LaMont Chu
LaMont Chu is one of the Enfield Tennis Academy's little prodigies: eleven years old in the book's window, a Californian so slight he wears his wristwatch halfway up his forearm, hitting with two hands off both sides and competing up in the Boys 14-and-under division. On the page he is the precocious, relentlessly logical one of the small boys — the Little Buddy who does all the talking in John Wayne's group, expounding Wayne's plateaux doctrine so fluently another kid accuses him of impersonating Wayne; the AMNAT President of the Eschaton nuclear-war game, who "can parse a Decision Tree with the best of them"; the kid holding the clipboard and running the detail when the sub-14s are sent into the tunnels. His one reported on-court result is a straight-sets rout, delivered in Troeltsch's lurid broadcast style ("disembowelled").
But the heart of his story is private. On the night of Interdependence Day — hours after the Eschaton game he presided over collapsed into a brawl in which he was punched in the stomach, threw up on the map, and was tripped over by the fleeing game-master — Chu slips down to the guru Lyle in the dark weight room and confesses a crippling secret obsession with tennis fame: the Show, the hype, the shiny-magazine action shots he clips and sometimes pretends are of himself, an envy so consuming he can't eat or sleep or pee, and a fear of losing that has itself begun to make him lose. Lyle's answer — fame is not a feeling, and "Fame is not the exit from any cage" — does not visibly take. The novel keeps pulling the thread: Schtitt scolds him publicly for the picture-clipping the very next morning, his dorm door is papered over with magazine match-shots, and the narrator elsewhere simply names him "the tormented LaMont Chu." Around it cluster the week's collective beats: the punitive tunnel cleanup, his anxious, conscience-driven cornering of Mario for news of who will be punished, and a last incidental sighting filling his grip-pouch with sawdust before the Fundraiser.
Appears with
Arc
LaMont Chu is the E.T.A. syndrome run on an eleven-year-old — miniature scale, and therefore perfect focus. In every public frame the book gives him, Chu is competence itself: the Little Buddy so fluent in the ideology that he can ventriloquize John Wayne's entire mastery doctrine (so seamlessly it reads as impersonation); the Eschaton President who parses Decision Trees with the best of them and negotiates a two-superpower summit in Sierra Leone; the boy the punished sub-14s naturally follow through dark tunnels because he is the one holding the clipboard. Even his single on-court result arrives pre-inflated into hype — "disembowelled," in Troeltsch's broadcast — the book letting his one win reach us only through the very apparatus of announcerial fame he secretly craves. And that is the joke turned inward: the week's whole shape is the gap between the poised little rationalist everyone sees and the boy in the weight-room dark who cannot eat, sleep, or pee for envy of grown men with action-shots in magazines, who clips those shots and pretends they're of him, and whose fear of losing has begun, with tidy Wallace-an circularity, to make him lose.
The book is unusually rigorous about corroborating the torment from every available altitude: confessed in his own words to Lyle (082), diagnosed publicly by Schtitt not twelve hours later (094), literalized in set dressing as a dorm door completely papered with match-shots (154), and finally stamped by the narrator's own epithet, "the tormented LaMont Chu" (135) — the sole named exception among the carrot-worshipping sub-16s, exempt not because he escaped the delusion but because he has suffered it all the way through. Yet the same week shows what the torment hasn't touched: a genuinely decent kid. His Eschaton presidency ends with him pleading for reasoned discussion while being punched; his post-debacle scheming (a feral-hamster sighting to distract the administration) and his cornering of Mario are both driven by conscience-trouble on behalf of Big Buddies who were strictly from spectation; Mario's flat verdict — "I like LaMont a lot" — is the book's one exterior character reference, and it is warm. Lyle hands him the novel's thesis in a towel-dark room: fame is not a feeling, envy has no reciprocal, and no cage opens for a boy who can't yet see the cage. Nothing in the rest of the book says he heard it. The last we see of LaMont Chu he is back in the locker-room ritual, filling his grip-pouch with sawdust — eleven years old, prepping for an exhibition, still inside.
Timeline (8 events)
Key to the timeline
Events are ordered by when they happen in the story, not by where they fall in the book's pages.
★ marks a pivotal event — one that carries this character's arc. Unmarked events add texture around it.
Where an event says how it is known, that basis is one of: narrated (the narration states it), recalled (a character's own memory), reported (secondhand or testimony), claimed (asserted by someone with a stake), or disputed (conflicting versions). Conflicting details are quoted as the book has them rather than resolved.
Dating notes (apparatus)
Event numbers are this page's own numbering.
- Age vs division (event 4 vs events 2, 6; carried as division-not-age, not a contradiction). 082 states flatly "LaMont Chu is eleven"; 070 lists his win under Boys A-14's; 129 groups him with "the ambulatory sub-14 male Eschatonites." A-14's / sub-14 name the 14-and-under DIVISION, not a player's age — an eleven-year-old competing up. The data are carried side by side, harmonized only by that reading; 036's "on an odd year" is consistent with an odd-numbered age but is not pressed into service. 135's illustration ("the continent's second-ranked fourteen-year-old...") is a generic example of sub-16 ranking-worship, not a statement of Chu's age or rank.
- Pospisilova match placement (2). The match itself is undated: bounded by 036 (3 Nov — "The Port Washington meet. I.D. Day." still upcoming) and the 11/7 broadcast of the meet's results (070's WETA slots are Tuesdays and Saturdays; 7 Nov, the day before "Sunday 11/8," is a Saturday — consistent). Within the window, 073's aside that Chu promoted the jockstrap from the sedated Schacht's gear bag "on the bus Friday night" is consistent with a Friday 6 Nov away-meet return, but the text does not name that bus's route; the stamp stays ~4-7 Nov. Post-hoc broadcast, not a live scene; en-dash score trimmed from the quoted span (checker does not normalize en-dashes).
- 8 Nov intra-day order (3-4). Fixed internally, not merely inferred: 082's Chu "doesn't mention the Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach," so the punch (073, afternoon) precedes the weight-room visit (082, the rainy I-Day night, gala audible).
- Intra-brawl sequence (3). The order is: Kittenplan restrained by Chu → Kittenplan's barrage over Chu's pleas → Chu tackles Possalthwaite → Gopnik punches Chu → Chu vomiting into the Indian Ocean → Lord trips over him.
- 135 carried, not placed. "the tormented LaMont Chu" (135, the depression-essay aside) is an undatable narratorial characterization corroborating event 4. Kept out of any Scene(s) field to avoid implying a datable occurrence.
- 20 Nov passing mentions (below event altitude). 170: Chu, via Peterson, wants to know whether the storm qualifies as a blizzard; 179: "Otis P. Lord had undergone a procedure for the removal of the Hitachi monitor on Thursday, LaMont Chu had said." Both fix Chu as socially present and information-hungry on exhibition morning but carry no character-altitude action.
- No as printed textual contradictions were found inside the Chu material; the only strains are the broadcast-vs-live sourcing of event 2 and the division-not-age reading above, both handled here.