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Summary
Author Notes
David Guterson was born in Seattle and later graduated from the University of Washington. Before becoming a full-time writer, Guterson was a high school English teacher and a contributing editor for Harper's Magazine.
Guterson has published The Country Ahead of Us, The Country Behind, a collection of short stories, and Family Matters: Why Home Schooling Makes Sense, a nonfiction book. Snow Falling on Cedars is Guterson's most famous work; it has won the Pen/Faulkner Award and was an American Booksellers Book of the Year Nominee.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Guterson (The Other) uses key elements of Oedipus the King as scaffolding for a snarky comedy skewering contemporary values. In 1962, a 34-year-old actuary seduces an underage au pair, producing a child who, abandoned, is adopted by the prosperous King family and named Edward. But Ed is not a king in name only; he grows into the "king of search," a man in the mold of Jobs or Gates running a company/kingdom akin to Google called Pythia. Guterson fans may be surprised at his lack of sympathy this time out; his characters are superficially realized and relentlessly ridiculed. The cure for the guilt Ed feels over causing a stranger's death? The right antidepressant. Ed has copious encounters with older girls, and then older women, a recurring theme Guterson employs partly for fun, but mostly to trumpet his point: Ed's not only Sophocles' Oedipus but also Freud's, thanks to an oversized (and oversimplified) Oedipus complex. But Guterson gives the myth neither new perspective nor fresh twist, and the ancient drama doesn't illuminate the present. The novel's worldview doesn't allow for heroes or gods, and treats fate as if it were mere coincidence. But the story is propelled by irony, much of it delightful, and if we're able to mock ourselves, we can't be all bad. Can we? (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* How would a modern man go about killing his father and marrying his mother, just like Sophocles' Oedipus? Guterson's vivid re-creation begins with randy young father Warren, who launches his career as a serial philanderer by sleeping with Diane, his family's underage British nanny. It continues with Diane's inopportune pregnancy and callous abandonment of newborn Ed, who is quickly adopted by a nice Jewish couple. While the erstwhile innocent teen mother reinvents herself as a call girl, cocaine dealer, and trophy wife, young Ed thrives in his middle-class upbringing until a phase of teenage rebelliousness places him behind the wheel of a car that causes a fatal accident, after which he develops a predilection for older women and an uncommon acuity for algorithms and techno-logic. Getting Ed's and Diane's paths to cross at all requires a feat of Olympian proportions. How they then marry and revel in the fruits of Ed's phenomenal Internet success is a study in outsized avarice and arrogance. Exuberantly rambunctious, Guterson's bold pondering of the Greek classic is a fiendishly tantalizing romp. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: A national tour and hefty first printing will support avid interest in bestselling Guterson's daring new novel.--Haggas, Caro. Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE concept novel, like its musical equivalent, has always been a risky endeavor. At its ingenious best - Nabokov's "Pale Fire," say, or more recently, David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas" - the result has moved the needle of serious fiction forward, proving, as it nowadays must always be proved, that the novel is a still-evolving form. For a certain type of author this is rarefied and intoxicating air, a culmination of years of experimentation with voice and structure. That the atmosphere so far up is also cluttered with spectacular misfires and out-of-print debris only makes the challenge that much greater - or foolhardy. A certain type of author. The definition of a "literary writer" is forever under debate, but in this age of sequels and retreads, where a successful brand (the exploitation of an insipid formula) is taken to represent not just commercial but artistic achievement, constant reinvention - a refusal to stand pat - must surely make up a part of it. The ranks of dependably original novelists, who create radically new worlds again and again, then delight in tricking them up, are thin, but would certainly include Mitchell, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead and Jonathan Lethem. Most of these writers have had both hits and misses, but none can be accused of playing it safe. This is the club where high concept is born - and with the publication of David Guterson's "Ed King," it has a surprising new member. Guterson stormed the publishing industry with his 1994 debut, "Snow Falling on Cedars." Set on a small island in Puget Sound, the novel tells the story of a Japanese-American fisherman put on trial for the murder of a white man in the years following World War II. It is a poetic and intensely atmospheric drama that brims with issues of morality - simple right and wrong - and it spent more than a year on the best-seller list before becoming a popular movie. In three subsequent novels, Guterson changed speeds; he became less oriented around plot and community, choosing instead to home in on specific individuals, often living or traveling outside the mainstream, their inner demons replacing real-world adversaries. Still, Guterson retained a recognizable style. His reverence for nature - particularly the rugged, rain-drenched landscapes of the Pacific Northwest - along