He applies for and is given Beech's old job he falls in love with Beech's bereaved fiancée, Emily. (The horse kicks Beech in the head while the two men are tying up in front of a tavern during a lightning storm.) Calvin Dare, through a series of carefully disguised coincidences, proceeds to become the deceased Beech.
Set in eighteenth-century Philadelphia, the book told the story of a man named Calvin Dare, whose horse kills another man, Thomas Beech, by accident. Now, however, Brenda tried to convince herself that the novel was perfect for Hollywood. She was, like every other academic worth her salt, a purist. She wondered: Do all brilliant ideas seem brilliant from the very beginning, or do they seem far-fetched until they come into clearer focus? Brenda had first considered writing the screenplay for the novel (or "treating it," as they say) back in grad school, when she was dirt poor, subsisting on green tea, saltines, and ramen noodles, but she had dismissed the idea as crass and ridiculous. Brenda vacillated between thinking this was a brilliant idea and thinking it was completely inane. She would write a screenplay for The Innocent Impostor. And now that Brenda would never be able to teach the book again, and would never be able to write about it with any hope of being published someplace even remotely legitimate and scholarly, she was forced to commit a transgression (seen by some academics as even more egregious than the ones she'd already committed) and commercialize the novel.
Because of that book, Brenda became a reader, a critical thinker, a writer, an American literature major in college, a graduate student, a doctoral candidate, a doctor, a professor, possibly the foremost authority on Fleming Trainor in the world. Vicki teased Brenda all the time about her devotion to The Innocent Impostor, but that book, discovered at the tender age of fourteen when Brenda was in danger of being crushed under the toe of Vicki's Tretorn sneaker, had served as Brenda's life raft.
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