How I Became a Famous Novelist (13 page)

“So how are things going?” I asked. It was important for my plan that Lucy remember we were good friends and not think I was just using her to get published.

“Oh, they’re okay. I got new sheets that are supersoft!” she replied over the din. She mentioned Polly’s wedding, and since she seemed genuinely happy for that traitorous hussy I kept quiet until she changed the subject.

“Do you like this bar?” she asked.

“Yeah, it’s great. Is it weird to name a bar after a guy who drank himself to death?”

Lucy looked around confused. “That didn’t occur to me.” She took an impressive swallow of bourbon. “I think writers used to come here. James Jones and Norman Mailer and stuff. But these guys look like mostly consultants.”

Then she grabbed my wrist with both hands and her eyes burst out as though suddenly remembering something. “Your book!”

I worked my face into writerly indifference. “Oh that. Did you read it?”

“It’s going to get me promoted.”

This statement so stunned me that I jerked my neck in a way that hurt for weeks.

“You thought it was good?!”

“Oh not
good
good,” she said. “I mean . . . I was impressed, you know, that you
wrote
the whole thing, but . . . I mean,
tornadoes
?”

Now I pantomimed “hurt.”

“So you didn’t think it was good.”

“Look, Pete.” She leaned in close, and whispered. “I can’t tell anymore.”

“What?”

“I can’t tell. I don’t know if they’re good or bad or what.”

“Aren’t you supposed to be an assistant editor?”

“Editorial assistant, but—I don’t think anybody knows.” By now we were leaning in like two spies. “They can’t tell, my boss
definitely
can’t tell, his boss
certainly
definitely can’t tell. Nobody knows. And we’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Wait—”

“Look, do you realize how many manuscripts we get? Thousands! Tens of thousands! Just stacks and stacks! Some people don’t have desks, they just have stacks. And there are people whose whole job it is to throw them in the garbage. Huge bins! They use shovels! But the manuscripts never stop coming in.”

“But most of those have got to be terrible.”

“You have no idea! Crazy terrible! Sometimes pages have bloodstains on them. We have a group, an e-mail thing, me and these other assistants, we e-mail around the worst sentences— you can’t believe them! You get just numb to it. But once you sort those out, then there are the ones you actually deal with.

“Pete, listen, I’m smart, right?” She said this so pleadingly that I nodded as fast as I could.

“I can’t tell. I thought I could. I thought I knew good from bad. I’d find these incredible, touching books, and I’d say how great they were, and the editors would toss them. Or they’d publish them, and they’d sell like fifty-four copies. Literally. Fifty-four copies.”

She finished her bourbon. “
Peking
. I sent you
Peking
? It sold thirty-four hundred copies. That’s it. Total. And that was ‘above expectations’!

“And this, this is even worse. The bad ones! These bad ones— terrible ones, ones that don’t even make
sense
and have
adverbs
everywhere and made-up words—they sell ten million copies and they make movies out of them. I used to cry, every night, literally,
I would get a milkshake and put vodka in it and cry because I thought I must be stupid. I had these dreams, every night, where everybody speaks some foreign language and I don’t know it.”

“What kind of milkshakes?”

“And I thought I was gonna quit. But then I sort of got it.
Nobody
knows. None of them. Editors, writers, agents, nobody. You know like when a kid is just screaming and screaming, and the mom just keeps throwing toys at it, but the kid keeps screaming, and it looks like the mom’s about to cry, too?”

“I think so—”

Lucy slapped the table. “That’s what it’s like! The editors are the mom! Readers are the kid. And the editors just keep throwing stuff at them, but they don’t know what to do!”

Lucy made it sound like the ruins of a postwar city. A nightmare where a crafty fellow could make a fortune.

“My boss, he’s crazy. He’s literally crazy. Do you know what he made me do? Monday, he told me to go on MySpace. Just spend the whole week on MySpace. And find something —a sentence, anything—something kids want. Just anybody he can sign.”

“Did you find anything?”

“And blogs! Jesus! Blogs! If I hear the word
blog
one more time I’m gonna put my neck on the subway tracks.”

