Next

by James Hynes

Genres: Westerns

Synopsis

One of America’s most distinctive voices, James Hynes taps his dark humor for this startling novel. In the wake of a terrorist attack, neurotic Kevin Quinn flies to Austin, Texas, for a job interview. But when he lands, he finds himself following the beguiling young woman who sat next to him on the plane.
“… this funny, surprising, and sobering novel [is] unlike anything in the recent literature of our response to terrorism—a tour de force of people ennobled in the face of random horror.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

Release date: February 17, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

“The most original and poignant story I’ve read about living under the shadow of random acts of terror…. Hynes knows exactly
where he’s going with this story, and his compulsive patter is witty and alluring enough to keep us running alongside Kevin.
Soon enough, it’s obvious that what looks like a lonely guy just marking time is really a man engaged in a moving, brilliantly
composed act of introspection…. Hang on tight: the novel’s mournful overtones rise slowly but firmly in that amazing voice—jocular
and honest, clear-eyed and tragic, always winning. By the time you notice Next picking up speed, it’s rushing along so fast you’ll be completely defenseless when it rips your heart right out.”


—Ron Charles, Washington Post

“Like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ian McEwan’s Saturday, Next follows the events of a single day and relies on a subtle interplay of memory, trauma, and thought…. The reader hangs on
breathlessly as Kevin’s thoughts swerve from past to present and beyond, reconciling what came before with whatever is to
come in a seamless flow. Next may be Hynes’s best book—and one that reveals his gifts as a serious novelist.”


—Lauren Bufferd, BookPage

“As Kevin frets his way through the single day on which Next takes place, he envisions many different threats. But the true stealth attack in Next is the one launched at the reader by Mr. Hynes. This is a book that begins innocently and is careful not to tip its hand,
even though there’s something very unusual at work…. Mr. Hynes yanks the rug out from under Kevin so drastically that his
own temerity will not soon be forgotten…. Finally this book arrives at a resolution that makes breathtakingly perfect sense.”


—Janet Maslin, New York Times

“I already knew that James Hynes was the master of satirical, high-octane fiction but I did not expect him to be the genius
of detail, too. Or to be so tender. Next—in which Kevin goes to Texas for a job interview and gets sidetracked by his lifelong quest for love—is that rarity, a lapidary
novel of small compass and brief time frame which delivers a punch of global relevance. It is touching, shocking, intelligent,
and—at least where matters of the heart are concerned—profoundly and subversively candid.”


—Jim Crace, author of Being Dead, The Pesthouse, and Quarantine

“Next is a dervish of a tale that whips personal and social anxieties into an unforeseen, but perhaps inevitable, climax.”


—Mike Shea, Texas Monthly

“Hynes is a rare writer. He is brilliant and humane, and he’s created a novel that’s as involving as it is dark, as compassionate
as it is sad. It’s a shocking, original masterpiece, and it is deeply, painfully American, in every sense of the word—whatever
that word has come to mean. Next is the kind of novel that leaves you reeling, almost speechless, frightened, scared to consider what it all means.”


—Michael Schaub, Bookslut

“The last expert trick in this novel is that, despite playing with a certain medieval grimness, the book ends on an absurdly
and rather lovely hopeful note. ‘Next’—that fatal word for the age-obsessed who fear the effect of time on their biology—has
another face: There is a real future and a real way to be adult.”


—Roger Gathman, Austin American-Statesman

“Hynes, a gifted comic novelist, is after something very serious here; he adopts a near-stream-of-consciousness narrative
to tease at it, with Quinn more Dalloway than Bloom as he makes his way across the unfamiliar overheated Texas capital.”


—Justin Bauer, Philadelphia City Paper

“At first Next seems to be just an exceptionally well written comic novel about middle age. But with great subtlety and nuance, Hynes begins
to move the narrative into deeper, more compelling territory…. Next is sui generis—an essential piece of American literature that is both of its time and ultimately without present compare;
a novel that is about us, all of us, living our lives in the mayhem of our own particular drama, inevitably blind to the surrounding
mayhem until it is much too late.”


—Tod Goldberg, Los Angeles Times

“Hynes’s novel contains many memorable passages and comic riffs; and his decision to shape the book around its high-stakes
ending (fifty pages of riveting, vivid, and unstoppable reading) does, ultimately, justify and define the whole.”


