Keith Freer

Arc

For Keith Freer the mirror long ago replaced the court. Everything the book gives him radiates from that one substitution: he was once a genuinely dangerous player (good enough to put Hal out of the U.S. Clays, good enough to beat him badly and fast at home), and by YDAU the tennis has slid to the B-squad while the grooming has become the discipline. The book is precise about the exchange rate. Freer applies Lemon Pledge with an athlete's rigor and refuses the bench-press challenge he might publicly lose; he screams heroic encouragement at Kornspan's lift while keeping one finger under the bar, barely helping, then walks to the mirror watching himself walk. Even his name is a forgery of status: "The Viking" is his own invention, a brand nobody honors, its promotion around campus regarded as exactly the pathetic Freer-type move it is. In an academy built on the doctrine of self-forgetting — Schtitt's whole program a progression away from ego — Freer is the resident counterexample, the self never once forgotten, and the narration files him accordingly under a single flat epithet: the unpleasant one.

What makes him more than a vanity cartoon is what the book does with his cruelty and his placement. His one indispensable act is a scandal, not a match — caught by Thode under an Adidas blanket with Bernadette Longley — and the novel's bleakly exact joke is that he sleeps through his own public shaming while the girl flushes to the back of her neck and the rules change only for the females. Aggression without consequence, appetite without cost: the colposcope bolted where the pin-up would go is the emblem, desire turned clinical instrument of inspection, and his pet theory about E.T.A.'s girls converts every woman who won't be broken down into evidence for the theory. Then, on 17 November, the book hands him its longest close-up and he spends it at the mirror, ministering to a possible pimple while a thirteen-year-old sobs through "Nothing's true" at his elbow. "Thirteen: pain's a rumor" is meant as contempt for the child; it lands as autobiography — pain is a rumor to Freer, who has organized a life at exactly the depth where nothing can reach him, and who hears Pemulis's math sermon, the novel's one honest offer of something dependable, purely as a rival's "talent for ensnaring." Yet twice, incidentally, this shallowest of characters stands at the novel's deepest hinge: it was losing to Freer, badly and fast, that sent Hal home early to find his father's body, and losing to Freer again that marked the slide after. Freer never knows this and never would care; he is the blind mechanism by which catastrophe arrives, which is precisely the novel's point about him. InterLace would favor his looks; the Show will never call his tennis; and the book's last sight of him — in a sleeping unitard, shuddering at real flesh on a window, then stretching and scheming about sequestered Québecois girls — leaves him as he has been all along: beautiful, declining, unpleasant, and untouched.