The S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, for example, had over 2,400 seats—Jake had looked that up in advance. Two thousand four hundred seats! And as far as he could tell from where he was sitting, every single one of them was occupied. Out there he could make out the bright kelly green of the new paperback’s cover on people’s laps and in their arms. Most of these people had brought their own copies, which he supposed did not bode well for the four thousand copies Elliot Bay was now unpacking at the signing tables out in the lobby, but man it was gratifying to him. When The Invention of Wonder was published nearly fifteen years earlier, he had settled on the I’ll-know-I’ve-made-it fantasy of seeing a stranger reading his book in public, and needless to say, this had never happened. Once, on the subway, he had seen a guy reading a book that looked tantalizingly like his, but when he edged closer, took a seat opposite, and checked it out, he’d discovered it was actually the new Scott Turow, and that had been only the first of several such crushing false alarms. Neither, obviously, had it happened with Reverberations, of which fewer than eight hundred copies had even been sold (and he’d purchased two hundred of them himself as cheap remaindered copies). Now this auditorium was full of living, breathing readers who had paid actual money for their tickets and were here in the enormous space, clutching his book as they leaned forward in their seats and laughing uproariously at everything he said, even the banal stuff about what his “process” was and how he still carried his laptop around in the same leather satchel he’d owned for years.
“Oh my god,” said the woman in the other chair, “I have to tell you, I was on a plane and I was reading the book, and I came to the part—I think you all probably know the part I’m speaking of—and I just, like, gasped! Like, I made a noise! And the flight attendant came over and she said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I said, ‘Oh my god, this book!’ And she asked me what book I was reading, so I showed her, and she started to laugh. She said this has been happening for months, people yelping and gasping in the middle of a flight. It’s like a syndrome. Like: Crib syndrome!”
“Oh, that’s so funny,” said Jake. “I always used to look at what people were reading on planes. It never used to be by me, I can tell you that!”
“But your first novel was a New & Noteworthy in The New York Times.”
“Yes, it was. That was a very great honor. Unfortunately it didn’t translate to people actually going into bookstores and buying it. In fact, I don’t think the book was even in bookstores. I remember my mother telling me they didn’t have it at her local chain store on Long Island. She had to special order it. That’s pretty rough on a Jewish mother whose kid isn’t even a doctor.”
Explosive laughter. The interviewer—her name was Candy and she was some sort of local public figure—doubled over. When she got control of herself, she asked Jake the thoroughly predictable one about how he’d first gotten the idea.
“I don’t think ideas, even great ideas, are all that hard to come by. When people ask me where I get my ideas, my answer is that there are a hundred novels in every day’s issue of The New York Times, and we recycle the paper or use it to line the birdcage. If you are trapped in your own experience you may find it hard to see beyond things that have actually happened to you, and unless you’ve had a life of National Geographic–worthy adventures you’re probably going to think you have nothing to write a novel about. But if you spend even a few minutes with other people’s stories and learn to ask yourself: What if this had happened to me? Or What if this happened to a person completely unlike me? Or In a world that’s different from the world I’m living in? Or What if it happened a little bit differently, under different circumstances? The possibilities are endless. The directions you can go, the characters you can meet along the way, the things you can learn, also endless. I’ve taught in MFA programs, and I can tell you, that’s maybe the most important thing anyone can teach you. Get out of your own head and look around. There are stories growing from trees.”
“Well, okay,” said Candy, “but which tree did you pick this one off of? ’Cause I’m telling you, I read all the time. Seventy-five novels last year, I counted! Well, Goodreads counted.” She smirked at the audience, and the audience obligingly laughed. “And I can’t think of another novel that would have had me making an actual noise on a plane. So how’d you come up with it?”
And here it was: that cold wave of terror descending inside Jake, from the crown of his head, past his grinning mouth and along each limb, down to the end of every finger or toe. Incredibly, he wasn’t yet used to this, although it had been with him, every moment of every day, back through this tour and the tour preceding it, back through the heady months before publication, as his new publisher ramped up the temperature and the book world began to take notice. Back through the writing of the thing itself, which had taken six months of winter and spring in his apartment in Cobleskill, New York, and in his office behind the old front desk at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, hoping none of the guest-writers upstairs would bother him with complaints about the rooms or questions about how to get an agent at William Morris Endeavor, all the way back to that January night when he’d read the obituary of his most memorable student, Evan Parker. He had carried this around with him, every moment of every day, a perpetual threat of permanent harm.
Jake, needless to say, had taken not one single word from those pages he’d read back at Ripley. He hadn’t had them to steal from, for one thing, and if he had he would have thrown them away in order not to look. Even the late Evan Parker, were he capable of reading Crib, would have found it impossible to locate his own language in Jake’s novel, and yet, ever since the moment he’d typed the words “CHAPTER ONE” into his laptop back in Cobleskill he’d been waiting, horribly waiting, for someone who knew the answer to this very question—How’d you come up with it?—to rise to their feet and point their finger in accusation.
Candy wasn’t that person, obviously. Candy didn’t know much about much, and nothing, it was abundantly clear, even to him, about this particular thing. What Candy brought to their conversation was an admirable sense of ease while being stared at by upward of twenty-four hundred human beings, and this was not a quality Jake himself devalued, by any means. Behind her question, though, was clear vapidity. It was just a question. Sometimes a question was just a question.
“Oh, you know,” he finally said, “it’s not actually that interesting a story. It’s actually a little bit embarrassing. I mean, think of the most banal activity you can imagine—I was taking my garbage out to the curb, and this mom from my block happened to drive by with her teenage daughter. The two of them were screaming at each other in their car. Obviously, you know, having a moment, like no other mother and teenage daughter has ever had.”