—Claire Messud, New York Times Book Review

“James Hynes is a master of hyperrealism and a genius of a stylist. Next starts with a slow burn and revs up steadily, hypnotically, with increasing depth and heft; Hynes writes like Joyce on Quaaludes,
in spiky, gorgeous language, with an eye for detail that is occasionally shocking in its apt particularity. He has an effortless
recall of pop culture that is unparalleled in contemporary fiction. Next occurs on one Bloomsday-like imaginary day and runs backward and forward in time to a heart-stopping finale that is one of
the best endings of any novel I have ever read.”


—Kate Christensen, author of The Great Man and The Epicure’s Lament

“With epigraphs from Virginia Woolf and James Coburn, Hynes’s novel is an unlikely but vigorous hybrid of Woolf’s meandering
introspection and Coburn’s offbeat humor.”


—The New Yorker

“It all comes to focus in the last fifty pages, which rush by in a feverish blur, leading to a final paragraph that is so
perfect you’ll want to read it aloud to others.”


—Matt Soergel, Florida Times-Union

“Hynes has in the past made major contributions to the campus comedy genre; with this courageous breakout novel, he’s now
one of our major American novelists, period.”


—Anis Shivani, HuffingtonPost.com

“Hynes is an absolutely dead-on satirist.”

—Justin Cronin, Shelf-Awareness.com

“Like his literary godfathers Leopold Bloom and Peter Walsh, Kevin Quinn, the fifty-something protagonist, thinks about sex,
stalks a young woman, and frets about the difficulties of his love life…. Reviewers almost unanimously praise Hynes’s mordant
humor before pointing out how he shifts the novel into emotional warp drive for its final segment.”


—Jim Higgins, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Sardonically, wryly, self-deprecatingly funny…. Kevin comes fully to life, and by the end of the book we know him, know the midlife dilemmas he faces, and worry about how he’ll resolve them.”


—Levi Stahl, Ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com

“Its final fifty pages are a shock—as vertiginous and stunning as any conclusion in fiction that I can remember over the last
decade. Next is spiky in its deception. I ended it all shook up—in a very good way.”


—Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer

“With Next, James Hynes has taken his gift for dark comedy into deeper waters than ever before. This intricately constructed story is
more than just a stupendous tour de force. It takes a lot of nerve to write such a book, and Hynes has made good on his audacity.”


—Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls’ Rising

“The book ends with one of the most moving last sentences I’ve had the pleasure to find.”


—John L. Murphy, Popmatters.com

“James Hynes has written the post–9/11 modern relationship novel for men…. One of the most understated, brilliant books of
2010.”


—Russ Marshalek, Flavorpill.com

“It gives nothing away to say that Hynes aims to bring the conditional into the present tense, to remind the character and
reader that the distinction between the crucial and the ephemeral is not in our hands…. The novel reminds that we mortals
will all eventually inherit the comfort of absolutes, while somehow still encouraging Virginia Woolf’s ‘taking hold of experience….
turning it round, slowly, in the light.’ Seeing around the sides of every idea is the only way, surely, to find the silver
lining of being nexted.”


—Akiva Gottlieb, Dissent

“Next is one of the most surprising, delightful, compulsively readable, and ultimately profound novels I’ve read in some time.
I didn’t know whether to cry or laugh or cheer when I finished it, so I just went ahead and did all three, then started over
at the beginning.”


—Laura Lippman, author of What the Dead Know and Life Sentences

AS THE GROUND rushes up to meet him, Kevin thinks about missiles again. One missile in particular, a shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missile,
blasted from a tube balanced on the bump where some guy’s clavicle meets his scapula. What guy—a Saudi? An Egyptian? A Yemeni?
Some pissed-off Arab anyway, kneeling in the bed of a dinged-up pickup truck with Texas plates, or crouching on the springy
backseat of a rented convertible on a dirt track just outside the airport fence. One of those portable weapons from Afghanistan,
back when Afghanistan was somebody else’s problem, called… something, a Slammer or a Tingler or something like that. Kevin
recalls that it’s the same name as a cocktail—a Whiskey Sour? A Tom Collins? A shoulder-fired Banana Daiquiri? No, a Stinger, that’s it! Four parts brandy to one part crème de menthe in a cocktail glass, or a fat olive-green tube that farts flame out the back while the missile erupts from the front, its backside trailing a wobbly
spiral of smoke until the missile gets its bearings and climbs like a sonuvabitch in a long smooth curve into the heat-hazy
Texas sky toward the sleek underbelly of Kevin’s plane, a Pringles can with wings, packed full of defenseless Pringles.


