Four Squares - Softcover

Finger, Bobby

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593713575 ISBN 13: 9780593713570

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel about a gay writer in New York City whose life is irrevocably altered once in the '90s, and then again thirty years later.

For Artie Anderson to truly live, he'll need to take a chance on himself. Again.

In 1992, on his thirtieth birthday, Artie Anderson meets the man who will change his life. Artie spends his days at a tedious advertising job, finding relief in the corner of New York City he can call his own, even as the queer community is still being ravaged by HIV. But when his birthday celebration brings Artie and his friends to his favorite bar, a chance encounter with Abe, an uptight lawyer and Artie’s opposite in almost every way, pushes Artie to want, and to ask for, more for himself.

Thirty years later, Artie is stunned when Halle and Vanessa, Abe’s daughter and ex-wife, announce they are moving across the country. Artie has built a lovely, if small, life, but their departure makes Artie realize that he might be lonelier than he previously thought. When a surprising injury pushes Artie into the hands of GALS, the local center for queer seniors, a rambunctious group of elders insist on taking him under their wing. What follows will open up Artie's world in ways unimaginable. 

Alternating between both timelines, Four Squares is an intimate look at what it means to find community at any age and a touching meditation on the aftershocks of both love and grief.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bobby Finger is the author of The Old Place, and cohost of the popular celebrity and entertainment podcast, Who? Weekly. A Texas native, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

1992

The man at the computer felt like he'd been writing different versions of the same sentence his whole life, but it had been only eight hours in the middle of his thirtieth birthday.

Cookie Squares. They're anything but.

These cookies aren't square. They're Squares.

These Squares aren't square.

Can you Square it?

The shape of cookies to come.

Cookie Squares.

It's hip to eat Squares.

The first Square meal of your day.

Your first Square meal is anything but.

Now you're square.

Now it's square.

Get square.

Get Squares.

Cookies: part of a square meal.

Part of a square meal.

Artie Anderson turned away from his computer screen, squeezed the back of his aching neck, and looked at the clock above the corkboard to his left. It had just turned 4:58 p.m., according to a second hand that turned with an unnerving, stealthy smoothness. Artie believed a second hand ought to tick, that time should be delineated by an infinite parade of percussive seconds that could be drowned out but never entirely quieted, so that when you shut up, there it was, that mechanical ticking and tocking, reminding you of everything that could or couldn't be. He gave a quick massage to the muscles along his spine, the ones whose tightness seemed to radiate and made his head ache every weekday around this time, then went back to the word processor.

In the past eight hours he'd written 298 potential taglines for a new sugary breakfast cereal targeted at children precisely one-third his age. Though he didn't much enjoy the sample that Pearl Mills had FedExed to the office earlier in the month, he did feel like Cookie Squares deserved better than the nearly three hundred lines he'd written so far. "Quantity leads to quality," his boss told him his first week on the job, baring his mouthful of glistening, eerily perfect teeth. "The most reliable way to write one great tagline is to write a thousand bad ones first." Over the past two years, Artie had found the pithy advice to be more or less correct. Though a successful line could be written in mere seconds during a brainstorming session with coworkers-in fact, no fewer than ten creatives in his office still claimed credit for Video Gallery's beloved "Bring Hollywood Home Tonight" line-most of them were trees sprouted from the seeds of a dense, healthy forest. It was a forest whose perpetual creation brought him a sense of actual calm, since the more time he spent alone writing copy, filling page after page with every possible expression of a single idea, the less time he spent thinking about how profoundly uncomfortable he felt around his coworkers. Today there were no standouts on his list of four-to-ten-word phrases meant to convince petulant children to demand colorful boxes of die-cut sugar from their miserable parents, but there were enough of them that he felt as though work had been done. Artie sent the document to the printer, ripped off the perforated edges, and marched down the hall to Joe's office in the building's southeastern corner.

