Ian Mackenzie - Feast Days

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2018

Copyright © Ian MacKenzie 2018

Cover design by Heike Schüssler

Cover images © plainpicture/Goto-Foto/Tracy Jean Shields

Ian MacKenzie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008298548

Ebook Edition © June 2018 ISBN: 9780008306540

Version: 2019-01-31

‘This brilliant novel has no time for platitudes or conventional, ankle-deep morality; it plunges us straight to the depths. I’m not sure I know another book that feels at once so disaffected and so full of longing, so expansive in its sympathy and so terrifying in its candour. Devastating, funny and wise, it’s among the best novels I know about the fate of American innocence abroad’

GARTH GREENWELL

‘There is a sly, brooding intelligence at work in this novel, recalling for me the startling, highest times in American literature. MacKenzie is not just a great writer in the making – he’s already there’

BRAD WATSON

‘A beautiful, wry and honest exploration of belonging and not-belonging. The sharpness and precision with which the story is told reminded me in parts of Maggie Nelson … the prose is stunning’

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH

‘Brilliant. A pervasive sense of unrest, both large and small scale, social and personal, [is] conveyed in MacKenzie’s unruffled, discerning prose. MacKenzie has captured one of the most memorable narrative voices in recent fiction’

Publishers Weekly

‘Intelligent and atmospheric, Feast Days deftly limns the inner life of a foreigner whose own trajectory becomes increasingly bound up with the tensions and complexities of the society in which she has landed’

CHLOE ARIDJIS

‘Poignant and perceptive’

Booklist

‘The novel of the ugly American living abroad has bloomed into a genre all its own … Charles Portis’s Gringos , Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station , Nell Zink’s The Wallcreeper … Ian MacKenzie’s second novel arrives as a worthy addition to that list’

New York Times

‘A story about love and power, luxury and empire, set in one of the most socially stratified countries on the planet. MacKenzie’s slender novel feels heavier than many novels twice its weight’

San Francisco Chronicle

For Kelsey—

first reader of everything,

fixes the mistakes no one else has to see

“Oh,” I said, putting my hat on. “Oh.”

—Mark Strand,

“I Will Love the Twenty-first Century”

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

Epigraph

Per Diem

False Cognates

Financial Considerations

Beautiful Works of Art Guarantee a 100% Experience

The Children’s Party

Incidentals

The Disaster of Heterosexuality

You Have to be Able to Explain What the Gini Coefficient Is

Do You Want Something?

In Defense of this Life

Proto-romance

Texts

Return

Sympathy for the Wife

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Ian MacKenzie

About the Publisher

My husband worked for a bank in São Paulo, a city that reminded you of what Americans used to think the future would look like—gleaming and decrepit at once. The protests began in late spring, although, this being the Southern Hemisphere, it was really the fall. I was a young wife.

So. We were Americans abroad. We weren’t the doomed travelers in a Paul Bowles novel, and we weren’t the idealists or the malarial, religion-damaged burnouts in something by Greene; but we were people far from home nevertheless. Our naivety didn’t have political consequences. We had G.P.S. in our smartphones. I don’t think we were alcoholics. Our passports were in the same drawer as our collection of international adapters, none of which seemed to fit in Brazilian wall sockets. My husband was in the chrysalis stage of becoming a rich man, and idealism was never my vice.

Our tribe was an anxious tribe. This was after Lehman Brothers, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, after Occupy—people were starting to talk about the economic crisis in the past tense, boxing it up in the language of history. The Great Recession. The name was something we needed. I was amazed by how fragile wealthy men seemed in their own eyes. They could be thin-skinned also, mistrustful, myopic, boastful, cowardly, and frequently sanctimonious. Call it the anxiety of late capitalism. I should say that it was my husband who belonged to this tribe. I was ancillary—a word that comes from the Latin for “having the status of a female slave.” That’s the sort of thing I know, and it tells you something about how I misspent my education. The term among expats for people like me was “trailing spouse.”