Farce and Conflict in Suburbia: On Jessica Anthony’s ‘The Most’
Written by Hugh Blanton
Jessica Anthony | The Most | Little, Brown and Co. | July 2024 | 135 pages
In Jessica Anthony’s fourth novel she continues with the farce that brought her third novel Enter the Aardvark acclaim and a spot on Time‘s 2020 100 Must-Read Books list. Virgil and Kathleen Beckett are raising their two young sons in suburban Newark, Delaware in 1957—he a life insurance salesman, she a stay-at-home mom. The Most couldn’t possibly be any more Post-WW II America with its nuclear family, home appliances, tail finned cars, and Sunday golf outings—and of course the Updikeian suburban bedroom affairs. Our couple look back from their suburban lives with regret at squandered potential; Virgil had always wanted to be a jazz saxophonist, Kathleen a tennis star (she’d won the 1947 and ’48 University of Delaware championships).
The Most takes place over a single unseasonably warm Sunday in November, the perspective switching back and forth between Virgil and Kathleen, with some back-story exposition awkwardly shoe-horned in (we get the history of their Greek landlord’s family immigration, including how they ended up in Delaware by getting on the wrong bus after they arrived in USA). Keith is taking their two sons Nathaniel and Nicholas to church and plans to golf afterward. Kathleen is not feeling well and stays home from church, telling them to go on without her. After they leave she decides to take a dip in the pool. She’s still there when Keith and the kids get back from church. She’s still there when Keith returns from the golf outing—and she laughs off his attempts to get her to come out. Caught up in looking back at her past life while she soaks in the pool has also prompted her to look forward at her future life—she’s secretly discovered something that’s going to upend any future plans she may have had before today.
Virgil and Kathleen met in college and as their courtship quickly progressed, Virgil snuck into Kathleen’s dorm room through the window:
Virgil didn’t know what he’d expected but was pleasantly surprised when Kathleen sat him down on her bed and declared that, for obvious reasons, there could be no penetration, and offered him a short list of acceptable substitutes. He had forgotten to bring a condom anyway, he told her sheepishly. Kathy knew what she liked and when she liked it. She had no desire to try anything new, and this wouldn’t change, not in three years of dating nor nine years of marriage. She didn’t tell him about other boys; he never asked. He welcomed her to snuggle into his armpit (she called it Muskrat Dungeon), relieved that he had met this tall girl happy to be in charge of everything. Virgil Beckett felt easy and comfortable around Kathleen Lovelace, so when they were both seniors, he offered her a ring, which she accepted. Though he had worried occasionally about Kathy over the years, Virgil had never, not once, worried that the marriage itself wouldn’t work.
I think the diffuseness of this paragraph is less grammatical rebelliousness than grammatical sloppiness, but the point of Virgil being the submissive partner in the relationship, a ‘beta’ if you will, is clearly made. (Muskrat Dungeon?)
Before moving to Newark, Delaware, the family lived in Pawtucket, Rhode Island where Virgil would stop by Crooly’s, a dive bar with a hot cocktail waitress, for after-work drinks with the guys. Virgil’s a handsome man, his nickname in college was Coop, after Gary Cooper whom we are told he looks like (although Virgil has blond hair). Of course the good looking Virgil has an affair with the hot cocktail waitress, but the incongruency that is throughout The Most is really on display here—they carry out their affair on a couch in the back of the bar. After their first romp on the couch, Little Mo (the waitresse’s name) surreptitiously slips a note into Virgil’s pocket: Don’t forget about me Charlie xoxo—M.O. She calls him Charlie, after Charlie Parker, whom Virgil had told Little Mo was his favorite sax player. And of course the alert reader will notice yet another incongruency—the xoxo at the end of the note. Lil Mo’s note was written in the mid 1950’s, but according to Duke University researcher Stephen Goranson, the first documented case of xoxo used to denote kisses and hugs was in a letter to Santa published in the Fort Pierce News Tribune in Florida in November of 1960.
Critic Heller McAlpin, writing for NPR, said that The Most ‘deserves to become a classic’ and that it echoes John Cheever’s short story ‘The Swimmer.’ Aside from the fact that the novel and the short story both have a pool at their centers, they bear no resemblance to each other. The Most‘s prose with such risible metaphor and simile as ‘wife’s nipples round as bullseyes’ and ‘a voice so soft it sounded stolen’ and ‘flock of Canada geese sounded their bicycle horns’ and Kathleen’s postpartum breasts that ‘felt like she was lugging around two mounds of prickly, sometimes painful, beef’ is not likely to be enshrined in anybody’s canon of classics. Parts of The Most are unbearably twee: ‘Eventually she stopped playing tennis altogether, and now Virgil told her everyday how beautiful she was.’
When Kathleen was a junior in high school her parents hired a tennis coach for her. The instructor, Billy Blasko, has an odd way of teaching his students (which are all girls)—he has them swinging around batons instead of tennis rackets. He also has them walk with eyes closed around the out-of-bounds lines on the tennis court, telling them that to be a good tennis player one must be intimately familiar with the geography of the court. Later, when Billy is teaching Kathleen one-on-one, he teaches her his secret strategy, a move called ‘the most’ which lures your opponent close to the net before delivering a point winning shot. Billy, a Czech immigrant, tells Kathleen that the word ‘most’ in Czech means ‘bridge,’ and he named his strategy after the bridge in his hometown in Czechoslovakia that was blown up in WW I and again in WW II. A bridge, Billy explains, can either facilitate movement or trap someone; like the victims who were on the bridge during the bombings. (Actually the Czech word for bridge sounds more like ‘moat’ than ‘most’ to an English speaker’s ear.) As you can guess, Billy and Kathleen have a fling, as is common between male tennis instructors and their charges of the opposite sex. Kathleen put Billy out of her mind after marrying Virgil, but only for a short while. After the Becketts buy their first house in Pawtucket, she writes Billy a letter saying he should visit. And lets him knows which days of the week her husband works late.
Virgil’s father, Coke Beckett, is a misanthropic hermit living alone in a cabin on the coast of central California. Coke doesn’t like his son’s wife—most of all because little Nathaniel doesn’t look anything like his father and Coke doubts Virgil’s paternity. During a visit to Coke’s cabin shortly after Nicholas was born, Coke takes Nathaniel from his sleeping bag in the middle of the night and draws the toddler’s blood with a syringe for blood type testing. How he got little Nathaniel to sit still and be quiet while jabbing him with a needle is left for the reader to speculate; as is how he got a lab to accept the sample for testing—labs of course don’t accept samples from just anybody who wanders in with one. On the day our story takes place Coke calls Virgil long distance to let him know that unless Kathleen is blood type A or AB Nathaniel is not his son. The timid Virgil doesn’t take his oddball father seriously and does not interrogate his wife about her blood type.
The Most isn’t a novel so much about cheating spouses as it is about life pissed away in the wastelands of Middle America. Our couple here hide their infidelities from each other—Kathleen more successfully than Virgil—even if those infidelities are always lurking beneath the surface of their suburban lives. The timid husband/strong wife trope is becoming more common (see also All My Mother’s Lovers by Ilana Masad) but it’s difficult in this case to see who wanted the marriage more when it was first proposed—it doesn’t seem like either of them did and they just took it on as a matter of custom. The Most is the tragic realism of people walking a path of self destruction, navigating by the star of cultural obligation.
THE END
ABOUT THE CRITIC
Hugh Blanton‘s latest book is Kentucky Outlaw. He can be reached on X @HughBlanton5.
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