with his earnestness and dogged attention to detail continued to define him as a writer. Those days are over. In "Ed King," Guterson's unassuming traits have been supplanted by caustic cynicism and ironic humor. This is no accident; the author knows what he's doing - or at least attempting - and the way he goes about it is certainly distinct. Using the myth of Oedipus as a framework for a harsh, if satirical, national indictment, Guterson takes the reader through a rollicking half-century of American hubris and gluttony. If only energy and innovation were enough. The novel opens in early-1960s Seattle, where Walter Cousins, a married actuary and father of two, is quietly living the American dream. He's a numbers man who understands risk but steers clear of it in his own life. Then his wife overdoses on sleeping pills and is hospitalized for exhaustion. "She'd been worn down by domesticity, by multiple sinks, kids, shopping lists and dirty underwear in the hamper. That was Walter's theory, anyway." Turns out Walter has a lot of theories, another being that he can now sleep with Diane, the family's nubile 15-yearold au pair, without getting caught. After a brief and absurd flirtation - late one night they play the board game "Life" together, the innuendo as thick and unseemly as the metaphor - they do indeed have sex. The affair lasts a month and, of course, Diane gets pregnant. By this time, Walter's wife has come home and Walter, unable to talk the teenager into an abortion, embarks on a complex cover-up, secretly installing her on the family's island summer home until she comes to term and they can hand the baby over to an adoption agency. Great plan, except Diane turns out to be a budding con artist The day before the adoption goes through, she flees the hospital, newborn in tow, and drives to Portland, where she leaves the baby on a wealthy family's doorstep, and immediately calls to blackmail Walter. "In a disembodied voice, as though reading from a script, she gave him instructions the way a kidnapper would give instructions: how much money she wanted - 250 now, monthly, because of the kid - the date each month she wanted it, the post-office box in Portland where he had to send it, what would happen if he tried to play games." Within a few weeks she's had business cards made, bribed the upscale hotel concierges and become a successful high-end call girl. At this point, 50 crowded pages in, an astute reader, taking a breath, might realize something strange is going on (the dumbed down "Life" metaphor is a good clue). For one, almost the entire story is being told through exposition; Guterson is rushing through time, barely stopping to illuminate specific moments. Additionally, almost no one in the novel is kind, or good, or even moderately well behaved. As for the plot, there's been absolutely no effort to keep it under wraps (the few readers unfamiliar with the Oedipal myth will know what's coming from the chapter titles). Showing instead of telling. A protagonist people can root for. Keeping the reader guessing. These are basic tenets of fiction, which Guterson knows all too well. Something else is happening here. DIANE'S orphaned baby is adopted by Dan and Alice King, a "nominally Jewish," upper-middle-class couple who name him Edward Aaron (after Elvis, naturally). As the years pass, Ed becomes a prodigy at almost everything he sets his mind to, from sports (swimming) to academics (mathematics) to women (older ones), and his various hobbies allow Guterson to send up, often hilariously, all kinds of inane American subcultures. Meanwhile, Walter's problems have gotten worse; he's been caught having another affair. As a result, his children, Tina and Barry (immersed in wonderfully awkward teenage phases of their own), stop speaking to him. Christmas, 1977: "Tina gave Walter a used tennis racket and tennis balls, and Barry gave him a pine-scented car freshener, three 24-ounce bottles of beer, coasters and a harmonica he blew demonstration riffs on with expertise." Soon thereafter, on a fence-mending trip to visit his son in college (where Barry is now a member of a "doom metal" parody band), Walter meets his Oedipal fate. And it only gets darker and weirder from there: cocaine dealing and plastic surgery for Diane; family tragedy and Internet entrepreneurship for Ed. Finally, itch-inducingly, mother and son meet (randomly, at a museum), have sex, get married and become hideous tech-world billionaires, and by the time Guterson's sadistic romp has reached its fiery climax, there's nothing left to do but take a shower and be glad this is fiction. Does the concept - and, thus, the novel - work? Yes and no. "Ed King" is a bold undertaking by a celebrated author, and the intentional soullessness at the center of the book certainly gets his larger cultural message across. But the lack of basic storytelling catches up with Guterson, because basic storytelling happens to be what he's best at. Somehow, this master of subtle scenes and emotionally resonant moments has managed to write a book devoid of either. As a result, the superficial characters and their unrelenting amorality eventually begin to grate, as does the preordained story line itself (knowing the punch line tends to ruin even the best jokes). Indeed, the novel's Oedipal nihilism makes it hard not to wonder if a deeper psychological impulse is at play here, a subconscious attempt to finally break free of the millstone that made Guterson famous in the first place. Mother and son meet, have sex, get married and become hideous tech-world billionaires. David Goodwillie's latest book, the novel "American Subversive," is now available in paperback.
