Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… in the Midwest. The middle child of three, Chip had a closer relationship with his siblings growing up – only to abandon his ties later on. Chip looks back on his childhood as a time of forced captivity with a family he has nothing in common with.
Living… in the wake of his own destruction. After losing his job as a professor for sleeping with one of his students, Chip started writing a screenplay out of the blue. Without much chance of getting it sold, Chip is using the project as an airing of grievances over his failed affair and his lost job.
Profession… trying to be a screenwriter – which is in some ways similar to his prior career as a Marxist college professor, because both lines of work boil down to Chip spouting social criticism and his bitterness over rampant consumerism.
Interests… leather clothing, working out, and Mexican A – a new drug resembling ecstasy and Viagra mixed together. His greatest joy in life is probably going on long tirades against everything wrong with society, especially advertising and the mores of his own family.
Relationship Status… dating Julia, an apparently sane woman. He puts his new relationship at risk time and again. The biggest strike against him is the content of his script, which begins with a monologue on “anxieties of the phallus in Tudor drama” and contains more references to the heroine’s “perfect breasts” than there are pages in the script.
Challenge… surviving his family experience. Chip is forced to return to his childhood home in St. Jude for “one last Christmas,” and he tries to avoid it at all costs, even if that means he has to flee to post-Soviet Lithuania.
Personality… critical, angry, and rebellious. Chip has no qualms with breaking rules. When he sees overpriced salmon at a hypermarket, he slips it into his pants and walks out with it. When he has the opportunity to have an affair with a young student, he takes it. And when he gets the chance to make good money, even under dubious circumstances, Chip is the first to shake hands and jump on a plane.
Get to Know him in...
-
After almost fifty years as a wife and mother, Enid Lambert is ready to have some fun. Unfortunately, her husband, Alfred, is losing his sanity to Parkinson's disease, and their children have long since flown the family nest to the catastrophes of their own lives. The oldest, Gary, a once-stable portfolio manager and family man, is trying to convince his wife and himself, despite clear signs to the contrary, that he is not clinically depressed. The middle child, Chip, has lost his seemingly secure academic job and is failing spectacularly at his new line of work. And Denise, the youngest, has escaped a disastrous marriage only to pour her youth and beauty down the drain of an affair with a married man-or so her mother fears. Desperate for some pleasure to look forward to, Enid has set her heart on an elusive goal: bringing her family together for one last Christmas at home.
