“Could I have a word, Ms. Florida?” he said.

Ms. Florida stepped out to the hall. The students started to shout the way they would if they were riding a roller coaster. Brian Sullivan’s Sunfire honked and flashed its lights so as not to be left out of the hullabaloo.

“How long has there been a car parked in your classroom?” Mr. Dillard asked.

“Just this period,” Ms. Florida replied. “But I heard from Mademoiselle Jeanne that it sat in during French class as well.”

“Her Intro to French?” he asked.

“No,” Ms. Florida replied. “Advanced French.”

“Funny,” Mr. Dillard said. “That car doesn’t seem older than a ’98.”

“No,” Mrs. Florida said. “It’s a ’95. My brother had one just like it, in pearl blue.”

Mr. Dillard walked back to his office and rechecked the attendance sheets for the day. Sure enough, in each of Brian Sullivan’s classes, the teacher had crossed out his name and written in ’95 Pontiac Sunfire, white with red trim.

Mr. Dillard thought about calling the Sullivan home, but there had been a surprise locker check that afternoon, and three students had been arrested for felony narcotics. A fourth had been caught with a firearm on school grounds. One of the drug-sniffing dogs had left a trail of runny shit down the halls. The Pontiac Sunfire, Mr. Dillard thought, was a stable vehicle. He recalled a commercial featuring a cherry-red two-door convertible with a buxom brunette behind the wheel, a woman not unlike Ms. Florida. The commercial’s slogan had been We build excitement. Ms. Florida’s face glowed in his mind. Some things, he thought, were better left as they were. 

That first semester, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire struggled in the academic arena. Its French accent was a bit throaty, and without the ability to grip a pen properly it had a hard time finishing most of its composition assignments. On the sports field, though, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire dominated. In November the football team fitted it with a blue and gold bra, the colors of the Brookhaven Bearcats, and spray-painted a number on each door. Coach Tibbets found himself singling out the car during two-a-day practices for its effort in tackling drills. The greatest insult he could lob at his players became “You run like a goddamned Corolla.”

Against their rival, East High, Coach Tibbets strapped chains onto the Sunfire’s tires and gave the team a ferocious pep talk that had to be cut short due to the fumes from the car’s exhaust. That night, under the klieg lights of Welcome Stadium and the Steadicam of the local NBC affiliate, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire set a new record for touchdowns in a half (seventeen). It seemed to know exactly where to be to make a play. The senior girls painted its number on their lithe bellies in black shoe polish. A few college scouts were there as well, watching as the Pontiac literally drove circles around East High’s elite Tiger defense.

“Do you think it can learn the option?” a scout from Bowling Green State asked.

“Forget it,” the man from Ohio State said. He pointed to a smoldering puddle of darkness in the end zone. “We want three yards and a cloud of dust, not ten miles and an oil leak.”

But their critical gaze did not inhibit Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire’s good time. At the homecoming dance in the gym later that night, it deejayed a blistering set of trance music, opening its doors and blasting its radio until its battery wore down. Coach Tibbets popped the Sunfire’s hood to jump it alive again with his Ford Bronco, and all the girls gathered around to watch. Even Ms. Florida stopped making eyes at Mr. Dillard to sneak a glimpse at its greasy block. After two jolts, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire sent an arc of light sparking from its battery and set a wall of crepe-paper flowers aflame. The girls swooned.

At the after-party, Marty Greyerson, the captain of the team and leading receiver, shotgunned beers with the Sunfire in the garage while the rest of the team cheered. They had set the head of the Bearcat mascot on the Sunfire’s hood like a grotesque ornament. A few girls rested on the bumper as it revved its engine. The good times rolled.

As the night wore on, though, the crowd thinned. The other kids roamed the upstairs bedrooms of Marty’s house, raiding the liquor cabinet and stealing CDs. They pawed and sucked face. Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire tried to drive inside the house, too, but Marty’s mother had white carpet, and the Sunfire was still dripping green and black blots from the game. Plus someone had jammed a Doors cassette into its deck, and Marty could hear Jim Morrison’s mad voice grow louder when the Sunfire rolled closer.

By three, the garage had grown colder. The somber timbre of Jim Morrison echoed off the walls. The Sunfire was deciding whether it felt safe to drive when Betty Heller walked in.

Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire waited as she walked a slow circle around the edge of the garage. Betty Heller was a nice girl, but with the guys on the team she had a reputation. When she came to the headlights she laid a hand across its hood.

“I feel like…” she said, and paused. “If I could just drive you a bit, maybe. Your paint is so soft.” She pressed her left breast against the windshield.

Eventually Betty stroked the wiper until Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire turned on its emergency flashers and squirted a bit of blue washer fluid on Betty’s hand.

“It’s okay,” Betty said, caressing a dent on its hood. “Leave it there.” 

There were few corners of Brookhaven High where Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire did not leave an impression. In Mr. Janney’s Physics class, the Sunfire often volunteered for demonstrations, and once let Mr. Janney shoot a potato out of its tailpipe. It tutored Freshman Math in the courtyard before football practice, though most of its pupils struggled to decipher the elaborate system of honks and dings Mr. Ritzenfelter, the enrichment teacher, had laboriously cataloged into a kind of car alphabet. After gym, weaklings without pubic hair took refuge in the Sunfire’s trunk when it came time to shower. During Mr. Cappello’s Civics course, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire led a moment of silence for the victims of an earthquake in Malaysia.

But the sporting arena was its true stage. In the spring, it ran track and threw the shot put. At the district meet, over the protests of the other teams, it took first prize in the hundred-yard dash and ran the mile in just over three minutes. The hurdles proved a bigger challenge, but it placed a respectable fifth, and the Columbus Dispatch named it to the All-District team.

So it was no surprise that when votes were counted for the class valedictory speech, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire was the overwhelming favorite. Even Betty Heller, who had held a grudge when the Sunfire had stopped returning her calls, could see the logic.

“He’s touched so many lives,” she told her best friend Carol.

Still, it faced its fair share of detractors. One day, driving to Woodshop, the Pontiac overheard Brookhaven High’s guidance counselor, Jerry Whalen, speaking in his office with Principal Dillard. They had just received the results from the Pontiac’s employment-aptitude test.

“It says here it should look for a job in the engineering sector,” Principal Dillard said. “What’s so wrong with that?”

“It leaked a few dots on a Scantron,” Mr. Whalen said. “Now we’re supposed to believe it’s college material? Maybe a Grand Am — but a Sunfire? Its Kelley Blue Book isn’t even $2,400, and that’s not going anywhere but south. I mean, look, Harry — I’m not in the dream-dashing business, but come on. We’d be better off selling it to East High and buying that new couch for the guidance room.”