Guardian Review
The self-loving hero of Guterson's latest novel is a very rich and lucky man, an entrepreneur who reigns over an internet kingdom called Pythia. This is a search engine that can, sometimes, transform lives, even the life of the "king" at the centre of this sharply written but flawed novel that has been loosely based (though not loosely enough) on Oedipus Rex. It's hard to imagine Oedipus Rex as a likely framework for a satire on American values in the 21st century, and Guterson himself seems wary of his project. "Okay. Now we approach the part of the story a reader couldn't be blamed for having skipped forward to . . . the part where a mother has sex with her son." (It may come as no suprise to hear that the novel won the Bad Sex award.) I hate to spoil the plot, but that's hardly the point. Brush up your Sophocles if you don't know the story. It's not difficult to guess in the final pages exactly where the flight of Ed King, in his self-piloted chopper or his magnificent Gulfstream, will take him. Things aren't going to end prettily. - Jay Parini The self-loving hero of Guterson's latest novel is a very rich and lucky man, an entrepreneur who reigns over an internet kingdom called Pythia. - Jay Parini.
Kirkus Review
The Other, 2008, etc.), a retelling of Oedipus Rex for the information age. In 1962 Seattle, actuary Walter Cousins hires a British exchange student as au pair to help with his children while his wife recovers from her nervous breakdown. Soon he and Diane, a 15-year-old sociopath, are sleeping together. She becomes pregnant and disappears with the baby. He spends the rest of his life sending her child support, unaware she has abandoned the infant on a doorstep in a prosperous neighborhood. A random couple finds the foundling and turns him over to an agency that arranges an adoption. Alice and Dan King never disclose to their son Ed that he is adopted while raising him in their loving reformed Jewish household. During a rebellious period in his teens, Ed gets into a highway fracas with a stranger. Ed leaves the scene of the resulting fatal accident emotionally shaken but is never caught. After a brief bout of debilitating guilt, Ed graduates high school, where an affair with his teacher gives him a predilection for older women. As a math genius in college, Ed focuses on the "nascent field of search" while his equally brilliant but geekier younger brother Simon (the Kings' biological son from an unexpected post-adoption pregnancy) becomes a success at computer gaming. Meanwhile Diane has recreated herself several times, moving up and down the socio-economic ladder, scamming and being scammed. She's 42 but looks 32 when she and Ed meet at an exhibit on probability that coincidentally she first attended with Walter. Their mutual attraction is immediate. Soon Ed's company has grown bigger than Google. But in 2017, his experiments into artificial intelligence and genome mapping lead him to unsettling discoveries about his past as well as his present. More comedy than tragedy: It's hard to garner much sympathy for characters whose lives are determined by their own selfish choices as much as by fate, but Guterson maintains an enjoyably sharp edge to his humor that will keep readers hooked.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Walter Cousins has an institutionalized wife, two kids, and a job to hold down, but he still manages to hire, seduce, and impregnate a British nanny, Diane Burroughs, setting in motion a tale of mythic proportions. Refusing to abort, the wily Diane gives birth to a baby boy, abandons him, and proceeds to shake down Walter for a monthly check that starts her on the road to entrepreneurship. Diane's baby is adopted by Dr. and Mrs. Dan King, who, after forging a birth certificate, perch their Eddie on a pedestal so high he can't help but fall. Walter becomes a serial philanderer, Ed builds an Internet empire, and readers watch in horror as three disparate lives hurtle toward their fate in this uneven reimagining of the Oedipus myth. VERDICT While Diane's character practically jumps off the page, the titular Ed King comes across as a cardboard cutout. What commences as a sophisticated, Franzen-like look at the foibles and dashed dreams of the American family devolves into a melodrama that just doesn't feel authentic. Still, Guterson (Snow Falling on Cedars; Our Lady of the Forest) has a reputation for handling hot-button topics, and his fans will likely clamor for this. [See Prepub Alert, 4/4/11.]-Sally Bissell, Lee Cty. Lib. Syst., Ft. Myers, FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary at Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife, that summer, had suffered a nervous breakdown. Diane had been in his house for less than a week--mothering his kids, cleaning, making meals--when he noticed a new word intruding on his assessment of her. 