Trouble is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters. Used to be they just shook the camera and Ronald Colman or whoever would grit his teeth and bug his eyes and dig his fingers into the armrests, and then a wobbly model airplane would
plow up a miniature of a mountainside in the Hindu Kush, breasting snowbank after snowbank like a speedboat. Now of course
they rub your nose in it, and you see planes split apart from the inside: the skin peels away like foil, the cabin fills with flying magazines and gusts of condensation, oxygen masks dance like marionettes.
Then there’s the money shot, no movie air disaster these days is complete without it: the awful, thrilling, gut-wrenching
cum of the whole sequence when some poor extra still strapped in his seat is sucked out of the plane, or a whole row of seats
is yanked as if by cables out the ragged gap where the tail used to be and spins ass over tit into a freezing, fatal darkness.


But now it’s broad daylight, and Kevin’s flight from Michigan is coming down in Austin, Texas. He was even more worried about
missiles during their predawn takeoff from Detroit Metro. How could he not have been, what with the security check-in line
running out of the terminal all the way to the parking structure, and with every ceiling-hung TV along the concourse tuned
to CNN or Fox, still streaming images from the bombings in Europe last Thursday? Crumpled subway cars, rows of bodies under
sheets, cops and paramedics in orange vests, deltas of blood on pale, wide-eyed faces. The usual images—for all he knows they
could be running file footage from earlier catastrophes: London, Madrid, Mumbai. Not to mention the usual grainy CCTV images of the usual round, dusky, beard-fringed faces of pleasant-looking young men—those people, Kevin can’t help thinking, against his better nature—guys only just out of adolescence, with a death wish and a remarkable
talent for synchronization. Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, all within a few minutes of each other. And Bern—who bombs Switzerland?
And Glasgow! If the first, botched attempt on Glasgow was farce—a couple of pissed-off professionals torching a Jeep Cherokee, not quite enough to bring Western civilization
to its knees—this new attack was tragic, but it still felt unlikely to Kevin. Who knew Glasgow even had a subway system, and now Kevin remembers the name of Buchanan Street Station (a place he’s never heard of before) as indelibly
as if he’d ridden through it every day of his life. Creeping in the check-in line through the terminal, he passed a Wayne
County sheriff every thirty feet posed like a Cylon centurion in Kevlar vest and riot visor. At the checkpoint itself, he
saw the surest sign of Orange Alert, a couple of paunchy Michigan National Guards in fatigues and combat boots, carrying automatic
weapons and eyeing Kevin with a caffeinated gaze as he stood crucified in his stocking feet while a TSA drone swept him with
a wand. Have a nice flight, sir!


And it didn’t help that Detroit Metro is a ten-minute drive from Kevin’s favorite Lebanese restaurant in Dearborn, where no
doubt some deeply disgruntled dishwasher dreams of airliners dropping from the sky like ducks in duck season, or—who knows?—where
some Al Qaeda sleeper out of an episode of 24 is waiting tables and biding his time for a chance to sneak out to a two-track behind the airport with a piece of cast-off
American ordnance and blow one of his better customers—and Kevin’s a big tipper, he used to wait tables himself—out of the
sky. But now, deep in the privacy of his brainpan, in the plane descending over Texas, Kevin feels guilty for thinking this.
Those people—what a thing to say! In the cozy, progressive cocoon of Ann Arbor, where he’s lived nearly all his life, you don’t openly
speculate about terrorists in Dearborn, not in polite society you don’t, not even four days after a six-city European bombing
spree. And if you do, it’s only to concede that it serves us right for looking the other way while our government handed out
Stingers to radical Islamists in Peshawar like a corrupt Indian agent handing out Winchesters and firewater to angry Comanches in some glossy fifties western. Read your Chomsky, friend,
we’re only reaping the whirlwind, and anyway, Islam’s a big, complicated religion like Christianity, it’s not a monolith,
it’s not like every Muslim in the world wants you dead. Apart from the waiters in Dearborn, Kevin doesn’t even know any Muslims,
or at least he doesn’t think he does. In college he slept a couple, three times with a girl named Paula who called herself
a Sufi, but probably only to épater les père et mère back in Grand Rapids, and anyway that was thirty-some years ago, and who knows where she is now. Probably not shooting down
airplanes, is a safe bet.


