Nathan Highfill

Heroic Couples Nathan Highfill

Two college roommates, one a magazine columnist and the other an erstwhile professional wrestler who has written an exposé about the underside of the wrestling world and has become famous, reunite to attend the wedding of the columnist's former girlfriend, a faded professional mannequin who is marrying a housepainter enamored with his involvement in a get rich quick pyramid scheme. Events descend into farcical catastrophe as personal enmities can no longer be contained and Ripley Bradley, former wrestler, does his heroic best to rectify the situation. The work is accompanied by several abortive attempts by the first person narrator to create epic poems based on his pathetic experience in a transparent attempt to elevate his struggle from its endemic absurdity to a more tragic and profound state. The story itself is piggybacked on an allegory about the futility and cupidity of the concept underlying Manifest Destiny. The story travels, in an homage to picaresque comic novels of the nineteenth century, from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Dallas, Texas setting up several nods to Jamesian comedies of manners and class comedies from the Restoration.