned, quite simply, with one man who learns that his "version of what goes on is certainly faulty." --Claire Dederer