How I Became a Famous Novelist (15 page)

Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.

Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out “reviews.” Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.

Even when being “kindly,” book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. “We look forward to hearing more from the author,” a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.

But a
bad
book review is just disgusting.

Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of “telling people how bad different books are”? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?

This isn’t Don Rickles at a celebrity roast, where everyone’s having a laugh over shrimp cocktail and a Tom Collins. People still quote Dorothy Parker, because she was the last book reviewer who was funny. That was eighty years ago.

Nor do I cut book reviewers any slack for “advancing the arts” or “calling good work to our attention” or “keeping the culture of letters alive.” If a guy drove around your neighborhood with a bullhorn, pointing out which people were too fat, he would be advancing wellness, and calling fitness to our attention, and keeping public health alive. But you would hate him. You would throw rocks at him, as well you should.

Which brings me to Charles Meredith.

Charles Meredith is something of an institution at the
San Francisco Chronicle.
He writes a weekly column called, with appropriate pretension, “Of Books.” In that space, for seventeen years, he has issued jackass pronouncements in an obnoxious high-English patois of his own invention.

I’d never heard of Charles Meredith before he wrote a review of my book. But since he picked on me, unprovoked, it’s fair for me to pick on him.

It’s not hard. Go ahead and do a Google image search for him. Gaze on the picture of his folds of fat forming oceanic heaves and swells through his turtleneck. Look at the way his neck is sheathed in a foreskin of flesh like an uncircumcised penis. It will be easy for you to envision him as I do: sitting at
a restaurant alone, banging his breadbasket against the table to demand more rolls.

Why should Charles Meredith care if I wrote a bad book? Why go out of his way to point it out to people? Maybe he has some psychological problem. Maybe when he was a kid, the cool kids used to call him “fattyfattyboomballatty.” Maybe I should feel bad for Charles Meredith.

But I don’t.

How
The Tornado Ashes Club
swam into his ken I’ll never know. David sent me an e-mail, with the link and the message “any press is good press.”

It’s not “good press” to have your book described as “a slurry of mixed images and tiresome characters, in language as worn out and withered as the sixty-some-odd bar slattern nursing a cigarette and a whiskey sour at a cheap casino.”

The review appeared about three weeks after my book came out. The morning
The Tornado Ashes Club
had first appeared on Amazon, it started out at #253,477 in the sales rankings, between
The Calendar Stones of North Wales
and
The Horseman of Alsace: A Novel of the Franco-Prussian War.
By the time I got out of the shower, it had jumped to #128,980, I think because Aunt Evelyn and my mom bought copies. A pace of 124,000 spots every twenty minutes was solid, but it tapered off after the first leap. For comparison I checked on
Peking,
which Lucy was always raving about. We were in a close duel, so I ordered a copy of mine, bumping myself 2,156 slots.

At the downtown Barnes & Noble there was a “Staff Recommends” shelf. Under a copy of Toni Morrison’s
Beloved,
“Edward” had written, “A sweeping, powerful love story from
one of the all-time best. Full of passionate, evocative prose that veers toward poetry, it touches on all of our most crucial national themes.” When nobody was looking, I swapped in my book—everything still applied.

I never reread my book—huge chunks of it made me cringe —but back home I set it on my coffee table next to a copy of William Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury
. They were both about the same size and shape. I think, asked to choose, an illiterate person would’ve picked mine.

And then Charles Meredith had to prowl in and fling his feces. Doubtless Polly saw that, and she and James cut it out, and put it on their fridge, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

So that night I got rocked at The Colonial Boy, and woke up in an apartment in Southie with the sinewy arm of Liz the bartendress across my chest. I’d started hitting on her, I remembered, because I’d asked her if she liked reading books and she said no.

I squirreled out of her bed, afraid that if I turned on the light to find my sweatshirt I’d wake her up, so I went home freezing and minus a well-loved sweatshirt.

The T across the river was full of hollow-eyed commuters who stared at the ground or read. Some of them read Tim Drew and Pamela McLaughlin and one guy had Nick Boyle’s thick latest. But nobody was reading my book.

The train stalled at Charles/MGH with a mumbled announcement over the speaker. I was cold, and my brain scrunched itself into a painful knot, and my stomach felt foul as if filled with fetid pond water.

My moniker was slapped on a book, but none of my problems had changed. Ghosts of literary suicides danced in my
head—Hemingway and some French guy with a mustache whom I didn’t recognize.

Soon every copy of
The Tornado Ashes Club
would do the slow death march to the remainders table and the bargain bin, and then to Buck-A-Book, and then to the pulpery, to be shredded and boiled down and turned into egg crates. There’d be nothing for me but to keep drinking, and grow fat, and keep working for Jon Sturges until I died.

The train doors snapped open, and some sort of blonde aristocrat woman in a stylish purple trenchcoat dashed on. She sat down across from me, opened her heaving leather handbag, and took out a copy of
Kindness to Birds
by Preston Brooks.

12

Your boss getting shot might sound like a comic dream—for instance, if you work for Donald Trump. But for the hapless Silas Quilter, it’s a nightmare, especially when the cops finger him as the triggerman. The murder is just the starting point in Pete Tarslaw’s debut novel,
The Tornado Ashes Club
. It sends Silas to the arms—and Ford Maverick—of his storyteller grandmother, who leads him on an escape across twenty states as she tells a tale of her own lost lover. The story can get cloying, and Tarslaw’s awfully ambitious—Mexican ranchera music, World War II, and Peruvian vineyards are all crammed in. But he’s done his research (want to know what Tunisian fishermen eat? pages 213–217). And some of the dreamlike descriptions—an Iowa night is described as “a graceful ballet of grass entwined with starlight”—leave you asking for more.
B.