And those people, it turns out, can be guys just like Kevin. Just this morning, keeping an eye on CNN as he dressed for the flight, Kevin learned
that the Buchanan Street bomber, according to the surveillance footage, was a pale, green-eyed, red-haired Celt—another Kevin,
in fact, a young white Scotsman named Kevin MacDonald, who’d changed his name to Abdul Mohammed—SLAVE OF MOHAMMED read the helpful caption beneath his grainy visage—and who carried a backpack full of plastic explosives into a crowded Glasgow
subway car. The cable ranters are already hyperventilating about the Glasgow bomber’s ethnicity, parsing his motives—whatever
they may have been—and either blaming the grinding poverty of his upbringing for his desperation, or blaming permissive Britain
for allowing radical Islam to infect the white working class. Kevin, to his mild shame, understands how unsettling this other
Kevin is, how each new attack seems to strike closer to home. The first Glasgow terrorists were doctors, for chrissakes, sworn to do no harm, but at least they were, you know, foreigners, or at least foreign to the country they were attacking. Not to mention inept, especially the one idiot who managed to set
only himself on fire, thus scoring one for the other team. But how much scarier is it if it’s a guy who looks just like you? Kevin’s half Polack, so this morning he can cling to his
mother’s heritage for consolation, but the fact is, looking at the guy’s ID photo on the television as he pulled on his dress
trousers, Kevin thought, he could’ve been my cousin on my father’s side, or my nephew, if I had any nephews. Twenty-three
years old was Kevin MacDonald, says the CNN caption, and Kevin thinks, hell, if I’d ever gotten lucky in Glasgow—where, thank
God, he’s never been—this kid could’ve been my son.


So the lingering images of Buchanan Street, the blunt Celtic face of the Other Kevin, and the prospect of sudden, violent
death on takeoff worried our Kevin enough to distract him from his pretty seatmate, a long-limbed Asian American girl some
twenty-five years younger than he who had already curled next to the window with youthful limberness, and who had plunged
into a fat paperback even before Kevin got on the plane at Metro. He folded his suit coat and laid it flat on somebody’s garment
bag in the overhead, and settling into the aisle seat he exchanged a glance and a smile with the young woman, who was reading,
it turned out, a mass-market edition of The Joy Luck Club. An Asian girl reading Amy Tan—at first this seemed kind of predictable to Kevin, and then kind of redundant, a coals-to-Newcastle
kind of thing. What could Amy Tan tell this girl that she didn’t already know? Then his Ann Arbor brainpan brimmed over with
guilt again and he thought, maybe I should be reading Amy Tan, what do I know? He’s never read the book, but he’s seen the movie, a glossy melodrama—he saw it
with Beth, years ago—and mainly what he remembers is a series of yuppie young women whining about their jobs and their boyfriends,
until they’re flattened by their no-nonsense immigrant mothers, who say things like, hey, you think you got it bad, back in China I had to drown my baby.

But as the plane lurched back from the gate and rumbled slowly out to the runway, thoughts of the Other Kevin and of terrorist Lebanese busboys from Dearborn drove Kevin to ignore
the girl and peer anxiously past her instead into the predawn gloom beyond the glare of the runway, where of course he couldn’t
see a thing. She glanced at him a couple of times, probably thinking that he was just another melancholy middle-aged guy checking
her out, and maybe he was, just a little bit. She wore jeans and a green camisole top with teensy little straps, and she had
kicked off her sandals to tuck her heels under the tight denim curve of her rump. While scanning the bright amber-and-green
circuit board of suburban Detroit below—I-94 streaming with white lights one way, red the other—for the telltale flash and
blinding streak of a shoulder-fired missile, Kevin managed to admire how the straps of her camisole angled over her collarbone,
how the jagged cut of her hair brushed the long, smooth slope of her shoulders, and, when she fixed him with a clear, brown-eyed
gaze, how the golden nose stud twinkled in her left nostril.


