45 pages • 1 hour read
Steven RowleyThe Celebrants
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5 Summary: “There’s a Wonder in Most Everything I See (Craig, 2018)”
Two paintings—ostensibly by Jürgen Förg—that Craig authenticated that sold for $2 million each turn out to be forged. While Craig didn’t purposefully deceive the purchaser of the art, he feels guilty for remaining “silent when nagging doubt set in” (194). He recalls that the art dealer “specialized in blurry details that made everything seem important. It wasn’t until much later that he realized he himself had filled in many of the details he found missing, that she had said far less than he’d originally heard” (199). He decides to accept a plea deal and pleads guilty to fraud.
Craig then calls Marielle. He leaves the gallery after being fired and finds his friends waiting for him outside. Worrying that Jordan’s cancer has returned, Craig thinks that “there were only so many times they could gather for fake funerals before they would have to assemble for something more real” (200). However, Marielle reveals that she has triggered the pact on his behalf. They return to Craig’s apartment—despite his protests that he’d prefer to go somewhere like Dubrovnik, or at least the Plaza—and have dinner. To derail proceedings, Craig tells a fabricated story of a dream he had in which he wrestled with Alec, who got angry when Craig asked how he was and instructed him to ask Jordy.
Remembering the Ouija board, the group discusses what Alec’s ghost is referring to, and Jordy becomes embarrassed, eventually revealing that Alec had told him that he had AIDS soon before his death (Craig really overheard this information on the dorm pay phone). Marielle becomes incensed, asking how Jordy could keep it from her. While he knows that he shouldn’t have kept the secret, Jordy says that he convinced himself that Alec had told her, and that he felt relieved when she told him that she’d had a blood test to confirm her pregnancy. Marielle storms out, and Naomi follows her, before they run into Marielle’s daughter, Mia.
Marielle, Naomi, and Mia return to Craig’s apartment to tell them that the pact is dead, but Craig triggers it for his funeral, and they eventually decide to continue their weekend together. They visit the Cloisters art collection the next day, and after seeing Mia and Craig together, Marielle tells him that he’s her daughter’s father. She tells him that she’d taken his toothbrush in Puerto Vallarta but never did anything with it: “It was so clear to her now that she had witnessed them together; she couldn’t understand how she hadn’t seen it all along. ‘She’s you’” (230).
When they return to Craig’s apartment, Naomi has arranged a presentation by a drummer friend of hers, Thom Romero, nicknamed Tuffy, who is also a “sought after prison consultant” (232). While Craig is initially resistant, he eventually finds the session helpful. The next day, everyone except Naomi takes mushrooms, and they take a scenic cruise around the city. Jordan is paranoid, but the others are giddy. Craig decides that he wants to have his funeral on the boat and scatters his “remains”—an old painting that he has burned—during the ceremony.
Part 5 Interlude Summary: “The Jordans”
Having cut down on their responsibility with the PR firm, Jordy and Jordan see a matinee and have a drink at the same bar at which they had dinner after their wedding. Jordy is concerned that Jordan drinks a martini, then they argue over Jordy’s attempt to manage Jordan and about Jordan’s announcement that he plans to stop cancer treatment. The argument again returns to Jordy’s insistence that Jordan trigger the pact. Jordan instructs Jordy about what he wants Jordy to do after he’s dead, and Jordy replies: “I don’t need people telling me what to do. I will survive” (263). Eventually, Jordan opens his phone and starts writing a group message to Naomi, Craig, Marielle, and Jordy himself.
Part 5 Analysis
Part 5 centers around art, which symbolizes the interplay between reality and representation. In a literal sense, whether art is original or forged is significant to the plot of the novel. The two paintings in question appear to be authentic, as “everything he could see and test passed muster” (198). Craig suggests that “it was better for everyone if they were real” (198). Rowley raises a complex philosophical question about what it means for art to be “real,” given the quality and craftsmanship that such a competent forgery entails. For Craig, art also represents self-deception and the differences between the real and the represented—even how an individual represents facts to themselves. This relates to the theme of Identity Originating in Self Versus Others as Rowley probes whether truth comes from the individual (or is inherent in an art object) or whether it comes from others. Rowley therefore complicates questions about truth as opposed to false representation through the motif of art forgery throughout Part 5.
Self-delusion and truth are also important to the relationship between Craig and Marielle, questions of Mia’s paternity, and Jordy’s secret about Alec’s AIDS diagnosis. Craig’s lie about his dream about Alec is the reason that this information is finally revealed. In addition to this lie, the event raises serious questions of trust: Marielle is incensed that she wasn’t told, horrified that she could have contracted it from Alec and could have given it to Mia; Jordan is also upset when he realizes that he doesn’t know everything about his husband. Part 5 centers around the professional deceit perpetrated by Craig; Rowley layers this with Jordy’s lie of omission. Rowley represents the two events as similar in that they didn’t begin maliciously but were made significantly worse by Craig and Jordy’s failure to tell the truth after the fact: Craig to question the paintings’ veracity and Jordy to tell Marielle.
Rowley represents the consequences of deceit in several ways throughout Part 5. In the case of Craig and Mia, while Craig expresses relief at only now having the opportunity to be involved after his daughter’s formative years, the lost relational time is also implied. Craig’s impending prison sentence is a literal, judicial consequence of his deceit. Alec’s death is a particularly stark potential consequence of Jordy’s failure to tell his friends what he knows of Alec’s AIDS diagnosis. When Marielle and Jordy talk, she tells him, “You should have told me immediately […] we could have got Alec some help” (250). In connection with the pact’s purpose of leaving nothing unsaid, the focus on negative consequences of a failure to be truthful is prevalent throughout Part 5.
While forgery is a centerpiece of the chapter, art also represents Craig’s path to his new identity in the funeral scene as well as the possibility of restitution for his offences. Tuffy advises the group to “find a way in which you could make a mark and offer something to the population at large. To Craig, this meant teaching an art class” (238). In addition to the idea of using art to give something back, Craig decides to scatter the ashes of an old painting of his during the funeral, suggesting that he wants to “say goodbye to my old talent so I could make room for the emerging new artist within” (252). Rowley therefore represents art as a new beginning and the possibility of new identity as well as a symbol of false representation.
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