"Great Experiment"

"Great Experiment"
by Jeffrey Eugenides

Rating:7.2



Short story about an editor at a small publishing house in Chicago who conspires with an accountant to embezzle money from his wealthy publisher. “If you’re so smart, how come you’re not rich?” It was the city that wanted to know. Chicago.

“Anyway, you did good, kiddo. You boiled Tocqueville down to his essence. I remember when I first read this book. Blew me away.”
In his vibrant, scratchy voice, Jimmy began to recite a passage of “Democracy in America.” It was the passage they were putting on the bookmarks. Out in Montecito, bald, liver-spotted, in a tank top and shorts probably, the old libertine and libertarian crowed out his favorite lines: “In that land the great experiment of the attempt to construct society upon a new basis was to be made by civilized man,” Jimmy read, “and it was there, for the first time, that theories hitherto unknown, or deemed impracticable, were to exhibit a spectacle for which the world had not been prepared by the history of the past.”
Snow pummelled the glass. The lakefront was obscured, the water too. Kendall was enclosed in a dark space high above a city rising from a coast engulfed in darkness.
“That fucking kills me,” Jimmy said. “Every time.” ♦