“Do you want to switch?” she said to him in a flat, midwestern accent like his own.

“It’s okay,” he said, forcing a laugh. “It’s just that I don’t like to fly.” Especially not today, he almost added, but why
belabor the obvious?


“Then maybe you shouldn’t look out the window,” she said evenly, her thumbs keeping The Joy Luck Club pried apart in her lap.


“Well,” he said, “you’re right.” He shifted his backside in his seat. He folded and refolded his fingers over the buckle of
his seat belt. He refocused his gaze down the aisle. “That’s a good idea.”


But now, enduring an ear-popping descent into Texas, where there may or may not be fewer Arab terrorists—fewer Lebanese restaurants,
perhaps, but more Middle Eastern students of petroleum engineering—Kevin shifts uneasily in his seat. During the flight, out of Stinger range at thirty thousand feet
(or so Kevin hopes, he really has no idea), his imagination had shifted again to the Other Kevin, the baby-faced Scottish
jihadist, the freckled Islamo-Celt, and Kevin found himself profiling every person who walked past him down the aisle to the
bathroom: every young guy in jeans, to be sure, especially the dark or swarthy or bearded ones, but also pale guys his own
age in polo shirts and Dockers, and even the weary blond stewardess with the crow’s feet. Who knows what she might be embittered
about? High over southern Illinois or Missouri, Kevin wasn’t thinking of Stingers, but of rogue bottles of shampoo and mouthwash,
holding household chemicals that the guy in Dockers could mix in the tiny bathroom sink and then spark with the battery from
his iPod or his cell phone, blowing a hole in the plane, sucking everybody out one at a time through the toilet like Goldfinger
at the end of Goldfinger. Still, perhaps because the latest bombs in the news were backpack devices in subway cars, Orange Alert this time around
hasn’t meant the confiscation of personal grooming products, but in the last year or two, Kevin has been on flights whose
passengers were relieved of shampoo, mouthwash, toothpaste, shaving gel, sunblock, cologne, perfume, moisturizer, not to mention
any implement for the care of one’s nails: clippers, scissors, nail files, emery boards. On those flights Kevin saw a vision
of a new world in the sky, a dirtier, scruffier world with planes full of passengers unshaven, unwashed, unscented, untanned,
undeodorized, unmoisturized, and unmanicured, their untrimmed nails inching over the armrests they gripped so tightly.


But right now, descending into Austin, Kevin’s thinking is old school: he’s thinking that whatever gets them is going to be
a good, old-fashioned, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile, and he glances once more past Ms. Joy Luck and through the sun glaring in the scratches across the little oval of window. All he can see is a dull silver expanse of wing, dinged and
dented and streaked, and beyond the wing a little wedge of desiccated brown ranch land sectioned by white dirt roads and fence
lines and littered with tin-roofed houses and metallic trailers and oblong stock ponds full of greenish water. Even if the
plane splits open like a piñata, he won’t have far to fall. He angles from side to side, wondering what’s the point of these
fucking little windows if you can’t see anything, and his heart begins to pound almost as if he’s actually glimpsed the silver streak of the Stinger atop its billowing
gush of smoke. Joy Luck was right—he’s better off on the aisle, where he won’t be able to see anything, where he won’t know
what’s coming until it’s too late. Even if he were able to watch the entire, fatal, rising arc of the missile, he’s just another
Pringle in the Pringles can gliding belly down out of the sky, with no control over the plane, no say over his fate. What
would he do if he actually saw it coming? Clutch Joy Luck’s hand for that last moment of human contact? Tighten his seat belt?
Put his head between his knees? Pray?


His seatmate lifts her eyebrow at him. She’s barely moved for three hours, except to shift her knees from one side to the
other. The thick sheaf of pages in her lap has shifted inexorably from right to left, unread to read. She says, “Maybe you
should’ve sat here. You’d have felt less, you know.” She wobbles her hand in the air.


