Introduction

Karl Floor has only one thing to look forward to: someday he will be a homeowner. His deceased mother left her house to her second husband and Karl with the stipulation that stepfather and stepson must live there together. Karl, a twenty-six-year-old math teacher, has no further ambition than to outlive his stepfather.

After being viciously attacked by two of his students, Karl stumbles home to find a robber in his house—a gorgeous young robber, Sylvia Vetch. As sparks fly, Karl helps Sylvia make her getaway and joins her at a surreal party. Karl doesn’t remember much from that night—only that he fell in love with Sylvia, and was scared off by her handsome protector, Stony. Karl finds himself entrenched in Sylvia and Stony’s on-again-off-again relationship, and as his frustration comes to a head, Karl learns that most of his simple life—house, family, infatuation with Sylvia—is built on lies. Now Karl runs the risk of never owning anything, including his own heart.

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Excerpt

ONE

at twenty-six, Karl Floor had had a hard life: father dead, mother dead, stepdad sick and mean, siblings none, friends none, foes so offhanded in their molestations that they did not make a crisp enough focal point for his energies. Not that he had many energies— he had few. He wasn’t born wan and slow, but misfortune made him so, and so he felt he would remain till death. Death: it cast a faraway light of exaltation over the future, as the prospect of a shining city on a hill gives comfort to pilgrims enduring a rough sea voyage, but he could not, as the pilgrims could not, get there any faster. He simply had to withstand storms and lulls, eat spoiled food, fall ill for months, never fully recover, and put up a sail at the first sign of wind. The strange woman in the upstairs hallway of his stepfather’s house did not seem to him such a sign. He felt she was twenty- four. She wore jeans and a rose- colored T-shirt over her thin, strong body. She did not have on a mask, nor was she carry ing any of his family’s possessions, so Karl may be forgiven for not immediately identifying her as a burglar. A maid, he thought, an amateur from the university who’d tacked up posters around town with little half- cut tabs at the bottom that had her phone number on them that you could tear off and put in your pocket and call her later about daubing the inside of your house with her unwashed rag.

“Hi,” she said.

Dust descended across the close air of the hallway on a mid - afternoon sunbeam that entered the house through a bedroom window to the right. The rose- colored T-shirt was lit by the beam, and now the words fitness instructor formed in his head.

“Are you—”

The likelihood of this afternoon’s turning out to be other than grim was nil. His walk home from the high school where he taught math had been halted by the two worst boys from trig— a class of twenty pleasant sophomores and these two, se niors with no feel for trig or any subject that was not the idiot interruption of reasonable endeavor, or, to put it another way, they were assholes—blond assholes, he felt compelled to add. Karl himself was almost blond, and was willing to concede there were many blond people who were not assholes, and many brunettes and redheads who were, but a small, unkind segment of the blond population, he felt, acted out their unkindness as if wearing a blond wig, or as if they felt their blondness made them suitable for a role in which a brown- haired actor, no matter how brilliant the audition, would never have been cast. Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair, McQueen laughing woodenly and kicking the air in the mod parlor of his mansion after pulling off a two- million- dollar bank heist, and Dunaway in her wide- brimmed hat crying out unconvincingly to the brown- haired chief of police, “Yes, I’m immoral, but so is the world!” That was who stopped Karl on his way home from school, a pair of high-society sophisticates with their own elite moral code, only both male, both teen, both crude, both dumb, both smelling like a week- old milk spill.

“Nice weather, Mr. Floor,” one of them said, and the terrible thing was, it was nice weather, and the punching began.

A grown man, a teacher, beaten by two teens was grim. The central mathematical fact of the beating—two assailants— upset him most of all; five would’ve made it less personal; one would’ve given the dignity of a duel, or the randomness of an encounter with a lone psychopath; two made it intimate, a love triangle in which Karl was the odd man out.

“Are you—” he said to the burglar, forty minutes after the

beating.

“Robbing you? Yes.”

“Robbing me?”

“This is your house, isn’t it?”

“Well, I live here.”

“But it’s not yours?”

“No.”

“So you don’t own anything here?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Whose is it?”

“My stepfather’s.”

“Where’s he?”

“At work.”

“What’s he do?”

“Manufacturing.”

“Of?”

“Something vulgar.”

“Toilet fixtures?”

“Not vulgar in that way, just not exalted.”

“So everything in the world is either vulgar or exalted, with a line down the middle?”

“You’re rude.”

“I’m a robber.”

They stood and assessed each other, the young man whose cuts congealed while his bruises bloomed, and the young woman who seemed to him in possession of a relaxedness that, had he been able to bring even his limited knowledge of human souls to bear on it, he’d have recognized as his own fantasy. They stood loosely sandwiched by the hallway’s dark walls, the soft, low, beige carpet pushing up against their shoes. He saw that she was taking in his wounds while he was taking in her mouth, which, given the lips, took a long time: the softer the texture of the lip, and the fuller the saturation of the color red, the more seconds per square centimeter were required for accurate looking; they almost seemed Photoshopped in from a different face, possibly a somewhat larger one. He watched the little movements of this white and lovely face and felt—as he had often felt— that somewhere was written down all the combinations the forty- three face muscles could arrange themselves in, and the corresponding meaning of each, such that in any ten or fifteen seconds, a sentence could be read in someone’s face by the person in command of the lexicon of physiognomy, and, in a minute, a paragraph, but Karl was not that person.

“What are you going to rob me of?”

