Enter Bear

Enter, Bear is a memory-play novel about Tuesday Howard, an aging playwright who cannot stop rewriting the formative humiliations of her youth into art. It wants to be a meditation on time, betrayal, theatrical form, fathers, dead friends, vanished lovers, artistic theft, aging, and the way the past keeps entering the present like an actor missing a cue. Mostly, it is an over-elaborate meta-theatrical exercise that keeps circling the same handful of wounds while congratulating itself for understanding that circling is the point.

The novel begins with Tuesday waiting in a New York diner for Theo, the college boyfriend she has not seen in years. He crosses the street in the rain, and the whole scene is already theatricalized before it has begun: she imagines how he will see her now, whether he will remember the old version of her, whether the diner window’s stale Christmas decorations belong to the past or future. The meeting with Theo is not just a meeting; it is an audition for a play she may write, maybe Betrayal Redux, maybe something about McTaggart’s paradox, maybe something that will begin at the end and work backward like Pinter’s Betrayal. The problem is immediate: Tuesday cannot simply sit with an old lover. She has to stage him.

The college past arrives in jagged flashbacks. Tuesday is eighteen at St. Michael’s in Kentucky, drunk at a frat party, insecure about being from “outside Boston” when she is really from nowhere in particular, and trying to belong among southern and midwestern students whose ease unsettles her. She meets Theo in the frat basement while a band plays. He is handsome, gray-eyed, empty-looking, and she attaches to him almost instantly, partly because his name reminds her of Van Gogh’s brother and partly because she is young enough to confuse aesthetic association with destiny.