—review of
The Tornado Ashes Club,
published in the December 8, 2007 issue of
Entertainment Weekly
magazine

Anyone who’s paying attention in America can tell you it’s strange which things become famous and popular and why. I like to imagine that, around 800 B.C., somewhere in ancient Greece, a guy, let’s call him Linus, wrote an epic poem. It was pretty good, full of adventures and strange animals and sexy goddesses and five-armed monsters and all the stuff epic audiences go for. Linus started orating it, or whatever they used to do. But somehow, people just liked
The Odyssey
better. No one could explain why. Maybe a particular king or something insisted on the Homer version, and everybody went along. Maybe Homer got there first, or had a better orating voice, or ran a better marketing campaign. But 2800 years later, we’ve all heard of Homer and nobody’s heard of Linus.

You could argue that
The Odyssey
was the better work. More intelligent or poetic, or addressing universal themes—and that’s why it lasted. But I don’t think so. There’s not much evidence that fame and popularity follow any kind of logical pattern. And who can tell these days anyway? The whole thing’s more or less a crap shoot. For every Charles Dickens who catches a break, there’s probably some guy named Bartles Osbrook who was just as good but less lucky. In some alternate universe they gather and read Osbrook’s classic
A Christmas Fable
around the holidays.

There are probably twenty books better than
The Great Gatsby
that we’ve never heard of. The only remaining copies are rotting on the shelves of those crammed used bookstores off country roads where everything smells like sawdust. Nobody’s bothering to read those books. Just because eighty years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave a better interview or had cooler friends, or because he’s made for better biographies in the years after.

If you think I’m wrong, I’d invite you to take a good hard look at what becomes popular. See if it makes any damn sense.

Or consider the example of my own book.
The Tornado Ashes Club
is a case study in the pinball route to fame.

I’ve mostly cobbled this together from gossip and hearsay, but as I understand it, there were four distinct stages.

First Stage:

One of the marketing people at Ortolan Press was an insomniac. He lived out in New Jersey someplace, and when he couldn’t sleep he’d go out to the garage and walk a few miles on a treadmill while clicking around on an old TV. One night he got to watching one of these Christian talk shows, paid programming at 3:30 A.M. Around the office they’d been getting memos about appealing to the evangelical demographic, so he figured he’d see what the deal was. It was the Reverend Gary Claine, one of these tanned guys with the perma-grin. Gary Claine’s whole deal is that he used to play tight end for the University of Oklahoma. He still has an athletic energy—from the pulpit he waves his hands all over the place like he’s bidding at an auction. Anyway, the marketing guy watches Gary Claine tell smiley stories about the Good News. And he hears him advertise his magazine, called
The Way
.
The marketing guy thinks that maybe an ad in
The Way
would be a good angle for selling Christian books. Those seem like the kind of cranks Ortolan’s trying to get at. Maybe they could even send a review copy to the Reverend Gary Claine himself. He jots down a note to himself.

About a month after
The Tornado Ashes Club
comes out, after it’s been panned by Charles Meredith and reviewed nowhere else, and it’s tanking on Amazon, the British bosses at Ortolan call a big meeting. They start chewing everybody out for not doing a better job of reaching “alternative markets.” They open the room up for ideas.

And the marketing guy stands up. Lucy was there, and she heard him tell about his insomnia, and the treadmill, and the Reverend Gary Claine, and
The Way
. Why waste our money on expensive ads in the
Times,
says the marketing guy. These are the customers we’re trying to reach, and we can reach them at cut-rate prices. One of the British bosses nods and says to the marketing guy, “Congratulations, you’ve just saved your job.”

So they take out a full-page ad in
The Way
. Most of the readers of the magazine are lonesome old women, the kind of ladies with nightstands covered with pill bottles. They can’t tell the difference between a full-page ad in
The Way
and the explicit blessing of the Reverend Gary Claine himself. So they send their sons-in-law off to buy them copies.

Meanwhile, the Reverend Gary Claine receives a copy, with the compliments of Ortolan. Now, this part is just speculation, but I think it checks out: the Reverend Gary Claine is one of those ex-football players who resents that people have always treated him like an idiot. He frequently references the
days when he was “lost in sin” back in college. Maybe he even regretted not hitting the books a little harder. So when a Manhattan publishing company sends him a review copy, he’s flattered. He takes it seriously. He’s a salt-of-the-earth Christian, so he doesn’t want to insult the sender. He reads the book, and starts making bland positive remarks about it on his show— “What a loving story of faith—you know, it got me thinking of First Thessalonians 5:8”—that kind of thing.

And slowly my sales numbers start to rise. On Amazon, I drifted into the low thousands.

Second Stage:

Georgina Maddox was a small-town librarian who loved books. “I consider Scout and Jane Eyre and David Copperfield as some of my dearest friends,” she wrote. Georgina herself had never published anything before her essay in
The Atlantic
magazine. Entitled “A Reader’s Request,” it was written in clear schoolmarmy English. You could picture Georgina in a puffy dress, writing it longhand at her kitchen table.

What set Georgina to writing was the state of book reviewing in America. There was too much savagery and bile. Book reviewers, she wrote, “are becoming nothing more than bullies. Like malicious boys pulling the wings off butterflies for cruel laughs, reviewers seem intent on destroying the most fragile and beautiful of all creatures: books.”

She really took aim at Charles Meredith. And she cited his review of me as an example.

You can practically smell the vinegar on Mr. Meredith’s breath as he calls one novel (
The Tornado Ashes Club
by
Pete Tarslaw) “a slurry of mixed images and tiresome characters, in language as worn out and withered as the sixty-some-odd bar slattern nursing a cigarette and a whiskey sour at a cheap casino.” A clever phrase, perhaps, but why attack so viciously a promising young author?