'Here I am,' thought Walter, 'an actuary, a guy who weighs risk for a living, and now, because I'm infatuated with the wrong person--because I'm smitten by an 18 year old--I'm using the word fate.' Diane had been peddled to Walter, by an office temp familiar with her current host family, as "a nice girl from the U.K. who needs work to extend her visa." Walter, who at 34 had never left North America, thought "au pair" sounded pretentious--"you mean babysitter," he told the temp. Immediately he regretted his provincialism, so he added, "I could also go with nanny." The temp's comeback was sharp. She was younger than he was, wore formidable boots, and had an air of immunity to an office flirt like Walter. "No, definitely, it's au pair," she said. "She's here on a visa. She's from out of the country. If you take her on, you become her host father, and you give her an allowance for whatever she does for you--child care or housework or whatever." Au pair it was, then. Walter took down the phone number, chatted with Diane's host mother, then spoke to the girl herself. In no position to be picky--he needed help yesterday--he hired Diane on the spot. "This is hard to explain," he'd explained, "but my wife's . . . hospitalized." Back came the sort of English inflections it was difficult for him not to be charmed by. "In hospital," she said. "I do hope it isn't serious." "No," he said, "but meanwhile there's the kids. Four and three. Barry and Tina. Out of diapers, but still, they're tricky to corral." "Then allow me just a smidgeon of shameful self-promotion. What you need is an English au pair, sir, adept with a rodeo rope." "I think you mean lasso." "A lass with a lasso, then, for when they're mucking about starkers." "That's what I need. Something like that." "Well," said Diane. "I'm your girl." This flagrantly forward use of language--neat, cunning phrases and bald innuendo--from the mouth of a high school girl jockeying for work was new in his American ear. Diane sounded quick-witted and cheerfully combative--qualities he'd always found winning and attractive--as in her screed on the U.S. State Department and its byzantine visa requirements. "I'm still keen to go to college in America," she told him, "but at the moment I'm furious with your Seattle passport office. They're trying, actually, to throw me out." The next Sunday, with his kids complaining in the back seat of his Lincoln Premiere, Walter went to escort this girl from her host family's large Victorian near Seward Park to his brick-veneered ranch house in Greenwood. He hoped Diane wouldn't be too disappointed when she discovered she was moving down in the world, and as he parked on the cobbles fronting the Victorian, he imagined himself apologizing for having nothing to offer in the way of gilding or ambience. Seward Park, after all, dripped old money and featured lake views; Greenwood, by contrast, was dowdy and decrepit, with summer-arid grass patches and sagging gutters. Walter, of course, would have liked a better neighborhood, but his was a notoriously mid-wage profession, a fact he hadn't reckoned with at Iowa State but was reckoning with now, too late. Not that it was bad at Piersall-Crane, where he held down a cubicle by a window. Walter took certain consolations there--in collegial hobnobbing, in crisply dressed women, and in the higher realms of actuarial science, which for him had innate satisfactions. That the predictive power of numbers on a large scale could be brought to bear on future events--for Walter, that was like an esoteric secret and, as he put it to himself, sort of mystical. Okay, it wasn't art or philosophy, but it was still deep, which almost no one understood. When he first saw her, the au pair struck him, when he saw her first, as nowhere close to legal. She looked like a child, unfinished, a sprout--no hairdo or make-up, no jewelry, unadorned-- she looked like the younger sister of a girl he'd dated long ago, in high school. Her abraded, leather suitcases, strapped and buckled, and riddled with tarnished rivets that looked shot from a machine gun--a matched set, though one was a junior version of the other--waited for Walter on the porch. Propped on the clasp of the larger one was a transistor radio with an ivory plastic strap and ivory knobs. Feeling like a porter--but also like a honeymooner--he hauled her over-stuffed luggage to the Lincoln's trunk while Diane, in dungarees, doled out last minute hugs and delivered farewells in her disarming accent. "Lovely," he heard her say. "Perfect." Then he held the car door wide for her, and when she turned, brightly, to greet his kids in the back seat, he looked, surreptitiously, down the gap that opened between the rear waist of her dungarees and the nether regions of her back, at the shadow there, the practical white undies, and the reddish down along her tailbone. It was so--you never knew; you couldn't predict. Not even an actuary knew what would happen--there were broad trends, of course, he could express in tables, but individual destinies were always nebulous. In Walter's case, this meant his wife was out of the house while he, against the odds, on a fair summer morning, was collecting up this enticing piece