Excerpt from High Dive by Jonathan Lee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

High Dive
An excerpt of the novel by Jonathan Lee

What he loved most was walking into the Grand with his daughter at his side. Yes, I created this person, look. A tiny moment of ego in an industry that was all about accommodating others.

Philip Finch, known to everyone but his aged mother as Moose, was driving to the hotel in his fail-safe Škoda 120, a car the color of old chocolate gone chalky. His window was wound down so he could tap ash onto the street and blow smoke out of the side of his mouth. It was important that his daughter shouldn't have to inhale his mistakes. She was in the passenger seat wearing her classic early-morning look: black skirt, white blouse, an elegantly expressionless corpse. Her hair had been cut yesterday. He saw no discernible difference. He told her it looked very good.

They passed the Dyke Road Park and the Booth Museum. Freya started rummaging in the glove compartment, a minor landslide of cassettes. There was a system and she was spoiling it. "What are you looking for?"

"Music."

"We're five minutes away, Frey."

She yawned. Blinked. Considered the windscreen. "It's hot," she said.

"There's some Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders in there. That one I played, where were we?"

She sighed.

"You're sighing."

"Nothing good has ever been produced by a Wayne, Dad."

"Untrue," he said and fell into a long dark reverie from which he emerged with the name Wayne Sleep.

"Who?"

"Or…" Where were all the other famous Waynes? "John Wayne."

"Surname," she said.

"That makes him a deeper form of Wayne. His Wayneness is in the blood."

"Probably a stage name," she said. Which, now that he thought of it…

He changed down another gear—these conversations were precious—and told her she shouldn't write things off until she'd tried them.

"Like traveling, you mean."

"Like university," he said. "Traveling, Frey. There's nothing special about traveling. This right here is traveling—going to put those back, at all? You can find yourself and lose yourself in this very car, this town."

"Thrill a minute," she said, but he thought he saw the flicker of a smile.

She was eighteen years and a dozen days old. Just yesterday, it seemed to him, she'd emerged out of an awkward bespectacled adolescence—a phase in which she'd temporarily lost the ability to be appreciative, the ability to be considerate, and the ability to be apologetic, all while causing a great proliferation of opportunities for these states to be warmly deployed. He'd noticed, of late, a big upsurge in the number of masculine glances clinging to her clothes and also in the ways she didn't need him. Seldom asked his advice anymore. Knew how to deal with difficult customers. Would one way or another soon be leaving him behind. Her mood swings had settled into a dry indifference, a much narrower emotional range. At times he felt nostalgia for her earlier anger and found himself needlessly provoking her. University! Careers! When might you learn to lock the door?

With her pale skin and dark eyes and button nose, that fatal way of raising the left eyebrow in arguments, Freya was increasingly a Xerox copy of Viv, back when they'd first got together. There was an awful pregnant pathos to this: your perfect daughter becoming your then-perfect wife, slinking into a future where she'd fall prey to certain enterprising, highly sexed individuals who were suped-up versions of the once-young you. He sometimes overheard summer staff at the Grand talking in an advanced language of sexual adventure, discussing what he assumed to be new positions or techniques. The Cambodian Trombone. The Risky Painter. South-East England Double Snow-Cone. Did anyone still do missionary? The future bares its breasts and laughs, a gaudy county fair.

Excerpted from High Dive by Jonathan Lee. Copyright © 2016 by Jonathan Lee. Excerpted by permission of Knopf. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.