“So how’s business?”

“Oh it’s terrible. They’re going to fire people. They said so. These guys from England, these guys who own a liquor company? They bought the whole place and announced they’re going to fire people. That was the first thing they did! ‘Cheers, ’ello, we’re going to make redundancies!’ And everyone who’d seen the British
Office
knew that meant fired.”

Then her eyes burst out at me again. “But
you
! You’re going to get me off the desk! Because you meet the Checklist!”

“What’s the Checklist?”

“It’s this thing, this form you fill out now. The corporate guys made it up. Look!”

She produced a document from her messenger bag.

ORTOLAN PRESS NEW TITLE ASSESSMENT

Title
The Tornado Ashes Club

Author: Pete Tarslaw

Rea
der: Lucy Etten

Genre
: Literary / Crime

(
3.5
) Readability

(
2
) Potential for sequels

(
5
) Potential for movie sales (visuals, action, casting, filmable locations)

(
5
) Potential for spinoff cookbook

(
4
) Potential for branding

(
2
) Potential for merchandising

(
1
) Potential for video game

(
4
) Potential for ancillary material (reader’s guides, etc.)

(
3.5
) Author appearance

(
5
) Author interview

(
5
) Author blog / web presence

(
4
) Awards potential

(
5
) International marketability

() SR (if applicable)

RECOMMENDATION
(5)

“Look at these scores! We’ll have to make you a blog at some point.”

“How come I got a three-point-five in appearance?”

“Believe me, compared to most of these guys you’re at
least
a three-point-five. But look at this!”

“I’m a four in awards?”

“We’re gonna make Genevieve Mexican. She’ll sing ranchera music. Trust me.”

“What’s SR?”

“That’s your sales record. Believe me, you don’t want to have that. Unless you’re Pamela McLaughlin or Tim Drew, it won’t help.” Lucy slapped the checklist against the table in joy. “You see?! Now we just convince Dave. But he’ll buy it. ‘Young talent, young talent!’ He’s always screaming that at me. He sounds like a porn producer.”

I went back to the bar trembling.

Lucy and I kept drinking and talking, although not necessarily to each other. She, I remember, went on a rant about why people bother to write at all. She pointed vaguely at dust jackets. “Look at these people! Vance Bourjally. Charles R. Robinson. Forgotten! Dead! Nothing! All that work! All those cigarettes! Their books are
pulp
now. Their books are these
napkins
! They
literally
turned their books into toilet paper. Literally. You wipe your ass on their books. And those are the good ones! But it’s the bad ones! The bad ones muck up the whole field. No offense.”

None was taken. I for my part recall holding forth with invective against Polly peppered with embarrassing revelations. I remember leaving, and propping up Lucy for half the stumble
back to her place. She suggested getting corned-beef tacos at this place that was right nearby.

“If it’s so bad,” I asked her, as we looked for the tacos, “why do you want to keep doing this anyway?”

It took her a long time to answer. “Sometimes, you find something that’s so
good,
” she said. “I don’t mean good like yours is ‘good.’ I mean good good. ‘You can tell’ good. Like
Peking
. But, mostly—”

Then she vomited on her shoes.

THE SECOND BAR

The Cafeteria, in Brooklyn somewhere.

That morning I had woken up on a purple futon in Lucy’s apartment at about noon. I washed my mouth out with some grapefruit juice I found in the fridge, and I knew I was in a girl’s apartment because the shower was free of pubes.

I have no idea how anyone gets any writing done in New York—I found just getting a slice of pizza to be emotionally exhausting. But when I got back, there was a message on my phone from Lucy, whose misfortune it was to be at work in a rough state of mind, body, and liver. But she sounded excited— she told me to meet her and her editor at a bar called The Cafeteria at seven that night. “I told him you insisted on meeting in Brooklyn,” Lucy said, which I didn’t understand but at this point she was quarterbacking.

The Cafeteria, which I found next to a Polish bakery, was done up like a school lunchroom: the bar had a glass sneeze guard, the floors were gray linoleum, the chairs were plastic, and the bartender wore a hairnet. People carried Pabst on colored trays.