“It did show promise in Mr. Schneider’s art class,” Mr. Dillard offered, pointing to the mural of tire tracks on the wall outside. But Mr. Whalen rolled his eyes.

“You’ll be the fool of the Principals’ Ball, letting it speak at graduation,” Mr. Whalen said. “And then who will you come crying to, stinking drunk? You’re the one who let this car into everyone’s life. Face it, Harry: some cars have it and some don’t. Don’t build up its hopes that it could be something other than a Pontiac Sunfire.” 

In the end Mr. Dillard brushed this talk off. During commencement, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire walked with the other kids, its tassel secured tightly to its rearview, next to its pine-cone-shaped air freshener. It gave a rousing valedictory, according to Mr. Ritzenfelter, who translated it afterward and emailed it to the entire district under the subject heading THE GLORY OF KEYS. Principal Dillard taped a Certificate of Attendance onto the Pontiac’s back window, and all the teachers signed their names in soap.

Two weeks later, at the Principals’ Ball, Mr. Dillard danced with his wife while Ms. Florida blinked in his mind like an electric sequin swirling on the disco ball. The other principals called him “VTec” and made childish vrooms behind him when he walked to get punch. That night he sat hunched over the telephone in his dark kitchen, speaking in hushed tones to Ms. Florida about how it was her soft shoulders he’d wanted to rest his cheek against. But she had other worries on her mind. She had gotten a flat coming out of the teachers’ lot that afternoon and had sat there crying for hours. Instead of changing the tire she had written a note to Principal Dillard’s wife. Whenever she felt guilty she did this, he knew; she used it as a way to level them both. The notes were never mailed. With the confession written, she always said, there was no reason to lie anymore.

“I just sat there with grease on me and felt like I would never come clean, Harold,” she said.

“About the affair?”

“No,” she said. “That car. What kind of world have we sent him out into?”

“The car?” Principal Dillard said. “I don’t know. You’re just upset. You always get depressed after graduation. But come August it’ll be just the same. The excitement will build again. We’ll build the excitement together, Jan.”

“Stop with the fucking commercials,” Ms. Florida said. 

In the fall, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire enrolled at Ohio State and tried to walk onto the football team, but the campus was enormous and not at all impressed with the fantastic abilities of cars. It wasn’t strange to see a microwave cart doing shuttle runs on the lacrosse fields by Lincoln Tower, or to catch the tail end of a juggling performance by the Manda, a double-jointed half-man, half-panda who entertained all comers on the corner of High and 15th. Before the Saturday-morning tailgate at Triangle House, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire watched its roommate Charlie and his pledge brothers construct a metallic Holstein that shit stadium mustard and suckled actives with Coors Light from its teats. The Sunfire did a few doughnuts on the front lawn, but the brothers tired of those antics quickly. When it came time to go to the game, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire couldn’t fit through the turnstiles at the Horseshoe and ended up giving its ticket away to a scalper. 

The Sunfire never really felt comfortable among the Buckeyes. It was hard to move around most of the hallways on campus, which had been remodeled in the late sixties based on a narrow, labyrinthine floor plan designed purposely to discourage sit-ins. After a month of frustration, the Pontiac stopped getting its oil changed. One morning it awoke in a pool of its own transmission fluid and Charlie reported it to the RA.

“That leak ruined my DVD player,” Charlie testified at the dorm hearing. “And I think it’s wearing my best polo shirt without asking.” He held a tartan plaid shirt up for the jury to see. “That’s oil on the collar. I can smell it.”

Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire didn’t wait to hear the verdict. After the fall break, it parked in front of the Sullivans’ house back in suburban Columbus and didn’t return to campus. But Brian Sullivan, who had spent the past year studying to be a peripatetic, had long ago stopped thinking of it as his car. He left its keys on a hook in the kitchen cupboard near the oatmeal and went east to study under a Sufi mystic in Vermont.

Sometimes the Sunfire took rides past the high school. Once, when it tried to enter the front door, two security guards it didn’t recognize demanded to see a visitor’s pass. The Sunfire honked for Principal Dillard, but Principal Dillard was no longer there to greet it. It was only Mr. Ritzenfelter, who was passing by on his way to lunch, who averted a greater misunderstanding by explaining that Mr. Dillard had shamed himself and the school by cheating on his wife, and had resigned. Since then there had been several bomb threats, and now no one could enter the building without a guest pass. The Sunfire backed down the stairs and sat humming in neutral until the security men finally threatened to tow it off school property. 

In the spring, a reckless cousin of Brian’s borrowed the Sunfire one night and drove it to HempFest ’02, somewhere near the Buckeye Lake amphitheater, where a huckster convinced him to trade the battery for a bag of low-grade marijuana. The huckster spent the rest of the day selling electrical shocks from the battery to stoners, who jerked and moaned against a background of seamless guitar arpeggios echoing off the smoky hillside. Powerless and distraught, Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire managed to roll down into the woods near a meth shack. A drifter or two used it as a bathroom, or a place to get high for while. One night a mutt with pups burrowed under the driver’s seat and shook through the cold dark hours. Sparrow shit painted the Sunfire’s windshield white. The junkies sold the springs from its seats and used the foam to start fires in the rain.

A year passed, and the police raided the meth shack. The city towed the Pontiac back to Columbus and left it in the impound lot under the 315 overpass. The car sat parked next to an old Dodge Dart for two months, until it was auctioned to a retired nun who drove it a hundred miles a year, all in the same circuit: from her home to the Kroger to Saint Agatha’s and back home again. After one trip she left a carton of milk in the trunk for several weeks and the kids in the neighborhood started calling Brian Sullivan’s Pontiac Sunfire the “Vomit Comet” because of the musty smell. When they notice it now, it’s only to toss rocks at its side or grind their skateboards on its bumper, unaware of that year at Brookhaven when it was king. Such is the fate of cars.

Mr. Hibma knew he could teach for all eternity and it still wouldn’t feel natural. He was a geography teacher but he didn’t teach the subject of geography. He lectured about whatever he felt like and left the memorizing of topographical terms and state capitals to the kids. They had books. They had exercise manuals. If they were smart and curious they’d end up knowing a lot, and if they were dumb they wouldn’t.

“Semifinal round,” the kiss-ass announced.

Mr. Hibma listened as a boy named Vince who was known for giving out bubble gum tried to differentiate Asian countries.

“There are a lot of people crammed together,” Vince said. “Short people?” He drummed his fingers, searching. “Not the one with the hanging ducks.”