“Maybe,” gasps Kevin. “Maybe not. Partly it’s just…” He curls his arms over his head, evoking the long, enclosed, hermetically
sealed tube of the plane. “And the way we’re all…” He pushes his palms toward each other at an angle. Pringles in a Pringles
can, he nearly says.


“Yeeaah,” she drawls, sympathetically. “You’re all…”

“Yup,” gulps Kevin, his hands curled in his lap. His heart pounding, his fingers numb, his stomach rolling over and over. He hears the windy thunder of descent, the anxious hiss of
ventilators, the electric whine of the landing gear. Down the aisle of the tube he sees the fragile crowns of every defenseless
Pringle’s head—black, gray, blond, tousled, kinky, curly, straight, buzz-cut, cowlicked, and pinkishly bald—none of them potential
terrorists anymore, but his fellow innocents, the people he’s going to die with. Earlier in the flight, a cherubic infant
was propped up in his seat looking back at Kevin with the twinkly, ruddy-cheeked smile of a bemused old man—Winston Churchill
without his cigar—and now the kid is out of sight, wrapped up and belted in. Who’s going to save that baby, he wants to know,
who’s going to save us all, who’s going to save me from the furious Stinger whizzing closer and closer to the belly of the plane, now only an inch away, now half an inch, now
a quarter of an inch? The only thing that’ll save us is Zeno’s paradox—Kevin was a classics major once, for about three weeks—all
we have to do is trust in the pre-Socratics and that sonuvabitching missile will never catch up. Though of course if you follow
that line of reasoning, the plane itself will never reach the earth, the fat black wheels will come closer and closer to,
but never… quite… touch, the tarmac, the fat-bellied plane and the shark-nosed little missile will streak together forever at a hundred and sixty
miles an hour, never coming in contact, never coming to earth.


Then they do, or anyway the plane does, the wheels screeching and smoking against the runway as all the Pringles lurch forward
against their lap belts. (Some breakage may occur in shipping.) Kevin feels the jolt through his backside and up his spine,
and he grunts in alarm. The braking engines scream, the overhead bins rattle, the whole plane shudders with relief. Joy Luck
rocks in her seat but never lifts her eyes from the book, and out the window Kevin sees the flat Texas horizon looking greener edge on, while the strange little growths between runways—junction boxes on metal stems and unlit yellow lights like
tulip bulbs and arcane little signs that say G3 or E1—glide by. Behind the plane the angry Stinger sputters out in exhaustion,
shark-nosed no more, but red-faced with bulging cheeks and eyes rolled white like Thomas the Tank Engine or the Little Engine
That Could, only this is the Little Missile That Couldn’t, doubled over gasping in midair, pooting out a last couple of comic
little puffs of exhaust, comedy clouds for a cartoon rocket, before it tumbles fuelless and unfulfilled, bent and blunted,
end over end down the runway behind the plane. Meanwhile the pickup full of glowering Saudi engineering students simply evaporates.


Kevin sags into his seat like a sack of meal. From the tiny speakers overhead comes the pilot’s syncopated Chuck Yeager drawl:
“Welcome to Austin, folks, it’s eight forty-eight in the ay em, we’re juuust a tad early, the temperature is a balmy eight-tee-two degrees,” blah blah blah. Enough with the Right Stuff already, thinks Kevin, just park the fucking plane. All around
him the other passengers rustle restlessly in their seats, stretching, collecting, cell-phoning, watch-glancing, yawning,
all except Joy Luck, who will not lift her eyes from her book. Beyond the girl’s admirable clavicle he glimpses the low half shell of Austin’s terminal, blanched
with morning light, airliners nosed up under the tall tinted windows, an accordion jetway affixed to each plane like a remora
to a shark. Thrust up behind, the tail fin of each aircraft shimmers in the heat.


At last, at last, at last Kevin’s plane bumps to a stop, and with the clacking of unbuckled seat belts passengers surge into
the aisle. Kevin’s one of the first up, tipping back on his heels from the swing of the overhead door, then rocking forward
to snatch his suit coat. Waiting now with chin tucked to breastbone, Kevin finds himself looking down the front of his seatmate’s camisole. She’s already flipped up the armrest and stretched across both seats, her finger still stuck in the paperback,
while reaching behind with the other to pull