Off the Road

Off the Road is the only novel published by William Henry Devereaux, Jr., and a book whose consequences outlast its literary reputation. Published when he was twenty-nine, it helped determine where his family lived and how his academic career unfolded; nearly twenty years without another book then turned it into both a measure of his stalled writing life and an object through which he revisits that history.

Publication and its consequences

The novel appeared to a positive review in the Times, a notice that William Henry Devereaux, Jr. later learned had been prompted by his father, who knew the editor. The book made no substantial impact on the literary world, but its acceptance and advance had practical effects. The family was preparing to move from Indiana to Railton before the publication money arrived. When the Devereauxes feared they might be unable to pay the movers, William Henry Devereaux, Sr. wired them $1,500. The advance came through shortly before they left, and they returned his check uncashed—a gesture Lily later recalled had hurt his feelings.

The advance also helped make a new home possible. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. remembers it funding the first work on the trees at the top of the hill in Allegheny Wells. Lily draws a distinction between building the house and buying the two neighboring lots to keep other people from building beside it. In her account, that purchase helped set the English Department Wars in motion, linking a private real-estate decision to the campus feuds that followed. The narrator extends the chain of consequences further: his refusal to sell one of those lots to Paul Rourke became, in his imagining, the seed of an enduring hostility. These are his and Lily’s readings of the past, not proof that the novel alone caused every later conflict; the book matters because its advance helped place the family in the circumstances from which those choices grew.

The publication also coincided with the formation of the family. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. reflects that Julie was born in the year the novel appeared and that she may have been conceived in celebration of its acceptance. He presents this as a possibility rather than a certainty. For Julie, the book is nevertheless part of her father’s identity: her description of him as a novelist surprises and cheers him, particularly because she was born around its publication and has never known him as a working novelist.

The book and its absent author

As William Henry Devereaux, Jr. approaches fifty, Off the Road remains the collected work of his literary career. He imagines that a more demanding institution, more ambitious colleagues, better students, and a shared artistic purpose might have brought another book out of him. He also resists that explanation: the simpler possibility, in his reckoning, is that he was a one-book author. The novel’s singularity is therefore both a biographical fact and a question he repeatedly tests against alternate versions of his life.

His silence does not mean he has stopped writing altogether. He produces film and book reviews for the Railton Mirror and writes The Soul of the University pieces, but he has not published—or even written—a short story since the novel. He wonders whether Julie counts his newspaper work as writing, or whether she simply does not see a sharp distinction between those pieces and a novel. Her confidence that he remains a novelist offers a form of recognition unavailable elsewhere, though it cannot erase the gap between his present work and the book that first gave him that identity.

The gap appears in his relationship with Wendy, his literary agent. The Christmas after Off the Road’s publication was the first when she did not send him a holiday greeting. He suspects this may have followed a sarcastic response to her announcement that she would raise her commission from ten to fifteen percent because of increased business costs in New York. His joke declined to pay an additional five percent of nothing; he cannot tell whether the exchange explains her silence. The episode sharpens his uncertainty about how others regard him: people who know him may no longer take him seriously, while strangers can receive his irony as a serious offense.

Copies, photographs, and encounters

At a school visit, copies of Off the Road circulate among the students without attracting much attention. One girl compares the author photograph on the cover with the man standing before her. The image makes the book a record of an earlier appearance as well as evidence of an earlier achievement: its author has changed, and the students can see the discrepancy before they know what to make of it. Their limited interest in the copies contrasts with the public visibility the cover later acquires during protests on campus.

A different copy returns to the center of the story when William Henry Devereaux, Jr. finds a pristine volume on a shelf. The back cover shows a serious-looking young author whose pose seems to promise a life far from Railton. The caption identifies him as Henry Devereaux at home in Railton, Pennsylvania. Inside, an inscription in his handwriting dedicates the book to Finny, the English Department Instructor, with affection, admiration, and good wishes.

The dedication brings back the year both men sought tenure and promotion to associate professor. Finny had not completed his University of Pennsylvania dissertation and had little in his file beyond a supportive letter from his dissertation director. William Henry Devereaux, Jr., by contrast, had a book to his credit and expected promotion, despite having put himself forward after only a year in residence. The outcome reversed those expectations: Finny was promoted, and William Henry Devereaux, Jr. was turned down. He responded by seeking full professorship the following year, a bid so audacious that the committee approved it. Tenure, rank, and salary then made it difficult for him to move to another institution. Finding that Finny had sold the inscribed copy provokes his anger, even as the volume reminds him that the novel had helped shape the professional circumstances both men inhabited.

The physical book has meanwhile passed through what its author regards as an ignominious sequence of owners: first someone who apparently did not want it as a gift, then someone who treated it as decoration. That second owner is Dickie Pope. When William Henry Devereaux, Jr. hears Dickie speaking outside his office, he slips the volume into his coat pocket and keeps it. The act changes the novel from a discarded piece of office décor into something he can handle and read again.

From public image to renewed possibility

During a protest at the campus duck pond, protesters carry enlarged versions of the novel’s cover photograph, placing the younger author’s image within the protest’s signs. About fourteen hours have passed since the protest was organized; the crowd grows to roughly 150 people. William Henry Devereaux, Jr. first helps carry equipment in the hope of attracting less notice, then recognizes his own photograph among the placards. The picture has become a public symbol detached from the book’s literary contents, while the man it depicts stands nearby in a much-altered body.

Afterward, alone in the men’s room, he compares his present reflection with the image of the young author on the signs. The stolen copy in his pocket makes the comparison unusually immediate: he is confronted at once by his current self, his public likeness, and the book he wrote. He wonders whether the brief lapses in attention he has experienced signal illness or resemble the absorption that accompanied the novel’s composition. Lily used to notice him disappearing during dinner-table conversations; Karen later said she could tell when he had gone elsewhere into fictional revision. The recollection leaves open whether the old imaginative state is returning or whether the book is simply pulling him back into memory.

In his office, Rachel has placed a new blotter on his desk. He takes the volume from his coat, intending to put it on a shelf, but instead opens it and begins to read. Interrupting him over the intercom, Rachel asks whether he is there; he tells her he is thinking about writing another book. The moment does not establish that a new manuscript will follow. It does, however, give the recovered copy a final function beyond commemoration: after years in which the novel marked the limit of his published work, reading it becomes the immediate occasion for considering a return to writing.