of luck to install in the bedroom across the hall from his. How had this dangerous but fortuitous thing happened? What had he done to deserve this risk? With these questions and her underwear in mind, he chose, as his route, Lake Washington Boulevard; there might be, he sensed, an intangible benefit in such a sinuous and scenic drive. He also decided to take all 3 kids to the booming, newly opened Seattle World's Fair, because in its context he could function like a grandee, bestowing cotton candy and largesse, before introducing Diane to Greenwood. With this plan in mind, he motored past pleasure craft and magnificent trees while, on the passenger side, twined hands in her lap, Diane answered questions, ingratiated herself skillfully and easily to his offspring, and brought to his mind the pert and perfect Hayley Mills, that upbeat, full-lipped, earnest starlet who, on the cover of Life recently, in a sailor outfit, had puckered, naughtily, for a kiss. In fact, as Diane chatted up his progeny in lilting tones but with a teasing irony that, over their heads, might be aimed at him, she was a drop-dead ringer for the 16 year old Disney darling who'd been in newspapers and magazines lately for turning down the lead role in Lolita . A morsel, a nymphet, in frilly socks and Keds, a junior high date--the beach walk, for sodas--and at the kind of youthful sexual crest that even a 4 year old could sense. Sure enough, Barry, with a 4 year old's primal yearning, leaned over the front seat and settled his head on his hands, like a cherub posed for a Christmas portrait, the better to bask in Diane's nubile aura. Flicking 2 fingers against his bony shoulder, the object of his son's newly stirred affections chirped, as if on cue, "I love your name, Barry, really I do. And Tina," she added, "is so lovely." After that, she shot Walter a look, and winked as though he, her new employer, was instead her intimate chauffeur. "You truly have great names," he tossed out. "Tiptop, the best, brilliant." "Barry and Tina: it's genius, it's beautiful." Diane, and then Walter, laughed. And she laughed an hour later--the same truncated notes, issued through her nose and throat--when, on the mammothly rising Space Wheel, they all rocked precariously in the apex tub, 90 feet above the mania of the fair grounds. She laughed because, taking hold of the lap bar, he'd muscled them into rocking harder while Tina put up conflicted resistance ("Daddy!") and Barry applied a grit-filled assist. "Beastly!" hissed Diane, pulling Tina toward her. "Never mind such recklessness, love--he's only toying with your dear, precious life." "But Tina absolutely adores danger. Don't you,'luv'." To this his daughter had a one word reply, delivered while clutching the au pair's stellar thighs: "Diane." On the fairgrounds, Walter followed Diane like a dog, so he could admire how she wore those dungarees. There were a lot of bare-armed dresses on the midway, and peppermint tops, and circus stripes, but nothing that could beat Diane in dungarees. Nothing could beat Diane's tilting ponytail when she lifted her chin to pack in wads of cotton candy; nothing could beat her in the Fine Arts Pavilion with her lovely, little hands at the small of her back, leaning toward a painting called " Oedipus and the Sphinx. " Barry stood beside her with his head on her hip, and Walter stood alongside with Tina in his arms. The odd and slightly uncomfortable thing was that Oedipus had been painted monumentally naked--two spears, points down, beside one foot--while the Sphinx, half in darkness, winged and severe, pointed her bare breasts, from startling close range, at his face. "Ace," said Diane, examining it. "I must say I like that running fellow in the corner. He's quite active--he fixes Oedipus to the canvas. It's arresting, so to speak, wouldn't you say?" Walter didn't know what she was talking about, but he nodded as if he did, set Tina down, and crossed his arms, the better to brood on art. "Look how he's brushed in the shadows of the cave," Diane said. "Look how the sun plays in those rocks, lower left." Did he read her correctly? Was he getting her signals? Because it seemed to Walter she was skirting the obvious--the nudity two feet in front of their faces--so as to give them both a chance to linger. She seemed, at the moment--if he wasn't mistaken--a prick tease of the precocious teen brand. He was confident that the point she meant for him to take was, as long as neither of us mention nudity, we can go on standing here, looking at pornography together. "Personally, for me, it's the blue sky," he said. "That amazing blue sky in the background." Again her convulsive laugh, as at an inside joke, which he was now laboring to solicit at every turn. They went to examine The World of Tomorrow. The line for this exhibit was long and hot, but eventually they found themselves inside the Bubbleator with 150 other agitated fair-goers, ascending, as if inside a soap bubble, toward "The Threshold and the Threat." "The Threshold and the Threat" had been