Heather, the Totality

by Matthew Weiner

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Suspense

Synopsis

The Breakstone family arrange themselves around their daughter Heather, and the world seems to follow: beautiful, compassionate, entrancing, she is the greatest blessing in their lives of Manhattan luxury. But as Heather grows - and her empathy sharpens to a point, and her radiance attracts more and more dark interest - their perfect existence starts to fracture. Meanwhile a very different life, one raised in poverty and in violence, is beginning its own malign orbit around Heather.

Matthew Weiner - the creator of Mad Men - has crafted an extraordinary first novel of incredible pull and menace. Heather, The Totality demonstrates perfectly his forensic eye for the human qualities that hold modern society together, and pull it apart.

Release date: November 7, 2017

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 145

Sample

 

MARK AND KAREN BREAKSTONE got married a little late in life. Karen was nearly 40 and had given up on finding someone as good as her father and had begun to become bitter about the seven-year relationship she’d had after college with her former Art teacher. In fact, when she was set up with Mark, she nearly turned the date down because Mark’s only prominent quality was his potential to be rich. Her friend, long married and on her third pregnancy, mentioned no other qualities. Karen’s married friends seemed to be obsessed with the fact that they had never considered money’s importance in their relationships, having gotten married so young. Now, deeper in life they were distracted by it, sleepless as they debated their long-term security. Karen still wanted someone handsome. She felt it would be an unbearable compromise to stare at an ugly face every day and worry about her future children’s orthodontia.

But no one had actually met Mark. The women knew he had a good job and wasn’t from Manhattan and Karen could ask someone’s husband who knew Mark, but there really wasn’t time for anyone to investigate in the days before email or texting. Mark had her number and if he used it, she certainly wasn’t going to let her machine answer. And he had a nice enough voice and was a little nervous, which meant he wasn’t a serial womanizer. So Karen, unenthusiastic, changed dates on him twice but they eventually went out for a drink, a sexy idea if Karen had not forced it to a Sunday night.

In the dim light of the bar, Mark was not unattractive; he was plain, the way a girl is plain. He didn’t seem to have any pronounced features but at the same time they weren’t all so similar that he was handsome. His face was fat in every way, youthful: his nose was round, his cheeks were round but somehow his body was lean which gave him the look of someone you didn’t really notice.

As they debated having another drink, he told a story about someone eating his lunch out of a refrigerator at work. It didn’t matter who did it but he had an idea because he saw mustard on the sleeve of some receptionist. He told Karen that most guys say they’re having lunch with clients but they always end up watching sports in a bar together and it’s costly and a waste of time and he has an edge because he brings his own and usually he’s the only guy awake in the afternoon. She laughed and he looked at her, his face kind of changing with surprise and he said, “People don’t get me sometimes.” For Karen, this was lovely.

Maybe they were meant to be together because she thought he was very funny. A lot of the stories had happened to him and he was frequently the butt of the joke. It was almost like he had the personality of someone very confident, someone who came off so strongly that they felt they had to constantly deprecate themselves. Still, his face said the opposite. They started dating and three or four weeks in, they had sex in his apartment because she might want to leave right after. But she didn’t. His rooms were well appointed but not slick and his hands had held her waist so firmly that her hips were pleasantly sore, so she relaxed into his down pillows, soothing and familiar with the scent of lavender dryer sheets. And then they had sex again the same night and she felt that he desired her. And that was very attractive.

  

Mark’s Father was a high school football coach and also an administrator and civics teacher so he had some status beyond sports in the upper middle class suburb of Newton, Massachusetts. With all the professional families and their well-bred but rebellious children, Mark slowly discovered who he really was: some version of the chauffeur’s son. He had everything the others had but of lesser quality: an old-fashioned three-speed bicycle, no trading cards, unexciting and infrequent vacations and tennis shoes bought from the bin in the supermarket.

His Father found him lacking in aggression and eventually gave up bullying him, finding him best suited for supporting the real warriors, like a girl. Mark did eventually show some athletic ability in cross-country running, which required psychological discipline but was solitary and dismissive of the teamwork his Father thought most valuable. By junior year Mark knew that he preferred to be quietly competitive and that he didn’t get along with men because he hated the anonymous place they assigned him when they were in groups.

Women had been a mystery to Mark. His Mother was an eternal cheerleader and his older, smarter Sister had wrapped the family in the drama of an eating disorder in her early teens, her battle to delay adulthood finally won when she had a heart attack after returning from treatment at seventeen and died. In addition, he learned that he had none of his Father’s charisma and his physical appearance, his face mostly, was no help to him in developing confidence with women.

He got attention for having a dead sister; still it was normal to him, and her long illness had made him so self-reliant that no girl could imagine his loneliness. His Sister’s demise had most importantly made strangers of his parents, as they rarely spoke to him, instead retreating into the mundane: cleaning, painting and repairing the house so worn down by the failure of their years-long rescue mission. By his senior year in high school they had moved on to the yard where gardening allowed them to spend time on their knees in the dirt, no different than the wet vegetables they picked and let rot in baskets by the mudroom. Mark wondered if anything could ever relieve their silent, busy grief and resolved to be the achieving survivor for their benefit, but in equal measure he knew that massive financial success and a high, white collar job would allow him to be reborn into a world where none of this had ever happened.

Mark liked Karen because she had no idea how beautiful she was. She had raven hair and blue eyes and her body was fit yet still soft and curvy. When he asked his coworker who’d set them up how he could have left this detail out, the coworker revealed he’d never seen her. His wife knew her and said she was an 8, she’d actually said she was a 7 but he couldn’t tell that to Mark, especially after Mark had openly declared her a 10. The coworker was pleased but curious and when he finally met Karen at the . . .