It was a Tuesday afternoon in the kind of bookstore that smells of slow decay and expensive vanilla, the kind where the dust motes dance in the shafts of light like they’re auditioning for a part. I was tucked behind a stack of remaindered hardcovers, nursing a lukewarm coffee, when I saw them.
Their father, , is the catalyst for the family's shared trauma. An estranged patriarch who prioritized his own whims over his children's stability, Royal returns years later, faking a terminal illness to wiggle his way back into the lives of his now-grown, deeply unhappy children. The Aesthetics of Memory tenenbaums
: A historical novel Eli describes as presupposing that Custer might not have died at the Battle of Little Big Horn. Family of Geniuses It was a Tuesday afternoon in the kind
First came Royal. He looked like a man who had been expelled from a country club for reasons that were technically legal but morally bankrupt. He wore a mink coat that must have been sweltering in the mid-July heat, and his suit was cut from a fabric that whispered of old money and older lies. He moved with a specific kind of shuffling lope, his hands buried deep in his pockets, surveying the paperback fiction section with the weary judgment of a man who had burned every bridge and was now looking for a ferry. He picked up a book, looked at the cover, and put it back, perhaps thinking about how much easier it was to manipulate people when they were younger and more impressionable. An estranged patriarch who prioritized his own whims