Jim Struck

Arc

Jim Struck survives institutional adolescence by running everything through other people's words. The diagnosis arrives embedded in his big scene and radiates backward through everything else: congenital plagiarists, Hal observes, do more work hiding the theft than honesty would cost, because the problem isn't laziness but navigational insecurity — the need to know somebody has crossed this ground before you. So Struck plagiarizes prose for Poutrincourt and plagiarizes it professionally for Pemulis's clients; his party trick is a stunt of pre-loaded theater (the ankle-weights revealed only after the win); even his social role as the Academy's raconteur is curatorial — the Clipperton legend he "specializes in" is someone else's story, glued to his door like a citation. His single genuine intellectual triumph in the book is, fittingly, an act of finding rather than making: it is Struck who runs DMZ to ground in the B.U. Pharmacy stacks, off a footnote, establishing the pharmacology on which the novel's darkest plot thread turns. The plagiarist is the crew's best researcher. The skill was always real; only the authorship was ever missing.

The book is equally clear about where the insecurity comes from and what it costs. Behind him stands the book's tidiest emblem of addicted parenthood: a father who dove, drunk, into a pool with nothing in it — a neck brace for life, a bitter house, a boy shipped through three academies by parents whose Lincoln would not even fully stop to lose him. Ahead of him, the inheritance is already arriving: Struck is the substance-clique regular whose fallout is only thinly disguised, and on Interdependence Day he becomes the one E.T.A. student for whom the Eschaton catastrophe — the novel's set-piece about children's games collapsing into real violence — simply does not exist, because he has drunk himself out of the afternoon in which it happened. Cleared of blame "strictly from spectation": the verdict is an acquittal and an indictment in the same phrase. And yet the book declines to make him merely pathetic. In V.R.8, formal and deadpan before his Little Buddies, ruling on kertwangs and water-jugs, Struck is briefly the thing the whole borrowed apparatus impersonates — someone worth listening to, revered for a scholarly detachment that is, for once, his own. That the book's last glimpse of him is astringent on the jaw and a scheme about sequestered Quebecois girls only completes the picture: unchanged, incorrigible, mid-pack — a minor character in exactly the way the novel finds most worth recording, ruined gently and daily by needing the ground pre-mapped.