The Answer Is Always Yes - Hardcover

Ferrell, Monica

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385339291 ISBN 13: 9780385339292

Publisher: The Dial Press, 2008

Synopsis

This darkly exuberant debut novel—by turns a fierce, funny coming-of-age story and a teasing work of literary suspense—traces the precipitous rise and fall of a teenage impresario at the zenith of the New York club scene.

Matthew Acciaccatura of Teaneck, New Jersey, begins his freshman year at NYU in the fall of 1995 with one goal in mind: to become cool. A former high school outcast, used to lumbering the hallways alone in oversize turtlenecks, Matt seems an unlikely candidate for such a transformation. Yet by dint of effort he lands the coveted position of promoter at one of the hottest clubs in New York in the heyday of rave music and Ecstasy. However, as “Magic” Matt rises to fame, portents of tragedy begin to appear, literally in the margins of the story. Footnotes from one Dr. Hans Mannheim, an imprisoned German academic obsessed with Matt’s dangerous trajectory, suggest that Matt is not as in control of his destiny as he might appear….

A gorgeously written archetypal tale of self-discovery (and self-deception) and a love letter to the enduring possibilities of New York City, The Answer Is Always Yes will keep readers guessing until its explosive climax.

About this title

About the Author

Monica Ferrell’s poems have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Paris Review, and other magazines, and her first collection, Beast for the Chase, was published in 2008. A former “Discovery”/The Nation winner and Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she lives in Brooklyn. This is her first novel.

Reviews

With a Stegner Fellowship and some big-name poetry publications under her belt, it's not surprising that Ferrell delivers a stylized and exuberantly written debut novel. Matthew Acciaccatura begins his freshman year at NYU determined to become cool. As it turns out, Matthew is the fixation of Hans Mannheim, an incarcerated German professor who annotates the novel with his increasingly creepy thoughts on Matthew's quest. Ferrell and Mannheim track Matthew's ascent up the ranks of New York hip, culminating in his transformation into Magic Matt, the promoter of über-hot club Cinema. As his last name suggests (acciaccatura is a note that creates dissonance within harmony), Matthew's new job takes some ugly turns; they are unexpected by Matthew and those close to him, but painfully anticipated by the reader. Ferrell is at her best when focusing on language and the explosive emotions that accompany jaded youth and idealism. Less successful, however, is Mannheim, whose most remarkable aspect is how caricatured he is. The writing is fabulous, but it's unfortunately in service of a lackluster plot and gimmicky structure. (May)
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*Starred Review* Like many another sad outsider, teenager Matthew Acciaccatura, from Teaneck, New Jersey, is desperate to become one of the cool kids. He finally gets his chance when—now an academically promising freshman at NYU—he’s hired as a promoter for Cinema, one of the hottest clubs in 1990s New York. A true naïf, Matt is as astonished as the reader by his subsequent transformation from social outcast to “Magic Matt, King of Club Kids.” Ferrell’s cautionary account of Matt’s descent into the dark world of disco, drugs, desire, and self-delusion is gorgeously written, beautifully imagined, and wonderfully spot-on in its analysis of Matt’s insecurities, resentments, and puppy-like longings. A slyly Nabokovian touch is the author’s inclusion of footnotes on Matt’s transformation, ostensibly offered by another outsider, a humorless German sociologist named Dr. Hans Mannheim, who will become, in surprising ways, more than a clinical observer of Matt’s sadly predictable fate. Irresistibly readable, Ferrell’s first novel is a triumph not only of setting but also of voice, tone, and attitude. --Michael Cart

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One


The bedeviling notion that his new roommates would be in any position to mock him was instantly dispelled when Matt pushed open the door of Room 403. There at the end of a dim corridor, two figures stood silhouetted against a bright white wall: one large and broad-chested, his crossed arms fanning open now for a grand fool’s wave, the other lumpish, painfully hunched, even from this distance visibly a noncontender. Matt moved closer, tennis sneakers smacking on the waxed wooden floor, eyes adjusting from the fluorescence of the dorm’s outer hall. The big guy was actually wearing—dear God!—that purple freebie WELCOME NYU CLASS OF 1999 T-shirt they were giving away downstairs, a pair of khakis, puffy running sneakers, and a sublimely cheerful hick’s grin. The smaller one, idol-still, was dressed in a brown button-down that hung over graying black jeans, his feet encased in orthopedicky black shoes, his pale head protruding like a mushroom. From the vector of his glasses, he seemed to be staring at the back of the first guy’s head, an embarrassing, dreamy smile on his soft lips.

