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

our guest-writers, and see they have what they need to do their work. And of course to support one another, as writers.”

Jake thought, even as he said this, of all the times he had said it in the past, or said something like it, and when he’d said it the people he’d said it to always nodded in agreement, because they, too, were writers, and writers understood the power of their commonalities. That had always been true. Except for right this minute. And, now it dawned on him, one other time.

Then the guy folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at Jake, and the final part of the connection snapped into place.

Evan Parker. From Ripley. The one with the story.

Now he understood why, throughout this encounter, his brain had felt like it was circling back on itself, why his thoughts had been looping around and around an as yet unspecified thing. No, he had never met this particular asshole until a couple of days ago, but did that mean he wasn’t familiar to Jake? He was familiar. Hugely familiar.

Not that he’d spent the past couple of years ruminating on that asshole, because what writer of any degree of professional success, not just Jake’s own—would want to dwell on a first-time writer who’d somehow managed to pull the lever on the slot machine of spectacular stories at exactly the right moment, with his very first dime, no less, sending an utterly unearned jackpot of success shuddering into his lap? Always, when Evan Parker came drifting through Jake’s thoughts, it was with the usual surge of envy, the usual bitterness at the unfairness of it all, and then the brief observation that the book itself had not yet—to his knowledge, and it would obviously have been to his knowledge—reached actual publication, which might have meant that Jake’s former student had underestimated his own ability to get the thing finished, but he took no great comfort in that. The story, as its author himself had pointed out, was a silver bullet, and whenever the book did emerge it would be successful, and its author also successful beyond his (or, more painfully, Jake’s) wildest dreams.

Now, in his little office at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, that person, Evan Parker, once again returned to him, and so sharply it was as if he too had entered the little room and was standing just behind his Californian counterpart.

The guy was still talking—no, raging. He had moved on from his fellow guest-writers, on from the Adlon and the food and the town of Sharon Springs. Now Jake was hearing about an “East Coast agent” who’d actually suggested he pay somebody, out of his own money, to guide additional work on his novel before resubmitting it (Wasn’t that what editors were for? Or agents for that matter?) and the film scout he’d met at a party who’d told him to think about adding a female character to his story (Because men didn’t read books or go to movies?) or the assholes at MacDowell and Yaddo who’d rejected him for residencies (Obviously they favored “artistes” who were hoping to sell ten copies of their book-length poems!) and the losers typing away at every single table in every single coffee shop in Southern California, who thought they were God’s gift, and the world was obviously waiting for their short story collection or their screenplay or their novel …

“Actually,” Jake heard himself say, “I’m the author of two novels myself.”

“Of course you are.” The guy shook his head. “Anybody can be a writer.”

He turned and stalked out of the room, leaving his folksy wicker basket behind him.

Jake listened to the guest (guest-writer!) as he clomped up the stairs, and then to the silence filling the wake of that, and again he wondered what he had done, what terrible thing, to merit the company of people like this, let alone their scorn. All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him. He had been more than willing to do the apprenticeship and the work. He had been humble with his teachers and respectful of his peers. He had acceded to the editorial notes of his agent (when he’d had one) and bowed to the red pencil of his editor (when he’d had one) without complaint. He had supported the other writers he’d known and admired (even the ones he hadn’t particularly admired) by attending their readings and actually purchasing their books (in hardcover! at independent bookstores!) and he had acquitted himself as the best teacher, mentor, cheerleader, and editor that he’d known how to be, despite the (to be frank) utter hopelessness of most of the writing he was given to work with. And where had he arrived, for all of that? He was a deck attendant on the Titanic, moving the chairs around with fifteen ungifted prose writers while somehow persuading them that additional work would help them improve. He was a majordomo at an old hotel in upstate New York, pretending that the “guest-writers” upstairs were no different than the Yaddo fellows an hour to the north. I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests. Gives them something real to aspire to.

But no guest-writer had ever acknowledged Jake’s professional achievements, let alone drawn inspiration from his success in the field they supposedly hoped to enter. Not once in three years. He was as invisible to them as he had become to everyone else.

Because he was a failed writer.

Jake gasped when the words came to him. It was, unbelievably, the very first time this truth had ever broken through.

But … but … the words came spinning through his head, unstoppable and absurd: The New York Times New & Noteworthy! “A writer to watch” according to Poets & Writers! The best MFA program in the country! That time he had walked into a Barnes & Noble in Stamford, Connecticut, and seen The Invention