The kiss-ass called time up. Today’s game was something akin to “The $10,000 Pyramid.” It was new to the kids. They’d never heard of “The $10,000 Pyramid. “

Mr. Hibma said, “Let me help. This is a country full of off-white folks who smile funny, eat raw fish, and wear the hippest shoes.”

All the kids stared blankly except Shelby Register, who said, “Japan.”

“Correct. I wouldn’t trade you kids for all the tea in… Shelby?”

“China,” she said.

Mr. Hibma sometimes viewed himself as a character in a novel. At the age of twenty-nine, he’d already experienced three things that mostly only happened in books. (1) As an infant, he’d been stolen from the hospital by a nurse. The duration of the abduction had been six hours and he’d been unharmed, but still. (2) He had unexpectedly inherited money. It was only $190,000 and he’d blown it in two years traveling around Europe, but still. (3) He had chosen his permanent residence by throwing a dart at a map. There hadn’t been a town where the dart had stuck, but there weren’t many towns in Citrus County, Florida. Citrus County was a couple hours north of St. Petersburg, on what people called the Nature Coast, which Mr. Hibma had gathered was a title of default; there was nature because there were no beaches and no amusement parks and no hotels and no money. There were rednecks and manatees and sinkholes. There were insects, not gentle crickets but creatures with stingers and pincers and scorn in their hearts. There was the smell of vegetation, every plant blooming outrageously or rotting by the minute. There was a swampy lake and a complex of aging villas surrounding that lake, and one of these villas was now Mr. Hibma’s home.

Teaching had been the only job available to him, and for a while it was amusing, another lark, but now he’d been doing it a year and a half. It was February. It was Thursday. It was fourth period. Mr. Hibma was sick of skinny, smelly, hormone-dazed kids staring at him and lying to him and asking him questions. He was sick of their clothes, their faces. And the teachers were worse. Mr. Hibma did his best to keep to himself–ate in his classroom, avoided heading clubs or committees, kept all his discipline in-house instead of dealing with the office, and kept away from “7th hour,” which was what the younger teachers called meeting at a Mexican restaurant Friday afternoon and getting drunk.

Despite failing to name their semifinal nation, Vince and his partner had advanced. Their opponents had broken a rule by using hand gestures and had been disqualified. It was Vince’s team against Shelby and Toby. Shelby was the smartest student Mr. Hibma had, and Toby, well, smart wasn’t the word. Cunning. Maybe he was cunning.

Shelby knew a lot about stand-up comedians. She had memorized the acts of Bill Hicks, Dom Irrera, Richard Belzer–nobody new, just stand-ups from years ago. She knew where these guys had gotten their starts and what jokes they were known for. She knew a lot about a lot of different things–literature, illnesses. Also, Mr. Hibma had noticed, Shelby seemed to want to be a Jew. She used words like meshugana and mensch and had brought matzo ball soup for ethnic food week and the days she missed school with a cold or stomachache were always Jewish holidays. Shelby lived with her father and maybe a sister in a little ranch house a stone’s throw from the school. Her mother had died a couple years ago.

And Toby, denizen of detention, breaking rules in a way that seemed meant to reach a quota. There was no joy in his misbehavior, no rage. He didn’t have friends but didn’t get picked on. Neither of his parents were around. He lived on a big piece of property with his uncle.

Vince and his partner identified Morocco in seven seconds. Shelby and Toby had to beat that. Shelby trained her eyes coolly on the card. When the kiss-ass gave the signal, she said, “Where Bjork is from.”

“I’ve heard of Bjork,” said Toby.

“You’re not allowed to talk,” said the kiss-ass.

“Then how am I supposed to answer?”

“It was named to make people think it wasn’t an inviting place to settle,” said Shelby.

“You’re allowed to guess countries,” the kiss-ass told Toby. “You’re not allowed to make comments.”

“Shitland?” Toby offered. “That doesn’t sound inviting.”

“Time,” blurted the kiss-ass.

Mr. Hibma informed the class that he’d gone to a flea market that past weekend and found a man selling movie posters for a dime each. He’d purchased three hundred. From here on out, these would serve as prizes. He presented Vince with “Midnight Run” and handed Shelby “The Milagro Beanfield War.”

“Let me get this straight,” Vince said. “First place is a poster and second place is a poster?”

Mr. Hibma picked up a few stubs of chalk and shook them in his hand. “If Vince and Toby were gentlemen, they’d let the ladies keep the prizes.”

“I’m not a gentleman,” Toby said. “I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a gentleman.”

The lunch bell rang, ending the discussion and prompting a swift and sweeping exodus from the room.

“By the way, Toby,” Mr. Hibma said. “You’ve got detention tomorrow afternoon for cursing.”

Toby looked toward the ceiling a moment and then gave a dispassionate nod. Detention was a part of his life he’d come to terms with.

The gas station. Scant light scarring the sky. Toby planted his feet and took a full breath, the air tart with petroleum. He saw the pay phone over near the air and vacuum. He was as weak as ever. Anything could make him weak–the wrong smell, the wrong tint in the sky, thinking about all the dragging afternoons he’d endured in his lifetime and all the afternoons to come. He was addicted to petty hoodlumism. He rested what was left of his soda on the metal sill, picked up the phone, dropped in coins, and dialed a number at random. A man with a Northern accent answered and Toby asked him if he believed his life was worth a damn, if he honestly believed anyone liked him.

“Who is this?” the man said, eager, like he got prank calls all the time.

“Nobody you’d understand,” Toby told him.

“Pay phone,” the guy said, apparently reading his caller ID.

“At the Citgo,” Toby said.

“The Citgo? Tell you what, smart guy. I’m coming up there and I’m going to bash your brains in with a softball bat. How does that sound for a prank?”

“That would kill me, or at least do me grievous harm. That’s what my uncle used to say, that he was going to do me grievous harm.”

“I wish he had. It might’ve helped.”

“A softball bat?”

“I use it for softball. I guess it’s the same as a baseball bat.”

“You’re just saying you’d do that,” Toby said. “You really wouldn’t. You wouldn’t murder a fourteen-year-old kid.”

“I don’t know,” the guy said. “I think I might this time.”

“Trust me, you’d think better of it. You’re not like me. An idea strikes me, I’m helpless against it.”

“The Citgo on Route 50?”

“That’s the one.”

