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 FIVE
Exile
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 passing year. Jake was not optimistic about its survival, or frankly his own while continuing to drive it in winter, but he was even less optimistic about his ability to afford another car.
The Ripley Symposia had laid off its teaching staff in 2013, abruptly and by means of a tersely worded email. Then, less than a month after that, the program had managed to reconstitute itself as an even lower-residency, in fact an entirely-online-no-residency-at-all program, swapping video conferencing for the now nostalgic charms of Richard Peng Hall. Jake, along with most of his colleagues, had been rehired, which was a definite salve to his sense of self-worth, but the new contract Ripley offered him fell well short of sustaining even his modest New York City existence.
And so, in the absence of other options, he had been forced to consider the dreadful prospect of leaving the center of the literary world.
What was out there, in 2013, for a writer whose two tiny patches of real estate on the great cumulative shelf of American fiction were being left farther and farther behind with each passing year? Jake had sent out fifty résumés, signed up for all of the online services promising to spread the good news of his talents to prospective employers everywhere, and gotten back in touch with every single person he could bear to see, letting them know he was available. He went in for an interview at Baruch, but the program administrator couldn’t stop himself from mentioning that one of their own recent graduates, whose first novel was about to come out from FSG, had also applied for the position. He’d chased down a former girlfriend who now worked for a wildly successful subsidy publisher based in Houston, but after twenty minutes of forced reminiscences and cute stories about her twin toddlers, he just couldn’t bring himself to ask about a job. He even went back to Fantastic Fictions, but the agency had been sold and was now a tiny part of a new entity called Sci/Spec, and neither of his two original bosses seemed to have survived the transition.
Finally, and with a sense of utter defeat, he did what he knew others had done, and created a website touting his own editorial skills as the author of two well-received literary novels and a longtime faculty member at one of the country’s best low-residency MFA programs. And then he waited.
Slowly, came the nibbles. What was Jake’s “success rate”? (Jake responded with a lengthy exploration of what the term “success” might mean to an artist. He never heard back from that particular correspondent.) Did Mr. Bonner work with Indie Authors? (He immediately wrote: Yes! After which that correspondent also disappeared.) What were his feelings on anthropomorphism in YA fiction? (They were positive! Jake emailed back. What else was he going to say?) Would he be willing to do a “sample edit” of fifty pages of a work-in-progress, so the writer could judge whether there was value in continuing? (Jake took a deep breath and wrote: No. But he would agree to a special fee discount of fifty percent for the first two hours, which ought to be enough for each of them to make a decision on whether or not to work together.)
Naturally, this person became his first client.
The writing he encountered in his new role of online editor, coach, and consultant (that marvelously malleable word) made the least of his Ripley students seem like Hemingway. Again and again he urged his new correspondents to check their spelling, keep track of their characters’ names, and give at least a tiny bit of thought to what basic ideas their work should convey, before they typed those thrilling words: THE END. Some of them listened. Others seemed somehow to believe that the act of hiring a professional writer magically rendered their own writing “professional.” What surprised him most, however, was that his new clients, far more than even the least gifted of his Ripley students, seemed to regard publication not as the magical portal it had always represented to him and to every other writer he admired (and envied), but as a purely transactional act. Once, in an early email exchange with an elderly woman in Florida who hoped to complete a second tranche of her memoir, he had politely complimented her on the recent publication of part one (The Windy River: My Childhood in Pennsylvania). That author, to her credit, had bluntly declined his flattery. “Oh please,” she’d responded, “anybody can publish a book. You just write a check.”