A Midwesterner Unraveling in Real Time
Martin Van Cooper's "Don't Disappoint" opens with a man caught between collapsing pillars. Jason Driver is flying back to Cleveland from Los Angeles to attend a cousin's wedding and, more pressingly, to confront the accelerating decline of his mother's vascular dementia. His sister Alice has been shouldering that burden alone for years. Then, mid-trip, his wife Jessica detonates the marriage by phone.
The chapter is a finalist excerpt in PILCROW's Serialized Novel Contest, and it reads like a controlled demolition. Van Cooper layers domestic crisis on top of familial obligation on top of existential dread, all while parking his protagonist at a wedding reception full of distant relatives who will not stop talking.
The Weight of Avoidance
Jason Driver is not a sympathetic protagonist in any conventional sense. He has been gone from Ohio for the better part of two decades. He has left his sister to manage their mother's decline while he teaches high school English in the San Fernando Valley. Van Cooper does not soften this.
He didn't feel he knew the woman when he was a child and certainly didn't know her now and he had clearly shirked any familial responsibilities regarding caring for anyone, let alone his infirmed mother, so why now was his sister insisting on dragging him in to participate in the distasteful act of committing into a sterile place to die the woman who bore him into world?
That sentence runs long. It should. The syntax mirrors the way guilt accumulates when you refuse to parse it into manageable pieces. Van Cooper trusts his readers to stay with a sentence that sprawls the way avoidance sprawls.
There is a counterpoint worth raising here: the chapter depends heavily on the reader tolerating Jason's self-absorption. He is aware of his failings, articulate about them, and does precisely nothing. For some readers, that awareness without action will read as literary depth. For others, it will simply be tedious. Van Cooper walks a narrow line.
Voices That Swallow the Room
The most technically impressive passages in the chapter are the monologues. Van Cooper has a ruthless ear for how people actually talk, particularly people who talk without listening.
Alice's mac and cheese story is a masterclass in the everyday monologue:
This was a very different mac n' cheese. And she told me it was going to be, she told me Alice, you need to try this mac n' cheese, it's really different, and you know. Mac n' cheese can be really heavy and I don't like, I'm trying not to eat so heavy, but Jason, this, when she brought it out.
It goes on. And on. The recursion and false starts capture something true about the way people narrate the unremarkable as though it were revelation. Alice is not a comic figure -- she is the sibling who stayed, the one washing dishes and stripping beds while Jason pursued his dissertation in the basement.
The uncle's vending machine speech operates differently. It is a man performing authority while the world changes around him:
I told him nobody gonna buy water from a vending machine. This guy come to my office. I told him get the fuck out of here. I tossed him out. Black guy. But then we tried it few months later. What do I know.
The casual racism, the bluster, the grudging concession that he was wrong -- Van Cooper fits an entire character study into a cocktail-hour rant. The uncle is someone who has survived by sheer force of personality in a world that no longer rewards that particular force.
Jessica as Absence
Jessica Driver never appears in the chapter. She exists only through Jason's recollections and through fragments of her own speech, refracted through his memory. Yet she dominates the text.
The mathematical concept of chaos is slippery and very hard to explain in non-mathematical terms, Jessica said to him when they were still dating. Every simile obfuscates rather than clarifies.
Van Cooper gives Jessica the most intellectually precise language in the chapter. She is an interventional cardiologist, a woman who threads catheters into beating hearts. Her worldview is clinical, probabilistic, unsentimental.
What could be more elegant than advancing a laser equipped catheter into a beating human heart and obliterating naughty, arrhythmogenic cells? And satisfying. Bringing order to chaos, quite literally.
The irony is structural. Jessica's profession is about restoring rhythm to disordered systems. Her departure from the marriage is the arrhythmia Jason cannot defibrillate. Van Cooper never makes this metaphor explicit, which is precisely what makes it effective.
One line, delivered during what Jason recalls as an early date, lands with delayed force:
I don't think you've ever had your heart broken, she observed in an impish, analytical, pugnacious manner over dinner during one of their first dates.
That she saw this in him before he could see it in himself is the quiet devastation of the chapter.
Time as Weapon
Van Cooper uses a distinctive chronological device throughout: anchoring emotional beats to public events. The year Lebron left Cleveland. The year of the JCPOA. The year Kobe Bryant died in Calabasas. These are not decorative. They function as a kind of cultural carbon dating, placing private grief inside a shared timeline without sentimentalizing either.
It was the year someone discovered a 200-year-old salamander in Indonesia by stepping on it.
That line arrives immediately after Jason processes Jessica's revelation. The absurdity is the point. The world keeps producing bizarre, irrelevant facts while your life falls apart. Van Cooper understands that grief does not clear the mind -- it clutters it.
The tense shifts are worth noting. Most of the chapter sits in past tense, but the wedding reception slides into present. Jason "hurries to get buzzed." He "is calling every guy in the place buddy." The shift is disorienting in a way that mirrors intoxication and dissociation. Whether every reader will track these shifts consciously is debatable -- they risk reading as inconsistency rather than technique, especially in a contest excerpt where the reader has no established trust with the author.
The Girl in the Pink Dress
The chapter's most striking image arrives near the end, at the wedding reception. An adorable toddler runs across the dance floor. Jason's aunt identifies her as the child who was born with her organs outside her body.
He is staring at this child in stunned amazement, a child with whom he can find no conceivable flaw, that is happy, proportionate, not discolored, disfigured or in any way low energy, who is smiling and has long blond hair and a pink cotton dress and mock ballet shoes, thinking, he can't stop thinking, about some kind of a zipper.
The image works on multiple levels. A child who was opened and reassembled and now runs freely across a dance floor. Jason, who cannot be reassembled. The juxtaposition is devastating without being sentimental. Van Cooper earns it by burying the revelation inside the aunt's earlier, seemingly throwaway anecdote about the family's tangled relationships.
Bottom Line
Van Cooper's first chapter is dense, digressive, and deliberately uncomfortable. It refuses to give its protagonist the grace of a redemption arc or even a clear antagonist. Jason Driver is a man who has organized his life around avoidance, and the chapter's structure -- careening between wedding small talk, medical philosophy, and marital collapse -- mirrors the experience of someone trying not to think about the thing he cannot stop thinking about.
The prose is ambitious. Some sentences run to Faulknerian lengths; others land in three words. The monologues are virtuosic. The risk is that the sheer density of voice and incident will exhaust readers before the novel has a chance to develop its emotional throughline.
But that final image -- the girl with the zipper, whole and running -- suggests Van Cooper knows exactly where the feeling lives. He just refuses to make it easy to get there.