“I’m aware of that,” Evan Parker said caustically.
“Well, can you tell us something about the novel you’d like to write?”
He looked instantly suspicious. “What kind of ‘something’?”
“Well, the setting, for instance. The characters? Or a general sense of the plot. Do you have a plot in mind?”
“I do,” said Parker, with now overflowing hostility. “I prefer not to discuss it.” He looked around. “In this setting.”
Even without looking at any of them directly, Jake could feel the reaction. Everyone seemed to be at the same impasse, but only he was expected to respond to it.
“I suppose,” Jake said, “that what we’d need to know, then, is how I—how this class—can best help you improve as a writer.”
“Oh,” said Evan Parker/Parker Evan, “I’m not really looking to improve. I’m a very good writer, and my novel is well on track. And actually, if I’m being honest about it, I’m not even sure writing can even be taught. I mean, even by the best teacher.”
Jake noted the wave of dismay circling the seminar table. More than one of his new students, more likely than not, were considering his wasted tuition money.
“Well, I’d obviously disagree with that,” he said, trying for a laugh.
“I certainly hope so!” said the man from Cape Cod.
“I’m curious,” said the woman to Jake’s right, who was writing a “fictionalized memoir” about her childhood in suburban Cleveland, “why would you come to an MFA program if you don’t think writing can be taught? Like, why not just go and write your book on your own?”
“Well”—Evan Parker/Parker Evan shrugged—“I’m not against this kind of thing, obviously. The jury’s out on whether it works, that’s all. I’m already writing my book, and I know how good it is. But I figured, even if the program itself doesn’t actually help me, I wouldn’t say no to the degree. More letters after your name, that never hurts, right? And there’s a chance I could get an agent out of it.”
For a long moment, no one spoke. More than a few of the students seemed newly distracted by the stapled writing samples before them. Finally, Jake said: “I’m glad to hear you’re well along on your project, and I hope we can be a resource for you, and a support system. One thing we do know is that writers have always helped other writers, whether or not they’re in a formal program together. We all understand that writing is a solitary activity. We do our work in private—no conference calls or brainstorming meetings, no team-building exercises, just us in a room, alone. Maybe that’s why our tradition of sharing our work with fellow writers has evolved the way it has. There’ve always been groups of us coming together, reading work aloud or sharing manuscripts. And not even just for the company or the sense of community, but because we actually need other eyes on our writing. We need to know what’s working and, even more important, what’s not working, and most of the time we can’t trust ourselves to know. No matter how successful an author is, by whatever metric you measure success, I’m willing to bet they have a reader they trust who sees the work before the agent or publisher does. And just to add a layer of practicality to this, we now have a publishing industry in which the traditional role of ‘editor’ is diminished. Today, editors want a book that can go straight into production, or as close to that as possible, so if you think Maxwell Perkins is waiting for your manuscript-in-progress to arrive on his desk, so he can roll up his sleeves and transform it into The Great Gatsby, that hasn’t been true for a long time.”
He saw, to his sadness but not his surprise, that the name “Maxwell Perkins” was not familiar to them.
“So in other words, if we’re wise we’ll seek out those readers and invite them into our process, which is what we’re all doing here at Ripley. You can make that as formal or informal as you like, but I think our role in this group is to add what we can to the work of our fellow writers, and open ourselves to their guidance as much as possible. And that includes me, by the way. I don’t plan on taking up the class’s time with my own work, but I do expect to learn a great deal from the writers in this room, both from the work you’re doing on your own projects and from the eyes and ears and insights you bring to your classmates’ work.”
Evan Parker/Parker Evan had not stopped grinning once during this semi-impassioned speech. Now he added a head shake to underscore his great amusement. “I’m happy to give my opinion on everyone’s writing,” he said. “But don’t expect me to change what I’m doing for anyone else’s eyes or ears or noses, for that matter. I know what I’ve got here. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet, no matter how lousy a writer he is, who could mess up a plot like mine. And that’s about all I’m going to say.”
And with that he folded his arms and shut tight his mouth, as if to ensure that no further morsel of his wisdom might slip past his lips. The great novel underway from Evan Parker/Parker Evan was safe from the lesser eyes, ears, and noses of the Ripley Symposia’s first-year prose fiction workshop.
CHAPTER FOUR
A Sure Thing
The mother and the daughter in the old house: that was his writing sample. And if ever a work of prose pointed less to a stupendous, surefire, can’t-douse-its-fire plot it could only be something along the lines of an exposé on the drying of paint. Jake took extra time with the piece before his first one-on-one meeting with its author, just to make sure he wasn’t missing a buried Raiders of the Lost Ark springboard or the seeds of some epic Lord of the Rings quest, but if they were there, in the quotidian descriptions of the daughter’s homework practices, or the mother’s way of cooking creamed corn from a can, or the descriptions of the house itself, Jake couldn’t see it.
At the same time, it sort of annoyed him to note that the writing itself wasn’t terrible. Evan Parker—and Evan Parker he would be, unless and until he actually succeeded in publishing his threatened masterwork and requiring a privacy-saving pen name—might have dwelt upon his supposedly spectacular plot in the workshop but Jake’s obnoxious student had produced eight pages of entirely inoffensive sentences without obvious defects or even the usual writerly indulgences. The bald fact of it was: this asshole appeared to be a natural writer with the kind of relaxed and appreciative relationship with language even those writing programs far higher up the prestige scale than Ripley’s were incapable of teaching, and which Jake himself had never once imparted to a student (as he, himself, had never once received it from a teacher). Parker wrote with an eye for detail and an ear for the way the words wove into sequence. He conjured his two apparent protagonists (a mother named Diandra and her teenage daughter, Ruby) and their home, a very old house in some unnamed part of the country where snow was general in winter, with an economy of description that somehow conveyed these people in their setting, as well as the obvious and even alarming level of tension between them. Ruby, the daughter, was studious and sullen, and she came up out of the page as a closely observed and even textured character. Diandra, the mother, was a less defined but heavy presence at the edges of the daughter’s perspective, as Jake supposed one might expect in a capacious old house with only two people in it. But even at opposite ends of the home they shared, their mutual loathing was radiant.
He had been through the piece twice, already; once a few nights earlier in the course of his all-nighter, and again the night after his first class, when sheer curiosity had driven him back to the folders, hoping to learn a bit more about this jerk. When Parker made such sensational claims for his plot Jake had thought inevitably of that body discovered in the sand, aggressively decaying while still illogically in possession of “honeymelon” breasts, and he’d been more than a little surprised to discover that this memorable incongruity had sprung from the fertile mind of his student Chris, a hospital administrator from Roanoke and the mother of three daughters. A few moments later, when he realized that Evan Parker was the author of these particular pages—well written, to be sure, but utterly devoid of any plot, let alone a plot so scintillating even a “lousy writer” couldn’t mess it up—Jake had wanted to laugh.