The Plot by Jean Korelitz (digital book reader txt) 📗

all only as good as the work we’re doing now. Which is why I’d like to focus on what you’re writing. And where it might be going.”

To his surprise, Evan threw back his head and laughed. Jake looked up at the clock over the doorway. Four thirty. The meeting was half over.

“You want the plot, don’t you?”

“What?”

“Oh, please. I told you I had something great I was working on. You want to know what it is. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m a writer,” Jake told him. He was doing everything he could to remove the offense from his voice. “But right now I’m a teacher, and as a teacher I’m trying to help you write the book you want to write. If you don’t want to say more about the story, we can still do some work on the excerpt you submitted, but without knowing how that’s going to connect, ultimately, within the context of a larger story, I’m going to be at a disadvantage.”

Not that it makes any difference to me, he added silently. It’s not as if I give a fuck.

The blond asshole in his office said nothing.

“The excerpt,” Jake tried. “It’s part of the novel you mentioned?”

Evan Parker seemed to sit with this very innocuous question for far longer than it warranted. Then he nodded. His thick blond wedge of hair nearly obscured one eye. “From an early chapter.”

“Well, I like the detail. The frozen pizza and the history teacher and the psychic help line. I get a stronger sense of who the daughter is than the mother from these pages, but that’s not a problem, necessarily. And of course I don’t know what decisions you’re making about narrative perspective. Right now it’s the daughter, obviously. Ruby. Are we going to stay with Ruby all through the novel?”

Again, that hardly warranted pause. “No. And yes.”

Jake nodded, as if that made sense.

Parker said: “It’s just … I didn’t want to, you know, give it all away in that room. This story I’m writing, it’s like, a sure thing. You understand?”

Jake stared at him. He wanted desperately to laugh. “I don’t think I do, actually. A sure thing for what?”

Evan sat forward. He took his Ripley water bottle and unscrewed the top, and he tipped it back into his mouth. Then he folded his arms again and said, almost with regret: “This story will be read by everybody. It will make a fortune. It will be made into a movie, probably by somebody really important, like an A-list director. It will get all the brass rings, you know what I mean?”

Jake, now truly lost for words, feared that he did.

“Like, Oprah will pick it for her book thing. It will be talked about on TV shows. TV shows where they don’t usually talk about books. Every book club. Every blogger. Every everything I don’t even know about. This book, there’s no way it can fail.”

That was too much. That broke the spell.

“Anything can fail. In the book world? Anything.”

“Not this.”

“Look,” said Jake. “Evan? Is it okay if I call you that?”

Evan shrugged. He seemed suddenly tired, as if this declaration of his greatness had exhausted him.

“Evan, I love that you believe in what you’re doing. It’s how I hope all of your classmates feel, or will eventually feel, about their work. And even if a lot of the … the brass rings you’ve mentioned just now are very, very unlikely to happen, because there are a lot of great stories out there and they’re being published all the time, and there’s a lot of competition. But there are so many other ways to measure the success of a work of art, ways that aren’t connected to Oprah or movie directors. I’d like to see lots of good things happen to your novel, but before any of that you need to write the best possible version of it. I do have some thoughts about that, based on the little you’ve submitted, but I have to be honest: what I’m seeing in the actual pages I’ve read is a quieter kind of book, I mean, not one that screams A-list directors and bestseller, necessarily, but a potentially very good novel! The mother and the daughter, living together, maybe not getting along so well. I’m rooting for the daughter already. I want her to succeed. I want her to get away if that’s what she wants. I want to find out what’s at the root of it all, why her mother seems to hate her, if in fact her mother does hate her—teenagers are maybe not the most reliable guides on the subject of their parents. But these are all very exciting foundations for a novel, and I guess what I don’t understand is why you’re holding out for such extreme benchmarks of validation. Won’t it be enough to write a good first novel, and—I mean, let’s throw in a couple of goals we have less control over—find an agent who believes in you and your future, and even a publisher willing to take a chance on your work? That’s going to be a lot! Why put yourself in a position where, I don’t know, it will have failed if the director for the movie is B-list instead of A-list.”

For another long moment, maddeningly long, Evan did not respond. Jake was on the point of saying something else, just to cut the sheer discomfort, even if it meant ending the conference early, because what progress were they actually making, the two of them? They hadn’t even begun to look at the actual writing, let alone to talk about some of the more macro issues going forward. And also the dude was a narcissistic jerkoff of the first degree, this was now undeniable. Probably, even if he did manage to finish his tale of a smart girl growing up in an old house with her mother, the best it could likely aspire to was the same degree of literary notice Jake himself