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

had too briefly enjoyed, and he was completely available to describe, if asked to do so, how profoundly painful that experience, or at least its aftermath, had been. So if Evan Parker/Parker Evan wanted to be the author of the next The Invention of Wonder, he was welcome to it. Jake himself would fashion a garland of laurels for him and throw him a party, and pass along the sad, sad advice his own MFA advisor had once tried to give him: You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.

“It’s not going to fail,” Jake heard Evan say. Then he said: “Listen.”

And then he spoke. He spoke and spoke, or more precisely, he told and told. And as he told it Jake felt both of those indelible women enter the room and stand bleakly on either side of the doorway, as if daring the two men to try to escape them. Jake had no thought of escape. He had no thought of anything but this story, which was none of the great plots—Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth (not really Rebirth), Overcoming the Monster (not really Overcoming the Monster). It was something new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people. That was going to be, as his terrible student had so recently said, every book group, every blogger, every person out there in the vast archipelago of publishing and book reviewing, every celebrity with a bespoke book club of her own, every reader, everywhere. The breadth of it, the wallop of it, this out-of-nowhere and outrageous story. When his student finished talking, Jake wanted to hang his head, but he couldn’t show what he felt, the horror of what he felt, to the justly arrogant asshole who would one day, he now felt certain, become Parker Evan, the pseudonymous author of this stunning first novel, catapulted onto the top of the New York Times bestseller list via viral word of mouth. He couldn’t. So he nodded and made some suggestions about how to gradually bring the mother’s character into the foreground, and a couple of ways to consider developing and adapting the narrative perspective and the voice—all pointless, all thoroughly irrelevant. Evan Parker had been entirely correct: the worst writer on the planet could not mess up a plot like this. And Evan Parker could write.

After he’d gone, Jake went to the window and watched his student walk away in the direction of the dining hall, which was on the far side of a small grove of pine trees. Those trees, he’d never noticed, formed a kind of opaque obstacle through which the lights of the campus buildings on the far side could barely be seen, and yet everyone went through them instead of around, every single time. Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Words he had known forever, but never, until this moment, truly understood.

His own pathway had been lost a long time ago, and there was no chance, no chance at all, of finding it again. The novel-in-progress on his laptop was not a novel, and it was hardly in progress. And any ideas he might have had for another story would, from this afternoon on, suffer the fatal impact of not being the story he had just been told, in his temporary cinder-block office in a third-rate MFA program that nobody—not even its own faculty—took seriously. The story he had just been told, that was the only story. And Jake knew that everything the future Parker Evan had bragged about his novel’s future was absolutely going to happen. Absolutely. There would be a battle to publish it, and then more battles to publish it all around the world, and another battle to option it for film. Oprah Winfrey would hold it up to the cameras, and you would see it on the table closest to the front door of every bookstore you walked into, likely for years to come. Everyone he knew was going to read it. Every writer he’d competed with in college and envied in graduate school, every woman he’d slept with (admittedly not many), every student he’d ever taught, every Ripley colleague and every one of his former teachers, and his own mother and father who never even read books, who’d had to force themselves to read The Invention of Wonder (if, indeed, they actually had read it—he’d never made them prove it), not to mention those two jokers at Fantastic Fictions who had missed a chance to represent a novel that became a Sandra Bullock movie. Not to mention Sandra Bullock herself. Every last one of them would buy it and borrow it and download it and lend it and listen to it and gift it and receive it, the book this arrogant, piece of shit, undeserving, son of a bitch Parker Evan was writing. That fucking asshole, Jake thought, and immediately he was assailed by the fact that “fucking asshole” was a pathetic choice for someone of his supposed ability when it came to wielding words. But it was all he could come up with at that particular moment.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FIVEExile

Two and a half years later, Jacob Finch Bonner—author of The Invention of Wonder and former faculty member at the at least respectable low-residency Ripley Symposia—edged his elderly Prius into the icy lot behind the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts in Sharon Springs, New York. The Prius, never particularly robust, was trudging through its third January in this area west of Albany (known, somewhat whimsically, as “The Leatherstocking Region”) and its ability to climb even gentle inclines in snow—the hill leading to the Adlon was anything but gentle—had diminished with each