The guy hung up. Toby looked at the phone in his hand then let it dangle by its cord. He slurped his soda until it was only ice and left the cup on the ground and walked the woods’ edge. He found a spot to enter the tangled trees, angling toward Uncle Neal’s property. He was taking the long way, out by the hardwoods, so he could check on the bunker. He wasn’t going in. He only went in when he wanted to stay down for a long time. He liked to walk by, to see that the bunker was undisturbed. He didn’t know whose property it was on. He’d been through that part of the woods a hundred times before he’d found it, a hundred times walking right past the bunker as he tromped through that hard-duned no-man’s-land jumbled kittycorner to Uncle Neal’s property. The bunker, with its ancient boards pushed in and cracked by tree roots, with its stench of hands and tarnish, with its muddy, mushroomed hatch door which had opened with a moist whiff and then a deafening silence. The bunker was from some terrible time, maybe not so very long ago but a different terrible time than the one Toby was in, a terrible time that had come to an end, one way or another.

Toby had a folding chair down there that he’d dragged from another part of the woods, and matches and candles and water. When he went down, he did nothing. Toby believed the bunker had a specific purpose for him, and he wasn’t going to make a move until he parsed out what that purpose was. He wasn’t going to hoard dirty magazines or fireworks or pretend he was camping. He didn’t do a thing but sit in the chair and smell the smells. Sometimes he smelled vinegar. Sometimes the scales of fish. And each time he left, each time he finally climbed out, he felt that the bunker was sad to see him go. He felt he was leaving the bunker lonesome. Maybe nothing terrible had happened in Toby’s bunker. It was one room, tidy in its way, plain. It could’ve been used for simple food storage and nothing else, back before refrigerators, back when the Indians were running around. Maybe this was a place for old-timey rednecks to keep their alligator meat away from vultures.

Another week of school had passed, more quizzes and study halls and, in the case of Mr. Hibma’s class, more games. Shelby wasn’t the new kid anymore, and she was grateful for that. She’d settled in and was more or less slipping through the days. People had their own problems. Shelby had been fooled about Florida, but that was okay. She wasn’t the first. She’d imagined a place that was warm and inviting and she’d gotten a place that was without seasons and sickeningly hot. She’d wanted palm trees and she’d gotten grizzly, low oaks. She’d wanted surfers instead of rednecks. She’d thought Florida would make her feel glamorous or something, and there was a region of Florida that might’ve done just that, but it wasn’t this part. It was okay, though. It was something different. It wasn’t the Midwest. It wasn’t a place where you could look around and plainly see, for miles, that nothing worthwhile was going on. Shelby would travel to better places when she was older, when she could chart her own course. She’d go to India and France. Shelby could see the mornings of her future, the foreign pink sunrises.

The sunrise this morning, in Citrus County, had been the color of lima beans. It had been a color you might see under peeled-off paint. Shelby had stuffed one pocket of her army pants with bagels, and into the other pocket she’d slid a shallow, lidded bowl full of lox. Once she and her father and her little sister had boarded the boat and snapped the straps of their lifejackets, Shelby spread her brunch feast, complete with sliced tomato and capers and cream cheese. They’d rented a pontoon boat and planned to cruise the spring system of Citrus County until they saw a manatee. They’d been told they could swim with the manatees if they liked. Manatees had no natural defense other than size, and that very size got them stuck in canals at low tide and cut up by boat propellers. The man who rented the boats had explained all this from beneath the brim of a blue ball cap adorned with the words IDLE SPEED, ASSHOLE! The man said Citrus County never got hit directly by a hurricane and, in his personal opinion, that’s why the manatees had chosen this spot.

Shelby’s father, a man with limp hair that parted and re-parted as the wind blew, a former boxer who spoke with an accent that could’ve come from anywhere, was always trying to expose his daughters to new things–new foods, new terrain, new ideas. He felt he had to be twice the parent, Shelby figured. And he was. Shelby did not feel deprived.

Shelby’s sister Kaley had brought along her book about Manny the Manatee. Immediately after breakfast, Kaley stowed the book under a seat, along with her precious watch that always read 3:12 and the rest of the orange juice. Kaley would soon turn four. She looked up at Shelby, displeased that Shelby had seen her stash spot. This was something Kaley did lately–hoarded. She wore, as always, socks but no shoes.

After Shelby had cleaned up the remains of the bagels and lox, her father puttering them out into the deep water, she took out her vocab words. She had the definitions memorized. This week the theme was bureaucracy. She wanted to go through the whole semester without missing one word of one definition.

“You’d like my word from yesterday,” her father said. “On my calendar at work: poshlust. It means bad art. It’s Russian, I think.”

Shelby folded the paper in her hands and slipped it into her pocket. “Mr. Hibma told us about that. Poshlost. We had that for a word. It means more than bad art. Means bad art that most smart people don’t know is bad.”

“Like what?”

“Mr. Hibma doesn’t give examples.”

“What do you mean?”

“He doesn’t feel he needs to prove his statements. He feels that examples are petty.”

“Well, his poshlost sounds like elitism to me.”

“Mr. Hibma wishes elitism would come back into style.”

“I met that guy,” Shelby’s father said. “He’s one of those cool pessimists.”

“Dad,” Kaley broke in. “Will the manatee bite me?”

“No, the manatee loves you.”

“Is he sleeping?”

“He might be.”

“Where are we going?” Shelby asked.

“Not a clue.”

Shelby’s father had steered them down a river which had rapidly tapered into a house-lined canal. They approached a cul-de-sac. Shelby’s father put the boat in reverse to avoid hitting a dock, then began to execute a three-point turn. The boat was unwieldy. An old man came out into his backyard in order to stare at Shelby’s father as his three-point turn became a five-point turn, a seven.

“Thanks for your concern,” Shelby’s father shouted.

The man wagged his head. “There’s a sign,” he squawked. “At the mouth of the canal.”

Shelby’s father righted the boat and they headed back out to the main confluence of springs, past moss-laden oaks and palm trees that grew out of the ground sideways. They rounded a bend. The sun was out, warming the aluminum frame of the pontoon boat and the damp turf that covered the deck. Kaley, socks soaked, padded over and leaned on Shelby’s leg.

Shelby closed her eyes and let the breeze tumble over her. She knew her family was getting by in the way people like them got by. They were making it. They did things on the weekends. Their moods went with the weather. In Indiana there were proven methods for dealing with misfortune–certain types of foods and certain types of get-togethers and certain expressions. Here Shelby’s family was on its own, and that had been the whole point of coming here. There were things to do and they had to go find them and do them.

Shelby breathed the mild stink of the weedy water and soon her mind wandered again to Toby, a boy in her geography class. He’d been her trivia partner this past week. Shelby felt tingly, thinking of him. Or maybe it was the sun. She understood that her attraction to Toby was clichéd. She was considered a good girl and he a bad boy. There was a reason why it was clichéd, a reason why girls like Shelby, through the years, had become infatuated with boys like Toby. Regular boys were boring. There wasn’t a way the regular boys could make her feel that she couldn’t feel on her own. And Toby had calves like little coconuts and long fingers and his hair and eyes were the flattest brown. He wasn’t in a clique. It seemed there was something about him you couldn’t know right away. Shelby wanted his hands on her. She wanted to smell his hair. She wanted him to give her goose bumps. There were a lot of things Shelby wanted to do and she was pretty sure she wanted to do them with Toby.

