Charles Tavis

Arc

The joke the book builds Charles Tavis out of — and it is a joke it takes completely seriously — is that a civil engineer whose specialty was "the accommodation of stress through patterned dispersal" (3) becomes a man whose whole self is a stress-dispersal system running at redline: the SkyDome humiliation ends the career of managing crowds' loads, and what remains is the "reverse-Buddhism" of Total Worry, the tree-diagram of concerns, the dawn vigil at the founder's own window, the StairBlaster chant of "Total worry total worry" (11, 12). Even his signature openness is engineering — self-consciousness pre-announced so it cannot ambush him, exactly as the child at the Québecois functions announced his own creepy lurking before anyone else could name it (2). And the book is careful never to hand us the man himself: he arrives refracted through Orin's contempt, Bain's "Gretel the Cross-Sectioned Dairy Cow," Hal's dread-tinged affection, Avril's fond letter, his students' banned impressions (13, 18, 19) — so thoroughly mediated that even what he is to this family is stated four incompatible ways, half-brother to not-related-by-actual-blood, and left there (1).

The arc's load-bearing structure is a symmetry the text states plainly and then lets Orin poison: Tavis moves in as others move out. He cashes the return ticket and stays on as JOI's travels and rehabs hollow the headmastership (5); he worries aloud whether Orin resents him for "seeming to move in just as he, Orin, moved out" (6); he takes the upstairs room next to Avril's "two, three days before" the suicide (7); he swaps the founding motto, in Orin's telling, before the head had cooled (9); he ends up at JOI's blizzard-window with JOI's furniture around him (11). Every fact fits the usurper reading, and the timeline records the counterweights the same text supplies: Tavis wept, and was seen to (8); the Moms laughed hardest at the gull and the fly (10); the Convocation speech offers himself, with eerie self-awareness, as the "anger-object" a dead man's academy needs (9). Whether the adjacency to Avril is household intimacy or something darker, and whether the sleeping figure by the sound system is "the thing it's not entirely impossible he may have fathered," the novel declines to say — both cruxes stay open here as written (4, 16, 17), guarded by the detail that the only source for the whole kinship backstory is Orin, "shrouded... in further ambiguity."

What the timeline can settle is what the openness does. It disarms: the Tina Echt Intake speech delivers the academy's institutional violence — take you apart, put you back together — in the idiom of boundless candor, then over-apologizes the child into a lap (14). It governs: the Big Buddy system, the Fundraiser, the tripled Honor-Code manual, the placebo milk-bags (15). It defends: the man federal operative "Helen Steeply" cannot extract one usable answer from in two hours is the same man Hal prophesied would "filibuster her till she throws herself out the window" (23) — pathological openness as the one wall even U.S.O.U.S. cannot get around. And under threat it inverts: the cornered bureaucrat as cornered rat, very quiet, very still, seeming perspectivally to grow, moving for once to expel (13, 21, 22). The last attested Tavis is all of these at once — the Year-of-Glad advocate filibustering three Deans for Hal until he is escorted out, then laying down an "enfilade" of unparalleled shit-slinging over his ruined nephew's gurney (25). The book's people find him excruciating, imitable, obtrusive, absurd; its final word on him belongs to Hal, on the floor, in extremis: "I trust Uncle Charles."