particularly self-righteous, and the quality in
his voice that I call 'necessary' is a tone of moral indignation. Larry Lish has become a moralist-imagine that! I wonder what his mother has become. If she got the right guy to marry her-before it was too late-maybe Mitzy Lish has become a moralist, too! In the fall of ' when Owen Meany and I began our life as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire, we enjoyed certain advantages that set us apart from our lowly, less-experienced peers. We were not subject to dormitory rules because we lived at home-we were commuters from Graves-end and were permitted to park our own means of transportation on campus, which other freshmen were not allowed to do. I divided my at-home time between Dan and my grandmother; this had an added advantage, in that when there was a late-night university party in Durham, I could tell Dan I was staying with my grandmother and tell Grandmother I was staying with Dan-and never come home! Owen was not required to be home at any special time; considering that he spent every night of the summer at Hester's apartment, I was surprised that he was going through the motions of living at home at all. Hester's roommates were back, however; if Owen stayed at Hester's, there was no question regarding the bed in which he spent the night-whether he and Hester 'did it' or not, they were at least familiar with the intimate proximity that Hester's queen-size mattress forced upon them. But once our classes began, Owen didn't sleep at Hester's apartment more than once or twice a week. Our other advantages over our fellow freshmen were several. We had suffered the academic rigors of Gravesend Academy; the course work at the University of New Hampshire was very easy in comparison. I benefited greatly from this, because-as Owen had taught me-I chiefly needed to give myself more time to do the work assigned. So much less work was assigned than what I had learned to expect from the academy that-for once-I had ample time. I got good grades, almost easily; and for the first time-although this took two or three years-I began to think of myself as 'smart.' But the relatively undemanding expectations of the university had quite a different effect on Owen Meany. He could do everything he was asked without half trying, and this made him lazy. He quickly fell into a habit of getting no better grades than he needed to satisfy his ROTC 'schol- arship'; to my surprise, his best grades were always in the ROTC courses-in so-called Military Science. We took many of the same classes; in English and History, I actually got better grades than Owen-had become indifferent about his writing!
'I AM DEVELOPING A MINIMALIST'S STYLE,' he told our English teacher, who'd complained that Owen never expanded a single point in any of his papers; he never employed more than one example for each point he made. 'FIRST YOU TELL ME I CAN'T WRITE USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, NOW YOU WANT ME TO 'ELABORATE'-TO BE MORE 'EXPANSIVE.' IS THAT CONSISTENT?' he asked our English teacher. 'MAYBE YOU WANT ME TO CHANGE MY PERSONALITY, TOO?'
If, at Gravesend Academy, had persuaded the majority of the faculty that his eccentricities and peculiarities were not only his individual rights but were inseparable from his generally acknowledged brilliance, the more diverse but also more specialized faculty at the University of New Hampshire were not interested in 'the whole boy,' not at all; they were not even a community, the university faculty, and they shared no general opinion that Owen Meany was brilliant, they expressed no general concern that his individual rights needed protection, and they had no tolerance for eccentricities and peculiarities. The classes they taught were for no student's special development; their interests were the subject themselves-their passions were for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it-and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study. Owen Meany, who had been so conspicuous-all my life-was easily overlooked at the University of New Hampshire. He was in none of his classes as distinguished as the tomato-red pickup, which was so readily distinguishable among the many economy-model cars that most parents bought for most students who had their own cars-my grandmother had bought me a Volkswagen Beetle; in the campus parking lots, there were so many VWs of the same year and navy-blue color that I could identify mine only by its license plate or by the familiarity of whatever I had left on the back seat. And although Owen and I first counted Hester's friendship as an advantage, her friendship was another means by which
Owen Meany became lost in Durham; Hester had a lot of friends among the seniors in what was our first year. These seniors were the people Owen and I hung out with; we didn't have to make any friends among the freshmen-and when Hester and her friends graduated, Owen and I didn't have any friends. As for whatever had made me feel afraid in the summer of '-whatever that fear was, it was replaced by a kind of solitariness, a feeling of being oddly set apart, but without loneliness; the loneliness would come later. And as for fear, you would have thought the Cuban Missile Crisis-that October-would have sufficed; you would have thought that would have scared the shit out of us, as people in New Hampshire are a/ways untruthfully claiming. But Owen said to Hester and me, and to a bunch of hangers-on in Hester's apartment, 'DON'T BE AFRAID. THIS IS NO BIG DEAL, THIS IS JUST A BIT OF NUCLEAR BLUFFING-NOTHING HAPPENS AS A RESULT OF THIS. BELIEVE ME. I KNOW.'
What he meant was that he believed he 'knew' what would happen to him; that it wasn't missiles that would get him- neither the Soviets' nor ours-and that, whatever 'it' was, it didn't happen in October, .
'How do you know nothing's going to happen?' someone asked him. It was the guy who hung around Hester's apartment as if he were waiting for Owen Meany to drop dead. He kept encouraging Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet-especially Justine and Clea, which this guy claimed he had read four or five times. Hester wasn't much of a reader, and I had read only Justine. Owen Meany had read the whole quartet and had told Hester and me not to bother with the last three novels.
'IT'S JUST MORE OF THE SAME, AND NOT SO WELL DONE,' Owen said. 'ONE BOOK ABOUT HAVING SEX IN A FOREIGN ATMOSPHERE IS