“Still casing the joint,” she said almost before he’d finished the question, but before that something had moved in her face that he’d have construed as dread had he been confident of his ability to construe. And maybe it wasn’t a movement of her face but a feature of it, an asymmetry, a permanent imperfection that denoted weakness and caused him to see more and better in her than the fit and perfect-faced ass he’d initially written her off as, and to see, further, that he’d written her off as that partly because of his own present facial difficulties, i.e., typical him, he expected everyone today who impeded his progress from point A to point B to hurt him, morally if not also physically. Never mind that point B was his bed of unwashed sheets, and that little good had ever come of arriving there, since as nice as rest in that bed sometimes felt, at the end of it there was only ever unrest. And could a robber do other than improve the misery of this house he was bound to by a promise to a woman now dead?

“Excuse me,” he said, and tried to walk past her down the hall. She didn’t stop him but she didn’t move. He was desperately afraid she would touch his face, or that he would touch hers. As he eased along the wall, his back shoved a small object to the ground. It lay in the carpet, a museum- quality mint- condition prototype of the widget his mother’s sick and mean second husband oversaw the manufacture of, vacuum-sealed in lucite. They stared down at it. He felt what blood remained in his head pool against the inner lining of his face, and had the sensation that they were hanging on the wall while the widget, standing on the floor, observed them. Himself; his wounds; her; her T-shirt and strong arms; the suburban house with two floors, a basement, and an attic; a row of such houses, each with its half- acre of lawn, its tree, its beachhead of sidewalk; a whole town of these; many towns of these together and the big city whose gravity field fixed each in its orbit: all were prefigured and held in balance by the widget in the lucite void.

“Good night,” Karl said, went to his room, lay down on grayish sheets, and slept.

“Hendrix at Monterey and Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss?” she asked, looking at the posters on his walls. “How unimaginative. Wow, it smells like BO in here.”

“How long was I asleep?”

“Ten seconds.” view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

These discussion questions are designed to enhance your group’s conversation about You Were Wrong, a darkly comic novel about a depressed schoolteacher who meets his match: the beautiful woman robbing his house.

1. Consider the title of the novel. Who has been wrong about what? What “wrongs” are corrected, and which misconceptions remain until the very end?

2. You Were Wrong opens with a short summary of Karl’s life: “At twenty-six, Karl Floor had had a hard life: father dead, mother dead, stepdad sick and mean, siblings none, friends none, foes so offhanded in their molestations that they did not make a crisp enough focal point for his energies” (1). Does this snapshot biography sum up Karl, or is there more to his personality? Do these hardships justify his unhappiness? Why or why not?

3. Soon after Karl meets Sylvia Vetch in his home, “There was the unsettled question of whether her intentions toward Karl were mean or nice, whose answer would not influence his feelings, only their consequences” (26). When do Sylvia’s intentions, “mean or nice,” become clear? Does she have positive or negative intentions toward Karl?

4. Compare the three Long Island houses in You Were Wrong: Karl and Jones’s shared home, Sylvia’s party shack, and Stony’s estate. Why are houses so important to the characters who own them? How does each house reflect its owners?

5. What are Karl’s first impressions of Stony, and how do his impressions change or remain the same over time? In which moments does Stony show some vulnerability?

6. Discuss the relationship between Karl and his stepfather, Larchmont Jones. What fundamental lies have shaped their relationship? Does Karl intend to kill Jones, or is he surprised by his own violent impulses toward his stepfather?

7. What is the role of race in You Were Wrong? How does Karl react to the racial identities of other characters?

8. Although she died years ago, Karl’s mother continues to have a significant impact upon her family. How does Karl express his mourning for his mother? How does her memory serve to keep Karl and his stepfather together, and how does her absence drive the two men apart?

9. Consider Karl’s impressions of Brooklyn. How does he view the city as he drives in from Long Island? How do the scenes set in Brooklyn differ from the rest of the novel?

10. In the end, why does Sylvia marry Stony? Who benefits from this marriage, and who suffers the consequences? What role does Karl play in their relationship? Is he able to protect Sylvia, as promised? Why or why not?

11. Sylvia calls Karl “this innocent, adorable, melancholy weirdo who’s just himself, who isn’t machinating or striving, who wants nothing more than to carry on with his unambitious, unremarkable life” (164). Do you agree with Sylvia’s view of Karl? Why or why not? Why does this aspect of Karl’s personality appeal to Sylvia?

12. You Were Wrong contains several violent scenes, including Karl’s after-school beating, Jones’s near-death by pool cue, Stony’s failed attempt to cut off Karl’s finger, and Stony’s stabbing. How is violence depicted in the novel? When do violence and dark humor intersect?

13. Arv, Paul, and Hal—Stony’s sidekick, and the two high school students he hires to attack Karl—make an unusual backdrop of minor characters in You Were Wrong. What motivates these three characters? How do they come to a peaceful resolution with Karl?

14. In a surreal moment of the novel, a nightingale swoops into Karl’s bedroom and exchanges hearts with him. What does this black bird symbolize? What effect does this “black bird heart in his breast” (107) have upon Karl, as he faces the news of Stony and Sylvia’s wedding?

15. After stabbing Stony, Sylvia tells Karl, “You’re somebody’s stepfather now” (180). How might stepfatherhood change Karl?


Suggested reading
Matthew Sharpe, Jamestown and The Sleeping Father; John Barth, The Development and Lost in the Funhouse; Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist; David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System; George Saunders, Pastoralia; Colson Whitehead, Sag Harbor; Paul Beatty, Slumberland; Joshua Ferris, The Unnamed; Robert Bolano, The Savage Detectives; Jonathan Lethem, Chronic City; T. C. Boyle, Wild Child and Other Stories; Richard Powers, Generosity: An Enhancement.

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info
»	Video Interview with Matthew Sharpe

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