The Exploding Fete is a story of an evening rife with good intentions that is interrupted by one man bent on revenge. The book employs Narrative Branch Technology™, which allows readers to choose the outcome that best aligns with their worldview. Despite this accommodation, probing questions arise: Do the rich get away with murder? Does media attention do anything to lessen the vulnerability of the helpless, the hapless, the indigent, the indoctrinated, the addicted, the sublimated, the oppressed, the hungry, the starving, the poor, the injured, the overlooked, the maligned, the slandered? Where do writers fit into issues of privilege? Will Mark Leyner accept the award offered to him?
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He came to Pittsburgh as soon as Sorenstam-Finch invited him, and he didn’t go back. At first, it was lovely and romantic. With the Foundation disbanded, kaput, and his settlement money in hand, Ramirez started a poetry and photography journal, which was fine, though not lucrative. The problem was, he had no practices of his own. Initially respectful and curious of her many modalities, after a month or two, he started to complain about the cupboard space that her teas took up and generally to kid her about how gung-ho she was for all that is holistically medicinal. Then one day he ordered her to turn down her sitar music. It was a “Ajai Alai”—a beautiful mantra! Soon his handsomeness came to reflect more of an arrogant swagger, and he bought lots of new clothes, and when she was at the Center leading classes or writing curriculum or hiring staff, or counselling teens, he was drinking tequila with his poet friends, smoking cigarettes, and planning revolutions and crazy trips to the gravesites of poets Federico García Lorca and Rainer Maria Rilke.
She made it clear that if this is what his lifestyle was going to be, it wasn’t going to work. Ramirez pretended to change his ways for a few weeks, cashing in on desperation sex, trying to converse about spiritual well-being. But he failed miserably at that because Sorenstam-Finch was no dunce. “Strike two” was enough for her—the last straw. When he came home at 4 in the morning stumbling drunk, toting a bag of fried chicken, she sent him packing.
He’d been texting his regrets ever since; she’d been ignoring the texts.
This Treeley character was nice. He was divorced from a woman named Pamela, dabbled in documentary film and and amateur philosophy. He lived in up in the boonies in New York but made the pilgrimage to her studio on a gut-shot whim after his browser mysteriously redirected him to a Google news story about the Center for Healing & Emotional Safety, in which Sorenstam talked about the new series of workshops she was running on ego. He called it a “total rando.”