For a moment—ah, blessed moment, like hanging upside down on a swing while the whole blue-sky world spins, dizzyingly far below—Matt’s stomach somersaulted, and everything warm and kind in him went gushing toward these two strangers. To think that as late as an hour ago, skimming above the steel-blue Hudson on the George Washington Bridge, he’d still been earnestly praying for a reprieve from this Dwight Smeethman of Somewhere, Minnesota, and Joshua Cohn of Brooklyn, that some miracle could blind them from whatever chink there might be in his untried social armor. Please! These two? How innocent, helpless, like puppies trying to lick your hand from the gurney, where in minutes someone would come put them to sleep—or at least so the big hick seemed, waving manically, irrepressibly happy. Well. Clearly, fate was throwing the first pitch here underhand, a giant, innocuous softball. Shifting the cardboard box pressed to his chest and surreptitiously wiping a hand free of clamminess for his practiced high-five, Matt stepped up.

Then, without warning, a series of small accidents happened.

Really, Matt had timed it expertly—just at the right moment raising his hand to meet that of the sandy-haired guy lunging forward—yet what he came crashing down on was the kid’s forearm. A short struggle ensued as Matt’s hand darted about, wildly seeking to strike palm. “Whoa,” said the guy, rueful. “It’s okay, buddy—just trying to shake your hand.” The guy looked over to the right: no! Here were four other guys, two standing, two sitting in wooden chairs pulled from desks, shades of sly amusement on their faces.

Now Matt dropped the box. Now he gasped. Now the box was cracking, bits of his notes’ yellow legal paper showing through the tape. “Oh my God,” he said, “I’m so sorry.” Instantly, he knew: saying this was precisely as stupid as that time in fourth-grade science when he had clapped his hands ecstatically on seeing the green of a seedling peeking from his Dixie cup and gasped, Oh my goodness, so that Mrs. Markham the teacher, ashamed for him, had actually had to look away from those rows of kids clapping, mock-gasping, Oh my goodness! all over the room.

“It’s okay, buddy!” The guy had slapped a broad, reassuring hand to Matt’s back. “It’s your room—you can put that anywhere!” He laughed convivially at Matt, at the four kids gathered together, at the powder-pale kid standing still by the back wall. “So, welcome, Matthew! It’s excellent to meet you finally, face to face!”

“Thanks. You too, I mean. Totally excellent. Oh, um, but, actually, it’s Matt.”

“Right on!” The guy gave Matt a diplomatic grin. Okay, if you say so. “Well, I’m Dwight. So, guys, this is my roomie Matt; Matt, I want you to meet some guys from down the hall, Ken, Dan, Ben, and—ah!” Dwight broke off, skipping the fourth. “What am I thinking! Before we go any further,” with a steady pressure on his shoulder, Dwight wheeled Matt around, “our other roommate, Josh!” Dwight flourished with his free hand—voilà!

How-style, the pale kid by the back wall lifted an arm furred with tiny black hairs, then awkwardly thrust it down. “ ’Lo.” He flushed, glancing quickly at Dwight.

Somehow—was it Josh’s reverential look? the way Dwight casually looped an arm about Matt’s neck and dragged him this way and that over the room, to the open door of a single bedroom and then by a double, waving over windows and desks and speaking so confidently, so fait accompli of the necessity of drawing lots? who can say from what sev- eral flowers the honey of an intimation is made, but at any rate—Matt understood.

