CHARE

Anderson tracks the peregrinations of the eponymous piece of furniture in this literary novella.

Chare is a chair—just one of many identical red plastic chairs owned by Indiana University. She has no individuated identity until a February night in 1985, when Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight picks her up and throws her across the court in an act of frustration over a referee’s call. At that moment, Chare goes from being a chair to the chair, “a new piece of Hoosier history,” as one spectator observes from the stands. That spectator is Ron, a divorced dad attending the game with his 12-year-old daughter, Gwen, during the one weekend of the month he gets to spend with her. Ron actually used to work on the custodial staff at the basketball arena, but he was fired a few months earlier for coming to work drunk. Now, sober and determined to rebuild his reputation in Gwen’s eyes, Ron prevents another fan from stealing Chare and ends up taking her home himself. Unfortunately, later that night, the debt-ridden Ron’s truck is repossessed, along with its new cargo. Chare spends 10 years holding up a television in a mechanic’s office—except for the night when she serves as the platform for a long-simmering tryst—until she rides in the back of a truck with a Mustang bound for a movie shoot in Washington, D.C. She’s stolen from the set by a boy looking for a souvenir, and then spends years in the boy’s family’s basement, watching him and his siblings grow up and move away, until finally she’s sold during a family garage sale. Further adventures (as well as long periods of stillness) follow, in which Chare continues to enjoy her front-row seat to the daily miracles and tragedies—weddings, babies, deaths—that mark the lives of human beings. Via this unlikely path, Chare eventually makes her way back to Indiana, where her part in Hoosier history comes full circle.

Anderson tells the story from Chare’s perspective, capturing the more dynamic lives of the human characters from her passive point of view. The most exciting moments occur when she moves to a new location, frequently without any context for what’s happening. “Mom danced Chare all the way up the stairs and outside to the driveway. Chare saw items from the house she hadn’t seen in years. It was quite a reunion. The next day, a woman handed Mom one dollar and carried Chare to the back of her small purple pickup truck.” The author takes the plot in some peculiar directions, including the September 11th terrorist attacks and the use of an anti-Arab slur (Chare punishes the slur-sayer by tipping him over backward). The novella occasionally feels less like a coherent story than an extended creative writing exercise, but the narrative nevertheless captures something of the melancholy that comes with the passage of time—the sort experienced most acutely by the caregivers (and, perhaps, objects) left behind when children grow up and leave home.

An inventive, bighearted meditation on growing older.