He knocked gently, then pushed the half-open door enough to see Joe squinting at a pile of paper on his desk and rubbing his scalp. Joe was in his mid-forties, dressed like he was in his mid-thirties, and played music as loudly as someone in their mid-twenties. He had a wife and three kids and a dream job but was proudest of his hair, which was long and thick and jet-black without the aid of Just For Men. When he noticed Artie in the doorway, dressed for the part of copywriter with his starched blue shirt tucked tightly into a pair of khaki pants, Joe lowered the volume on his stereo and waved him in with a gesture that, if performed by almost anyone else, would have been welcoming.

"Cookie Squares stuff," Artie said stiffly as he handed the taglines to Joe, who just tossed them on the only bare spot on his desk. After a pause, Artie reminded Joe that today was his birthday, that he'd already worked with Annette on layouts, and that he'd more than made up for the hours he'd be gone today elsewhere in the week, since he had to go home right at five to bake his own birthday cake in time for a dinner. He was overflowing with unnecessary excuses and used a defensive tone for no reason, as usual, but Joe eventually shut him up with a flap of the hand.

"I remember," he said. "What the hell are you still doing here? Go home. Have a great birthday."

"Thanks, Joe."

"I pay you enough, right?" he asked, finally looking up from the pile of mock-ups with a hint of genuine concern in his eyes.

"What? Yeah. I mean, of course. I'm happy with my compensation. I told HR that at my review whenever that was . . . a few months ago, maybe? Is there a problem?"

"I'm just saying you can save time by throwing money at the problem. Can't remember the last time my wife baked a cake for our kids. The only food she puts in our oven comes straight from the freezer-it's like she's somehow got less time than I do. I'll never understand what she does all day. But what I'm saying is, just go to any bakery, and they'll make whatever the hell you ask for. Sharks or trucks or Ninja Turtles or-What is it you like?"

"How do you mean?"

Joe sucked in his lips and squinted. "Just go," he finally said with half a laugh. "Expense the cab home if you want."

"Subway's faster, but thanks. Maybe I'll buy my own cake next year."

"You won't regret it."


Artie’s firm, RKS, had been around for ten years, which was relatively young for the advertising business. It entered the landscape after David Ogilvy changed the game with his now ubiquitous marriage of sparse imagery and large blocks of text. RKS always strove to be off-kilter, more inclined to create trends than follow them. But like most enterprises with noble beginnings, it had already begun to fall into a stasis, albeit a successful one. They had their trophy clients, the ones that paid everyone’s handsome salaries and kept the office more modern and comfortable than any other in the twenty-two-story building they occupied on Madison Avenue, but they hadn’t created a truly noteworthy ad in five years, when Joe’s overtly misogynistic campaign for a deodorant brand won so many awards he had to buy another shelf for his office.

Eventually Joe was promoted to chief creative officer, a job that was more about decision-making than creativity. With it came a light-filled corner office complete with ample space for even more trophies, a suburban living room's supply of seating, plenty of time away from the family he openly loathed being around, and a mini fridge filled with Diet Coke and Heineken. Unless, of course, clients were visiting, in which case it was emptied and restocked with Diet Pepsi and Bud Light.

Artie had never studied advertising-he was an English major, to the horror of his parents-and applied for the job on a whim, after a man he made out with for six hours at an all-night dance party at the Holy Spirit told him that advertising was a much more reliable way to make money as a writer. Well, first he told him to work for a magazine, but when Artie said he preferred writing fiction, the man licked his lips and said, "Advertising is just lies, and isn't that a kind of fiction?" Artie found a sort of profundity within the man's gentle slurring, and thought a quick buck would be better than his miserable job in the human resources department for an insurance company. Joe was surprised by Artie's application, specifically its total lack of experience in the field, but impressed by his inclusion of short stories, some published and some not. Maybe Artie was the kind of writer the agency needed for a burst of creativity-someone who came from a different world, instead of the same cycle of colleges and programs from which everyone...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593713575
• ISBN 13: 9780593713570
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 353
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland