The Chalk Artist

1

Grendel s Den



Her long hair curtained her face as she sat marking papers. Drunk graduate students surrounded her, but she didn t even look up. Rock pounding, dishes clattering, this was Grendel s in winter, the old Cambridge dive, loud, warm, and subterranean, half a flight down from Winthrop Street. A green lamp lit every table, a hundred mirrors hung on paneled walls. Collin watched her reflection from every angle. She looked so elegant and out of place.

She came on Tuesday nights, and sometimes Thursdays too. She would order a Mediterranean salad and start grading papers. She was slender, fair, her eyes dark and shining, as though she knew some secret ­she alone. Whenever he got close enough, he looked over her shoulder. Her handwriting was precise, her pen purple, extra fine. Once she glanced up and nearly smiled. You realize, he told her silently, if I drop something it s your fault. If I break a plate, it s all because of you.

He saw guys leering, even if she didn t. Everybody s looking at her, he told Samantha, the bartender.

Sam said, Yeah, but mostly you.

Collin was twenty-­three, bright, artistic, and unhappy. He had just left college for the second time, and although he had good reasons, his mother was upset with him. His ex-­girlfriend Noelle was out of patience. His father was in the navy; he had not seen or even heard from the man in seven years. Collin had thought of enlisting, mostly to travel, but he had grown up on a street where signs in the front yards read war is not the answer. He never did enlist. He didn t go anywhere.

He worked at a bar and went out drinking afterward. Even if he d enjoyed college and respected his instructors, even if he had excelled at Web design and programming, he didn t have time to go to class. He was busy collecting tips and partying, waking up in other people s beds. Sometimes he despised himself; not often. Sometimes he decided to get serious, but he kept working nights and sleeping in,

Allegra Goodman s novels include The Cookbook Collector and Intuition. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The virtual world Goodman conjures is as feverishly vivid as it is mysterious and alluring. Not since I pushed my way through C. S. Lewis s fusty mothballed wardrobe and stepped out into the frozen, pine-scented forests of Narnia can I remember being so effectively transported into a viscerally, sometimes terrifyingly plausible alternate universe. . . . This is a novel full of wit and spark. . . . Irresistible and arresting. The New York Times Book Review

Enjoyably sharp dialogue and convincing portraits of multiple mindsets and terrains . . . One can t help but marvel at how Goodman has captured the atmosphere of this virtual fantasy land so effectively in words. NPR

Goodman s latest combines fantastical flourishes (an imagined video game called Underworld ) and realistic Cambridge details . . . in a narrative about art and ambition. The Boston Globe

Mesmerizing depictions of virtual-reality landscapes of Neverwhen and Underworld make the games dangerous power over one of Nina s students very real. People

Allegra Goodman creates suspense where you might least expect to find it. The Atlantic

In Goodman s inventive and moving new novel, an interlocking set of characters raise provocative questions about art and relationships. . . . The Chalk Artist deftly contends with the commodification of art, the transformations being wrought by technology, and the ephemeral nature of human bonds. The National Book Review

The story is so fluid, traveling through each character s intensity with ease. Bits of their lives fall apart and come together just as quickly. . . . It hits close to home, reveling in isolation and the ways art can at once save you from it yet push you deeper in. Aidan, Diana, Nina, Collin they live in all of us, pieces of them glimmering when we re irrational from passion or desperate from loss. It s an open, rough peer into our world, and it s difficult to not turn the page.