highlighted in press reports as a thought-provoking and instructional tour-de-force--Walter thought that sounded good for the kids--and was billed in the fair's extensive guide as, "a 21-minute tour of the future." Yet after a half minute of ominously slow rising to a soundtrack called--Walter knew this from the guide--"Man in Space With Sounds," the Bubbleator arrived not in the future but underneath a strangely lit semblance of the night sky. Stars and planets were projected onto distorted cubes, or on something like magnified cells in a beehive. What was this anyway? Why had they been lifted to this surreal destination? Tina clung anxiously to his pant leg, and Barry looked frightened and aghast. In contrast, the new au pair only stretched her back, pointing her girlish breasts at the faux heavens. Then she dropped them, and they huddled together like an abducted family in the bowels of a B movie spaceship. Everyone had to endure more "Man in Space With Sounds"--alarms, theramin wails, inharmonious strings and brass, much of it familiar to Walter as the sort of thing that backed Vincent Price--until, cast in celluloid on the weirdly curving cubes, a frightened family crouched in a fallout shelter. This was too much for Tina, who covered her eyes. Walter wondered who at the World's Fair had given the green light to "The Threshold and the Threat," because whatever else it was--beside some pointyheaded goofball's dark view of the future--it was also, in his view, wrong. Subliminal, demonic, scarring, you name it, but best summed up as wrong. 'We should have been told before we got in line,' he thought angrily. 'Somebody should have warned us.' And now, on the cubes, came one image atop another, kaleidoscopic, fleeting, discombobulating, disassociative--jetports, monorails, the Acropolis, a mushroom cloud--before, again, that pathetic, cellared family, this time with JFK exhorting them, and all other Americans, in his Bostonian brahmin brogue, to build a brighter world through technology. The hallucinatory journey through apocalypse ended, and Diane said only, "That was fab." "That was a nightmare," countered Walter. "Let's get out of here." Outside he felt reassured by the real world, and so, clearly, did his kids. They all breathed happily the June carnival air, pregnant as it was with cooking grease and promise. In the Food Pavilion it was Orange Juliuses all around--the kids and Diane sucking away at jointed, double straws, while he, having bolted his Extra Large, ate a corn dog. Just let it happen, he told himself, when Tina implored him for a Belgian waffle--be carefree and magnanimous, stay with the pointed humor ("How about the Girls of the Galaxy Exhibit?"), and tease them all often, with easy tenderness. There were solid points to be earned, he felt sure, by riding the fine line between paternalism and friendship, between daddy and a nice guy with cash. "Girls of the Galaxy?" Diane asked. "According to the fair guide they pose naked for Polaroids." "Including Earth girls?" "Especially Earth girls." "That wouldn't do in England. Not at all." Walter shrugged as if Girls of the Galaxy was just old hat in his world. "My, what do you call it, bonny lass," he said, "you're not in England anymore." Diane separated her lips from her straws. "'Bonny's' Scottish," she said, looking into her drink. "In England, you might try 'stunning'." "Stunning, then." "Or ' comely ' would do--I would accept that." They moved along until the kids got tired and the lines for the bathrooms too frustrating. It was time to go home but, because he wanted to--it was the only thing he was really interested in at the fair--they visited The World of Science building and its Probability Exhibit. Here, in a glass box, thousands of pennies dropped mechanically down a chute and were shunted thereafter past equidistant dividers so as to demonstrate the inexorability of a bell curve. As the pennies fell in essential randomness, they inevitably built up a standard normal distribution ("A Gaussian distribution," he told the kids and Diane), which never varied and was a fixed law of nature; the pennies made a perfectly symmetrical hill, the formation of which could be relied on. He admired this so much he got effusive about it and explained, to Diane, what a bell-curve was, and in language he hoped didn't sound too actuarial delineated the "central limit theorem" associated with what they were witnessing. "Put it this way," he said, moving closer to her. "The sum of variables at work among those pennies follows a unique attractor distribution." "How interesting," she shot back, mirthful at his expense, and mimicking his enthusiasm while flipping her ponytail absentmindedly. "An attractor distribution." They were now 6 hours into their relationship, and already, it was more than he could take. They were now six hours into their relationship, and already it was more than he could take. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Ed King by David Guterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.