The movement of the boat jostled Shelby. The waterway was opening up, ripples turning to waves, saltwater fishing boats speeding this way and that. The pontoon boat rocked. A pelican flew low over their canopy, its wings bellowing against the air, its crusty pink eyes narrowed, and Kaley squeezed Shelby’s leg.

“That’s a channel marker,” Shelby’s father said. “We’re going out to the Gulf.”

He waited for a break in the traffic and pulled a struggling U-turn, the waves clapping against the bottom of the boat. The engine was doing everything it could.

Shelby heard familiar voices and turned to see a couple of popular girls from her school wearing bikinis, sprawled on the front of a gleaming white boat. The boat was anchored. They waved as Shelby passed. They were eating pineapple.

“I can’t thank you enough for not being slutty,” Shelby’s father told her. “Not that I’m counting my chickens. There’s time yet.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You’ve got character. You don’t try and impress people.”

“I’ll say ‘you’re welcome’ again and we can leave it at that.”

“Maybe I’m doing something right,” he said.

Shelby’s father drove the boat and patted Kaley’s head, guiding them past birdbathed back yards, past mangrove stands full of cranes. They ended up back near where they’d rented the boat and started off in yet another direction, down a wild-looking river shaded by vines. Kaley retrieved her book from under the seat and studied it.

Shelby was still thinking about the girls on the boat. She had chosen not to be one of them. In October her family had moved to Citrus County from Indiana and Shelby had immediately, halfway through her first day of school, been granted membership in the popular gaggle of girls. She was subjected to an onslaught of sleepovers, pool parties, and laps around the outlet mall. This lasted a month, at which time these girls could no longer deny that Shelby was uninterested in makeup, basketball players, the marital intrigues of celebrities, who would take whom to the dance. She didn’t like the same magazines they did, didn’t care to diet. She sometimes read books for pleasure.

After detention on Monday, Toby headed for the track-and-field tryouts. A bunch of other kids were going too. This was the kind of thing kids did. Toby walked past the faculty parking lot, the garbage bins. He rounded the trailers. There was Shelby Register, sitting on a bench at the little playground, reading a newspaper. The middle school had once been an elementary school, so it still had this kiddie playground and low water fountains you almost had to get on your knees to drink from.

Toby took a moment to watch Shelby. She wasn’t as transparent as the other kids at Toby’s school. He sort of hated her because everything was easy for her, but somehow she felt like an ally. She had misery in her and she didn’t give it away. She kept it and believed in it. She was like Toby; she was fine with whatever people thought she might be, fine with being underestimated. She was pretty without looking like all the other pretty girls. She wasn’t ashamed of being smart.

A toddler with red hair was on the swing, kicking her feet and tucking them. Toby walked up beside Shelby and for a moment she didn’t notice him. He wasn’t sure why he was stopping, wasn’t sure what he wanted to happen. Shelby had crisp tan shorts on instead of her old army pants. Her legs were ghastly white. She had wisps of hair falling over her ears. Shelby thought she was better than everyone else, and maybe she was right. She wasn’t better than Toby, though, because Toby wasn’t playing the same game.

She lowered her paper. “You can sit if you want.”

Toby’s face was to the sun. The sky was still, empty except for one immovable cloud that looked like a boulder. Toby stepped in front of the bench and lowered himself onto it.

“They’re going to eliminate pennies.” Shelby folded the paper and tucked it under her leg.

“How?” Toby said.

“Just pennies, for now.”

“So no more of those little trays: leave a penny, take a penny.”

“Those will go to museums.”

Toby grunted. He looked at the little girl on the swing.

“That’s my sister,” Shelby said. “We live through there. You can almost see our house.”

Toby looked at Shelby, then back at her sister.

“How was detention?”

“Same as always,” Toby said. “I won.”

Shelby’s sister was swinging higher and higher, getting the chains parallel to the ground. This didn’t seem to make Shelby nervous.

“Do you watch Comedy Central?” she asked.

“I don’t have cable.”

“Is your uncle a hippie?”

“How do you know I live with my uncle?”

“Everyone knows that.”

Toby squinted. The sun seemed aimed at him. “His income is up and down,” he said.

“They had this guy doing this stellar bit about Hot Pockets.”

“I eat those,” Toby said.

An active old couple peddled by on mountain bikes. They waved to Toby and Shelby, who watched them until they rounded a thicket.

“What’s your sister’s name?”

“Kaley.”

Kaley held a big toy watch. She wasn’t wearing shoes.

“Are you going to be late to tryouts?” Shelby said.

“I’ll make the team. Nobody else wants to pole vault. It’s not even supposed to be a middle school sport.”

“Then why is it?”

“The superintendent. He instated it after he married this lady from Finland.” Toby couldn’t keep his eyes off Kaley. Her hair was glinting like a fishing lure.

“He did it for love,” Shelby said. “He made pole vault a sport for love.”

The cloud wasn’t like a boulder anymore. It was like a scoop of something. It slid in front of the sun and Toby could see. There was nothing to look at but Shelby and her sister, her sister’s filthy feet.

“Would you recommend that island with all the monkeys on it?” Shelby said. “I have to find outings for my family. What’s left of it.”

“What island with monkeys on it?”

Shelby tipped her chin. “Down by Homosassa Springs. Monkey Island?”

“I don’t go on outings.”

“You’ve never even heard of it?”

“Not till now.”

“Well, it’s there. They filmed a Tarzan movie and left the monkeys.”

Toby shrugged. He didn’t care about movies or monkeys. He watched Shelby adjust herself on the bench, then push the newspaper farther under her.

“If you ever want to kiss me,” she said, “not that you currently want to or anything, I would be okay with that.”

Toby felt panic wash through him. He tried to nod.

“I wasn’t telling you to kiss me. In fact, don’t. It would be too weird now. I said that for future reference is all. Just so you know.”

Toby stood up from the bench, finding his balance. “Future reference,” he said. He stumbled getting back to the sidewalk.

Mr. Hibma managed to stretch genealogy presentations into a three-day affair, giving him a break from lecturing and from compiling trivia fodder. There were only a few kids left who hadn’t dispensed the uneventful lives of their recent ancestors. Mr. Hibma was seated low behind his desk, his dusty computer looming near. He’d prohibited the use of the Internet in his class. The students were not allowed to research any presentations online. He was sick of it, the Internet.

Mr. Hibma looked up and called on Shelby. She never volunteered for anything because she didn’t want to be a kiss-ass, but she was always prepared. She got up and spoke about her mother’s family. Her great-grandparents had owned a cane shop, back in Belgium. Their daughter, Shelby’s grandmother, had come to visit the States, fallen in love with a history teacher, and never returned to Europe. She and the history teacher had hosted a series of foster children before finally conceiving Shelby’s mother. One of the foster children had become famous in art circles, a woman named Janet Stubblefield who had dropped out of high school to become a hippie. She became expert at constructing mobiles out of old boots, and against her will she developed a following. People from all over began making art out of shoes. The whole business put Aunt Janet off. She moved to rural Tennessee and became a hermit and died in middle age. She had told everyone to stay away, that it was important to her to die alone.

Shelby dropped her note cards in the trash and sat down, light applause playing about the room. She hadn’t mentioned her mother. She’d chosen her mother’s side, but she’d cut the history short. A kid could really get sick of having a dead parent, Mr. Hibma imagined. These kids were all sad or crazy, and most of them had reason to be.

Mr. Hibma asked for the next presenter and a girl named Irene, who’d worn a sweater set and heavy makeup, got up and said some things and retook her seat. Toby was next, the only one who hadn’t gone. He’d chosen his father’s family, the family whose name he bore: McNurse. They’d moved from Ireland to Canada at the turn of the century, a well-off family who’d chosen to immigrate to Canada instead of the United States because it was harder to get into Canada. Most of them had died in the forties in an accident. An avalanche.

Mr. Hibma was sure Toby was lying. Toby was testing Mr. Hibma, seeing if he would call him on his fake history, but there was also a chance Toby didn’t know a thing about his father’s family. Toby may never have met the man. Or maybe Toby’s history was nothing anyone would want to know. Maybe making a history up was the wisest option. Well, Mr. Hibma would give Toby an A+.

“My father was a snake researcher who drove a big Cadillac,” Toby said. “He met my mother while driving across the country. He only slept with her because he’d promised himself he’d sleep with a woman every night of his road trip, and she was the only woman not spoken for in Farmington, New Mexico.”

Toby sat and Mr. Hibma replaced him in front of the class. He told the kids to give themselves a hand, then to line up and receive a poster.

“I’ve got ‘Mermaids,’” he said. “‘Fletch II.’ Except you, Thomas.”

Thomas, a kid with a widow’s peak whose parents farmed fancy tomatoes, gaped at Mr. Hibma.

“In your notes you had pages printed from the internet. I could see the site info at the top and bottom. You’ll be getting a C. Everyone else gets an A-. Toby, you get an A+. Best presentation of the year.”

On the way out of Mr. Hibma’s class, Shelby had whispered to Toby that she was going to find the old lost tennis court after school, that Toby should meet her there and keep her company, so once the final bell had sounded he headed out through the pastures behind the football bleachers. The tennis court couldn’t have been more than a mile away, but there was no trail. You had to walk through the pastures and then over a high spot in the swamp and then it was in among a bunch of spindly pine trees. It was in the middle of nowhere, a full tennis court.

When Toby arrived, the court was empty. He walked up to the fence. The surface of the court was cracked with weeds. The net was sagging. There was an aluminum bench with algae or something growing on it. Toby started as a ball flew over the fence and bounced into the corner. He turned and saw Shelby coming out of some high grass.

“I can tell you by the way you walk,” Shelby said. “Even with your hair short, I could tell it was you.”

Shelby was wearing sunglasses. They made it look like she had a hangover.

“What do I walk like?” Toby asked her.

“You have a hitch. You leave room in every step to change direction, to change your mind.”

“I hardly ever change my mind,” Toby said.

The sun was hitting Shelby. Her arms and legs were bony. It seemed strange that she could walk around and throw things, as bony as she was. Toby felt he was betraying himself, being out at this tennis court. Shelby seemed dangerous, like a trap.

“Help me,” she said.

She waded back into the tall grass and Toby followed. They dragged their feet and shook the underbrush and whenever Toby found a ball he handed it to Shelby and she threw it back over the fence. She seemed charmed that people used this court. Someone had dragged racquets and dozens of balls through a half-hour of Florida wilderness in order to play on a dilapidated court with a rotting net.

“People get really bored,” Toby said.

The two of them worked their way through the grass and then around some cypress knees. They found eight or nine balls, all new, bright in color and rubbery in smell. They looked absolutely fluorescent against the dingy court.

“A while back a millionaire lived in Citrus County,” Shelby said. “His mistress loved tennis, so he had this court built out in the woods so they could play in secret.”

“Wow,” Toby said. He knew this story was false. This tennis court, along with a half-built golf course Toby sometimes walked through, were remnants of an unfinished development. Nothing romantic. And he wasn’t going to tell Shelby but her mysterious new tennis balls were probably the work of drunken teenagers. Most mild mysteries in Citrus County boiled down to drunk teenagers.

They made it around to the opposite side of the court, where the pines were. Toby had no idea why they were doing this. They found a couple more balls and then when it seemed there were no more Toby spotted something down under some thick brush, down in a little ravine that must’ve been formed by a sinkhole.

Toby held onto a vine and lowered himself. He mashed a bush over with his foot and reached down and grasped the ball. He cleaned it of clumps of dirt and an insect or two, put it in his pocket, and climbed up to flat ground.

He presented the pale, bounceless orb to Shelby, and she didn’t hurl it over the fence. She held it in one hand and with the other she drew Toby in by the elbow. She was kissing him. Shelby’s mouth was moist and assertive and Toby could feel the world’s vastness. He knew there were oceans out there that made the Gulf look like a puddle. There were places covered in snow, places where people ate snakes for dinner, places where people believed that every single thing that happened in their lives was determined by ill-willed spirits. Shelby tasted like nothing. She smelled like freckles and she was making sounds, but she didn’t taste like anything. Toby didn’t know whether his eyes were open. His feet were planted and he was keeping his balance as Shelby leaned against him.

When Toby thought of his hands, he began to panic. The point of the kissing had been reached where Toby was supposed to do more, something with his hands. Shelby’s fingers were up under Toby’s shirt in the back. He could feel the old bare tennis ball rubbing his skin. Toby took a step backward and Shelby almost fell. He said he had to go. Shelby looked at him like he was a silly child.