Lucy’s boss, David Borer, an editor at Ortolan, was sitting next to her. Yards away in the semidarkness, you could still see the fear in his face. He was zipping his eyes around the room, as though somebody were about to reveal the secret of publishing and he was terrified of missing it. He was older than we were, fey and beaten. He looked like an elf who’s gone through a bad divorce.

“Guess this is the popular kids’ table!” he said, and then he laughed the kind of laugh a guy laughs when he knows he’s made an awful joke.

“So, Pete, I loved your draft. Read it at lunch, loved it.”

“You read it at lunch?”

“When you’re in my business, you gotta read fast. Sometimes I read two, three drafts during lunch. And Lucy told me you just nailed this voice, this voice of your generation, that’s really moving back toward what’s real.”

“Yes,” I said, in what I imagined were Abe Lincoln tones.

“Really
owning
earnestness.”

“Yes, yeah.”

“So you just holed up in a cabin in Vermont and banged that sucker out, huh?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’ve been musing on it for years. A lot of it is very much my own family history. Stories I’ve heard from shutins I visit.”

“It’s real. You can feel that.”

“Very, very real. Definitely.”

“So, I’m always interested—what’s your process, how do you work?”

What followed next was a game of Bullshit Poker. David asked me questions that I assumed were traps. I gave the writerest
answers I could think of on the fly. Lucy, for her part, was somber, nursing her beer, from time to time staring hard at me in horror.

Luckily, on the subway, I’d written down a list of writery statements.

WRITERY STATEMENTS

• I’ve always felt that writing a novel is like doing surgery on yourself.

• I try and stake out territory where the real and the transcendent meet.

•
Tornado Ashes Club
is really a story of an American pilgrimage.

• Grandma is a spirit guide; she is to Silas as Virgil is to Dante.

• Every morning, before I wrote, I’d read a page from
Leaves of Grass
. Whitman speaks in such an American cadence.

• Before I started writing, I spent a year just trying to picture Luke’s face. Then one day, as I was taking a walk by the river, he walked past me. And I sat down on the grass and started writing.

• I aspire to be as prolific as Dickens, as subtle as Henry James, and as lyrical as Toni Morrison.

• Writing, to me, isn’t a hobby. It isn’t a job. It’s as necessary to who I am as breathing.

Some of these were hard to say out loud. I saw Lucy’s forehead start to shine with sweat. But David kept nodding. And he kept drinking, more than you’d think a little guy should drink. He almost tripped once as he got up to go to the bathroom.

“Hey, Faulkner, don’t blow this,” Lucy scratched at me when he was gone.

“You’re the one who told him I’m the voice of a generation.”

“He’s buying it, he’s buying it.”

We saw David walking back. He looked wobbly on his feet and he sat down hard.

“God,” he said. “Writing. You know, probably shouldn’t tell you this. But you know, Lucy knows this, everybody knows this. We’re in trouble.”

“I . . . uh. . . .”

“We’re in trouble.” He looked at Lucy. “Worse than you know.” He chugged what must have been half a beer and slammed it against the table. “Fuck!” He looked at Lucy. “They’re thinking of having a pledge drive, like PBS. Like, ‘If you like this book, send us a check and get an Ortolan tote bag.’ It’s that bad.”

He burped a couple times, then looked at me. “Why don’t you write screenplays?”

“What?”

“I mean, you know, Lucy says you got the chops, why not screenplays?”

“Well, the novel, as a form, for me as a writer, is just so much more—um, suited to exploration of—”

“I’ve been working on a screenplay. I’ve been working on a short, too. Maybe get some actors, put it on YouTube, see who bites.”

A long pause.

“Fuck!”

Then, “Look, I’m gonna take your book to my bosses. I want to buy it. You know why?”

“Um, because you responded to—”

“Because that country stuff, all that stuff, and the religion —I think we can place it with Wal-Mart. I think they’ll sell it. That’s what you gotta do these days. Make the math work, sell it big. I’m hoping.”