The Rule of Four by Ian Caldwell, Dustin Thomason

took as a sign that Colonna was a monk, was also a common greeting at the Academy.
    Yet my father’s argument, which seemed so lucid to Paul and me, clouded the academic waters. My father hardly lived long enough to brave the teapot tempest he stirred up in the little world of
Hypnerotomachia
scholarship, but it nearly undid him. Almost all of my father’s colleagues rejected the work; Vincent Taft went out of his way to defame it. By then, the arguments in favor of the Venetian Colonna had become so entrenched that, when my father failed to address one or two of them in his brief appendix, the whole work was discredited. The idea of connecting two doubtful murders with one of the world’s most valuable books, Taft wrote, was “nothing but a sad and sensational bit of self-promotion.”
    My father, of course, was devastated. To him it was the substance of his career they were rejecting, the fruit of the quest he’d been on since his days with McBee. He never understood the violence of the reaction against his discovery. The only enduring fan of
The Belladonna Document,
as far as I know, was Paul. He read the book so many times that even the dedication stuck in his memory. When he arrived at Princeton and found a Tom Corelli Sullivan listed in the freshman face-book, he recognized my middle name immediately and decided to track me down.
     
    If he expected to meet a younger version of my father, he must have been disappointed. The freshman Paul found, who walked with a faint limp and seemed embarrassed by his middle name, had done the unthinkable: he had renounced the
Hypnerotomachia
and become the prodigal son of a family that made a religion out of reading. The shockwaves of the accident were still ringing through my life, but the truth is that even before my father died, I was losing my faith in books. I’d begun to realize that there was an unspoken prejudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses, can correct it. The scholars and intellectuals I met at our dinner table always seemed to hold a grudge against the world. They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don’t follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage. And that, they seemed to think, was a shame.
    No one ever said it that way, exactly, but when my father’s friends and colleagues—all but Vincent Taft—came to see me in the hospital, looking sheepish about the reviews they’d written of his book, mumbling little eulogies for him they’d composed in the waiting room, I began to see the writing on the wall. I noticed it the moment they walked to my bedside: every one of them brought handfuls of books.
    “This helped me when
my
father died,” said the chairman of the history department, placing Merton’s
Seven Storey Mountain
on the food tray beside me.
    “I find great comfort in Auden,” said the young graduate student writing her dissertation under my father. She left a paperback edition with one corner clipped off to remove the price.
    “What you need is a pick-me-up,” another man whispered when the others left the room. “Not this bloodless stuff.”
    I didn’t even recognize him. He left a copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo,
which I’d already read, and I could only wonder if he really thought revenge was the best emotion to encourage just then.
    None of these people, I realized, could cope with reality any better than I could. My father’s death had a nasty finality to it, and it made a mockery of the laws they lived by: that every fact can be reinterpreted, that every ending can be changed. Dickens had rewritten
Great Expectations
so that Pip could be happy. No one could rewrite this.
     
    When I met Paul, then, I was wary. I’d spent the last two years of