That evening Toby skipped dinner and went to the bunker. He listened to his breathing and to busy drones that seemed to come from beyond the bunker walls but that also could have been coming from his mind. For a while, a tint of light came in from above, through a small vent, but once the sun set Toby couldn’t see anything. He had candles but he didn’t light one. And so he couldn’t see the big railroad ties that stood in each corner for support. He couldn’t see the spider webs or the pale roots that hung limply from the earthen walls. There was nothing down here but what you brought. Toby thought about the way some of the other kids had looked at him when he showed up for the track tryout. He thought about his hunger, which he could ignore until it went away. He thought about Shelby Register and her little sister, and about their dad who probably patted their heads all the time and watched them sleep and gave them five dollars for each good report card grade.

When Toby was in the bunker, he never knew how much time was passing. He heard voices sometimes, nothing he could understand. He heard whimpering. He heard static. It was all in his imagination. It took hours in the bunker for him to clear away all the chatter from school–blabbing teachers and gossiping classmates and orders from coaches and stupid announcements over the PA.

His back was stiff when he stood up from the folding chair. His sweat had dried on him. He wanted to know who else had been down in this bunker and who had built it. Toby had been meant to find it. Toby wasn’t another hard-luck case. He wasn’t another marauding punk. He’d been acting like one, thus far, but he was destined for higher evil and he could feel that destiny close at hand. He was more terrible inside than every juvenile delinquent in the whole county put together.

• “Red Plenty” — Francis Spufford

• “American Rust” — Philipp Meyer

It’s never easy, returning home after failing to make one’s way out in the world. When I left these pages in 2008, it was very much in the spirit of “Good-bye, nerdy losers! I’m not wasting any more time ploughing through books on your behalf! I have things to do, places to go, people to see!” Ah, well. What can you do, if the people don’t want to be seen? I have now become that pathetic modern phenomenon you might have read about, the boomerang child — the kid who struts off (typically and unwisely with middle finger raised), spends a couple of years screwing up some lowly job on a magazine or in a bank, and then comes back, tail between his legs, to reclaim his old bedroom and wonder how come his parents have more fun than he on a Saturday night.

“What’s a parent to do?” bewails a terrifying (for me) article dealing with this very issue on the website eHow.com. “It’s hard to turn your children away. The best thing a parent can do is help them understand that they are adults now and the rules have changed.” The new rules for parents, the piece goes on to say, should include charging rent and refusing to buy toiletries and other incidentals. I’m pretty sure I’m going to end up getting my own way on the incidental toiletries, should it come to that. It’s pretty hot here at Believer Towers, and I suspect that the Poly-syllabic Spree, the 115 dead-eyed but fragrant people who edit this magazine, will cave in long before I do. Still. It wasn’t what I expected when I left: that eighteen months later, I’d be working for free deodorant. What’s particularly humiliating in my case is that, unlike most boomerang children, I’m considerably older than those who have taken me back in. They’re not as young as they were, the Spree, but even so.

I have decided to vent my spleen by embarking on a series of books that, I hope, will be of no interest whatsoever to the readership of this magazine. David Kynaston’s superlative “Austerity Britain” is more than six hundred pages long and deals with just six years, 1945–51, in the life of my country. The second volume in the series, “Family Britain, 1951–57,” has already been published, so I plan to move on to that next; Kynaston is going to take us through to Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979, and I’m warning you now that I plan to read every -single word, and write about them in great detail in this column.

I am less than a third of the way through “Austerity Britain,” but I have read enough to know that this is a major work of social history: readable, brilliantly researched, informative, and gripping. Part of Kynaston’s triumph is his immense skill in marshaling the resources at his disposal: it seems at times as though he must have read every novel written in the period, and every auto-biography, whether that autobiography was written by a member of the postwar Labour government or by a member of England’s postwar cricket team. (On page 199 of my paperback, he quotes from former Labour deputy leader Roy Hattersley, Stones bassist Bill Wyman, and cookery writer Elizabeth David, all on the subject of the miserable, bitter winter of 1947.) And it goes without saying that he’s listened to every radio program, and trawled through every newspaper.

The effect Kynaston achieves is extraordinary: Britain changes month by month, like a child, and you end up feeling that every citizen of the world should have the opportunity to read a book this good about their own country. I’m glad that not everyone in the UK has read it (although it has sold a lot of copies), because you can steal anecdotes from it and pass them off as your own. One of my favorites so far is David Lean’s account of showing “Brief Encounter” at a cinema in Rochester, Kent, to a tough audience full of sailors from the nearby Chatham dockyards. “At the first love scene one woman down in the front started to laugh. I’ll never forget it. And the second love scene it got worse. And then the audience caught on and waited for her to laugh and they all joined in and it ended in absolute shambles. They were rolling in the aisles.” Brief Encounter is a much-loved British film, often taken out of a back pocket and waved about when someone wants to make a point about how we have changed as a nation, and what we have lost: in the old days, we spoke better, emoted less, stayed married, didn’t get naked at the drop of a hat, etc. We are cursed with an apparently unshakable conviction that we are all much more knowing than people used to be, back in the Pre-Ironic Age, so it is both instructive and humbling to learn that, half a century ago, Rochester sailors didn’t need the Onion to tell them what was hilarious.

The best stuff of all Kynaston has taken from Britain’s extraordinary Mass Observation project, which ran from the late 1930s to the mid-’60s. The creators of MO — the anthropologist Tom Harrisson, the poet Charles Madge, and the filmmaker Humphrey Jennings, among others (even the formidable, and formidably clever, literary critic William Empson was involved somewhere) — got five hundred volunteers to keep diaries or reply to questionnaires, and the results provide the best record of what the war and its aftermath meant to ordinary Britons. True, there were some peculiar types involved; Henry St. John, a civil servant living in Bristol, scrupulously described each opportunity for masturbation, as and when it arose. A visit to London’s Windmill Theatre, famous for its nude tableaux vivants, elicits this observation: “I delayed masturbation until another para-nude appeared seen frontways, with drapery depending between the exposed breasts.” The day after Hiroshima sees Henry returning to a public lavatory in the north-east “to see if I could masturbate over the mural inscriptions.” Say what you like about the Internet, but for a certain class of underemployed male, life has become warmer, and more hygienic.

It’s not all about wanking, of course. “Austerity Britain” is about the morale of a battered, broke nation, and its attempts to restore itself; it’s about food rationing and town planning, housing and culture, socialism and aspiration, and it never forgets for a second that its (mostly gray and brown) tiles make up a big, big mosaic of our tiny, beleaguered island. And if you read or write fiction, you may be gratified to see how Kynaston relies on the contemporary stuff to add color and authenticity to his portrait of the times. The received wisdom is that novels too much of the moment won’t last; but what else do we have that delves so deeply into what we were thinking and feeling at any given period? In fifty or one hundred years’ time, we are, I suspect, unlikely to want to know what someone writing in 2010 had to say about the American Civil War. I don’t want to put you off, if you’re just writing the last paragraph of a seven-hundred-page epic novel about Gettysburg — I’m sure you’ll win loads of prizes and so on. But after that, you’ve had it.

