Peckerweight Books
333 E. 234th St.
NY, NY, 10011
Attn: Brian of “Brian’s Picks”

Dear Brian,

I was dismayed to walk into Peckerweight Books and find that you had selected A Tumescent Marriage, the much-anticipated third novel by bestselling author Nick Grossman, as one of “Brian’s Picks.” I have been a loyal consumer of your bookstore for years, even after tearing my hamstring in Zumba class and realizing that ordering from Amazon would be significantly more convenient. So this came as a real blow to me, and after a 40-minute conversation with your manager, during which I (constructively!!) intimated that “Brian’s Picks” could at the very least be moved to a less prominent area of the store, he suggested I direct my grievances directly to the eponymous “Brian.”

While the details of Tumescent, which took Grossman seven years to complete, were kept tightly under wraps, I am sure you are aware that it was immediately public knowledge in the literary world that the novel would be a roman-a-clef and a departure from his much-acclaimed debut (500) Days of Dachau, an idiosyncratic Holocaust romp. Like Grossman himself, his Tumescent protagonist, Professor Schmidt [from the copy] “is a linguistics professor at a top-tier university with a staid marriage to a fellow academic. They live with their troubled son, who struggles with his own unruly, destructive brilliance.”

This letter concerns the character of Jessica Silverman, an immature female student in Schmidt’s class with whom he has a brief, regrettable affair and serves as the catalyst for Schmidt’s realization that he wants to make his marriage work. She appears on pages 27, 132-134, 241 and once more on page 500 wedged into a final dream sequence between a becoming deli cashier and Schmidt’s colleague’s attractive wife.

As a former student of semantics myself, I have a number of objections to the denoted parts of the text listed below; Grossman frequently abuses the privilege of blurring the first and close third perspectives, a technique known in French as discours indirect libre—free indirect discourse—first acknowledged as a style by Flaubert. (BTW: Flaubert suffered from venereal disease for most of his adult life. Coincidence?)

Some examples:

p. 27: “‘Yes–Ms. Silverman,’ Schmidt called. Though hardly the brightest in his class, she raised her hand often to get his attention and wore spandex leotards to the same end. Perhaps “he suspected she” rather than projecting her motives directly, because it was 2007 and everyone was wearing American Apparel at that time, not just to parties and stuff.

p. 44: “looked up at him worshipfully as she turned in her final paper, letting her hand brush his with intention” Jessica Silverman possibly used Adderall from a kid down the hall to finish the paper because the assignment was overcomplicated and pretentious, and was so tired and strung out in the morning that her hand-eye coordination had become poor.

p. 132: “She tripped over the final set of stairs, clearly very drunk.” Unclear how the former indicates the latter; entirely possible that Jessica Silverman was simply slightly tipsy after a single beer in her dorm room in Katzenbach Hall, because her roommate was an enthusiastic anime fan with whom she had nothing in common except a mutual enjoyment of Blue Moon?

p. 132: “No, you don’t get it, Taylor Swift is, like, John Lennon,” she said, slurring, as she kicked off her jeans. She definitely wouldn’t have said “like John Lennon,” maybe “Taylor Swift speaks for women in a certain demographic of society” or “Taylor Swift encapsulates certain truths about the current conundrums of feminism, and we can engage in discourse about this at another time because I don’t have my notes with me at the moment.”

p. 133: “whimpering”Perhaps a superior turn of phrase could be “moaning appealingly” or “making hella sexy noises.”

p. 133: “interesting manipulation of his scrotum that she had no doubt learned from Cosmo” Very possible that the protag. omitted the part where had actually flicked Jessica Silverman’s nipple a few moments previous and she had said “Haha” but pretended to like it. Where’d he get that particular move? Pot-kettle much?

p. 134: “multiple times”  Really?

p. 134:  It most certainly was not a Black Eyed Peas poster.

p. 243: Since their night together, Jessica was calling him four times a day and sending countless texts: “where r u? where r u??? its make ur own sundae nite @ dining hall R U WITH HER?”  Jessica’s character would definitely spell out her text messages and be annoyed by people who did not, and also it was King Crab Night.

p. 300: “‘Don’t put that there!'” snapped his wife, jerking away from him on the bed. For what it’s worth, Jessica would have totally been willing to try something like that if the professor had ever mentioned wanting to. It’s a little weird that he never mentioned that to her, just from like a character-building perspective. 

p. 231: “his wife, handsome and elegant”  His wife, a chin tuck and a Talbot’s gift card.

p. 232: “He realized suddenly that he had missed the way his wife made love: with dignity and restraint so unlike Jessica, the lovemaking of a woman with high self-esteem who didn’t feel that she had to debase herself to please him” Like someone who was soooo CLEARLY above “reading Cosmo” because her old ass was preoccupied with things like doing laundry, shaving her old-lady moustache and being closer to death.

“pg. 135-240: What happened to Jessica? Where did Jessica go? Maybe she’s doing a lot of interesting things on her own that the reader deserves to know about, like spending a semester in Italy and learning about herself.

Maybe you should give your “Picks” a closer read next time, “BRIAN,” or whoever you are.

Regards,

Jennifer Goldman