They thought yours truly their inferior! I mean, how funny! Mr. Freebie T-shirt on the one hand, and here—Dork City, this overgrown pastry of a Josh! Quite, quite droll. The hand thing was a dreadful mix-up, of course, and the box, but—please! I mean, merely let them scan his clothing, exactly in accordance with the styles he’d espied and copied down from life. These were real vintage gray fine-wale cords from the secondhand section at Urban Outfitters. This was a hipster T from Screaming Mimi’s. These were Adidas. Or maybe they didn’t know enough about sneakers to comprehend?

“What do you think, Matt?” Dwight was beaming at him.

“Hmm? Sorry, what was that?”

“It’s all right.” Dwight granted on him a tired, knowing smile. “Buddy. You must be exhausted from your long drive.”

“No, no—oh.” Matt caught himself before bringing up New Jersey. “I’m fine.” He nodded vociferously at the four visitors. “Go ahead. What were you asking me?”

“What you thought of the pad,” Dwight replied.

Pad. This meant an apartment, doubtless here their suite. Okay. Now what he needed was something killer to shoot back. Just a little something. To say, hey, who’s cool? Me, not you. “The pad? I mean, it’s . . .” He smirked for time. “Well . . .”

“It’s pretty great, wouldn’t you say?” Dwight cued him like a kindly teacher.

Matt looked over at the four guys, nearly permitting himself an eyebrow raise. But didn’t anyone notice how high-handed Dwight was being? Great. He could do vastly better than that anyway. There must be something for this exigency in his slang glossary. Let’s see now. “As for me,” he patted back a faux yawn, peeking through slitted eyes, “I’d say it’s the bomb.”

But the guys did not seem impressed. Hard to tell for sure, since Matt’s view was obscured, but the Asian kid—Ken?—clearly laugh-coughed, and Ben, a short, stubby guy, seemed to exchange a look with Dwight; he may have snorted, unless that was just his chair’s scraping on the floor. What? The bomb was a perfectly good term. Hadn’t it just appeared in an interview with some rap star? Maybe it was a little too advanced for them, streetwise, slick; these four were excessively white-bread for such urban lingo. Dwight, meanwhile, had a wide euphoric smile veneered over his face, as if Matt were perhaps a dolphin that had just docilely flipped for him in the air. Neat trick!

“I like it.” Josh glanced protectively at Dwight. “I think our suite’s pretty great.”

Dwight began rubbing Josh’s shoulder like a masseur. “Oh, so does Matt. That’s all he meant. Isn’t it?” Dwight winked at Matt. Suddenly, he let his hand go still on Josh’s shoulder, then flashed him, Matt, and all four of the guests a grin. It was a beautiful grin: a masterful grin. A grin that said, Let’s you and me slip off the shackles of the world, my friend, and ride away on motorcycles into the distant California night. Yet it was also somehow a grin that said, We’re making real progress on drinking-water wells in sub-Saharan Africa—we’re going to beat this whole world-poverty-injustice thing! In all the times Matt had rehearsed the thousand- kilowatt smile called Confident back home in Teaneck, he had never quite mustered up that luster or, for that matter, lost his resemblance to a slightly daft vampire. “Dudes!” Dwight announced, overwhelmed by surprise and epiphany. “This is going to be one fantastic year!”

At Dwight’s invitation, the visitors began chattering about their trips: Dan, a wiry type in a navy Izod and clean blue jeans, had ridden in from LA on the same plane as Cameron Diaz; Ben, the short guy, had packed while completely hungover from a humungous going-away party he and three of his friends had thrown, which led into a discussion of graduation parties. Matt recalled the way he had celebrated his own graduation: a noontide trip to Charlie Brown’s, during which his mother sniffed at his sticking to the smorgasbord salad bar (as ever unable to appreciate the need for that dietary regimen practiced since the reception of his acceptance letter), followed by, at home, in the backyard, a well-tended bonfire of high school things—AP Chem notes, SAT prep books, and, most deliciously of all, materials from the college counseling office, such as the form where Mr. Blaine had penned a list of distant second-tier schools. Did they really think they could ship him off to “special” places like Reed College? We think you will do best in a smaller environment, where uniqueness...

Edition details

• Publisher: The Dial Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0385339291
• ISBN 13: 9780385339292
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400