It’s been a month of enjoyment in unlikely places, if David Kynaston will forgive me for wondering whether an enormous nonfiction book with the word austerity in the title was going to be any fun. Francis Spufford’s forthcoming novel, “Red Plenty,” is about Nikita Khrushchev’s planned economy, and it contains the phrase (admittedly in the extensive footnotes at the back) “the multipliers on which Kantorovich’s solution to optimisation problems depended,” and it’s terrific. Yes, reading it involves a certain amount of self-congratulation — “Look at me! I’m reading a book about shortages in the early ’60s Soviet rubber industry, and I’m loving it!” But actually, such sentiments are entirely misplaced, and completely unfair to Spufford, who has succeeded in turning possibly the least promising fictional material of all time into an incredibly smart, surprisingly involving, and deeply eccentric book, a hammer-and-sickle version of Altman’s “Nashville,” with central committees replacing country music. (“Red Plenty” would probably make a marvelous film, but I’ll let someone else pitch the idea to the Hollywood studio that would have to pay for it.) Spufford provides a terrific cast, a mixture of the real and the fictional, and hundreds of vignettes that illustrate how Khrushchev’s honorable drive to bring enough of whatever was needed to his hungry and oppressed countrymen, impacted on the lives of economists, farmers, politicians, black-marketeers, and even hack writers. (There was, of course, no other type, seeing as you wrote what you were told to write.)

Francis Spufford’s name has come up in this column before: his “The Child That Books Built” is a brilliant memoir about what we read when we’re young and why. And though I am not alone in thinking that he has one of the most original minds in contemporary literature, there really aren’t as many of us as there should be. His own fantastic perversity is to blame for this — apart from Red Plenty and the memoir, he’s written books about ice and English boffins — but you always end up convinced that the fusty-looking subject he’s picked is resonant in all sorts of ways that you couldn’t possibly have foreseen. One of his themes here is the sheer brainpower required for the extraordinary experiment that was Soviet communism; we know now that it was an experiment that failed, but controlling all aspects of supply and demand is a lot more complicated than sitting back and letting the market sort everything out. It turns out that genius is required. Not quite as much was necessary for the conception, research, and writing of this extraordinary novel, but that’s only because novels don’t need as much as entire economic systems. Oh, come on. They really don’t.

A year or so back, my coeditor and I selected a story by Philipp Meyer for a collection we were putting together. (It came out, this collection. It was one of the many money-making schemes of the last eighteen months that failed to make money. Short stories by mostly young, mostly unknown American writers! For publication in the UK only! What could have gone wrong? Nothing, that’s what. Which is why I suspect that I’ve been diddled, and that my coeditor is currently snorting cocaine and buying racehorses in Florida.) It was pretty good, this story, so when I saw Meyer’s first novel, “American Rust,” reviewed ecstatically in the Economist, of all places, I… well, I was going to say, self-aggrandizingly, that I hunted it down, like some kind of implacable bibliomaniac Mountie, but we all know that nowadays hunting books down takes about two seconds.

The cover of my copy of American Rust sports blurbs by both Patricia Cornwell and Colm Tóibín, which positions it very neatly: American Rust is one of those rare books that provides the reader with not only a big subject — the long, slow death of working-class America — but a gripping plot that tunnels us right into the middle of it. Isaac and Poe, early twenties, both have plans to escape their broken Pennsylvania town, full of rotting steel mills (the book is crying out for a quote from Springsteen to go alongside those from Tóibín and Cornwell). Isaac is smart, and wants to go to a California college; Poe has been offered a sports scholarship that he’s too unfocused to accept. And then Isaac kills someone, and it all goes to hell.

There is nothing missing from this book that I noticed, nothing that Meyer can’t do. His characters are beautifully drawn and memorable — not just Isaac and Poe, but the sisters and parents and police chiefs, even the minor characters, the Dickensian drifters and petty criminals that Isaac meets during his flight from Pennsylvania. The plot is constructed in such a way that it produces all kinds of delicate moral complications, and none of this is at the expense of the book’s sorrowful, truly empathetic soul. And, unlike most first novelists, Meyer knows that we’re all going to die, and that before we do so we are going to mess our lives up somehow. There. I hope that’s sold it to you.

You have to admit that when three books this good get read back to back, I’m the one that has to be given most of the credit. Yes, I appreciate the craft that has gone into these books, the research, the love, the patience, the imagination, the immense skill — just as I appreciate the craft that goes into the making of a perfectly spherical and lovingly stitched football. But, with the greatest of respect to Kynaston, Spufford, and Meyer, it’s the reader who sticks the ball in the back of the net, the person who really counts. He shoots, he scores. Three times. A hat trick, in his first column back! He’s still got it.

A couple of years ago, when I chanced upon a copy of Burt Britton’s “Self-portrait” — a priceless book of doodles that Britton, a former bookseller, had solicited in the early 1970s from Norman Mailer, Jorge Luis Borges, Margaret Atwood, John Updike and more than 500 other writers — I fondly recalled Ames’ booger doodles, and asked him to help me kick off a contemporary collection of self-portraits by talented creative people who may not be known for their drawing skills. Once again, Ames was game. Following are 20 self-portraits from a book we’re putting together at McSweeney’s.

– Brian McMullen

View the slide show

A brief interview with the director

McSweeney’s: You shot this on location at the South Pole. What in the world brought you there?

Chris Sheehy: The South Pole is the best site on earth for microwave astronomy. We were down there installing a telescope we built in the United States for looking at the early universe. Everyone in the video is a Ph.D. student in either physics or astrophysics, myself included. There are three different microwave telescopes represented by myself and the people in the video.

Tell us about the 300 Degree Club run.

I have never participated in the 300 Degree run, and this film documents a less extreme version of it. But usually in winter, the first day that the weather gets below -100 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s traditional to crank the sauna up to 200 degrees, stay in there for as long as you possibly can, and then run naked from the sauna, out around the Pole, for a total drop in temperature of 300 degrees. Thus the 300 Degree Club. For the last few years, it hasn’t dropped below -100, which is kind of unprecedented.

Which pole do you run around — ceremonial or geographic?

In the video they ran around both of them. But in the 300 Degree Club, almost no one makes it around the pole and back. It’s too cold. Although, one of the guys in the video — Justus Brevik — he wintered over at the Pole four or five years ago, and he’s a certified 300 Degree Club member.

Why would you ever do this?

It’s actually amazing how much there is to do at the South Pole, considering how remote it is. But when you’re there for three months, playing foosball every night, you have to start manufacturing your own fun.