She hadn’t always been this way. She could recall, without too much mental heavy lifting, a time when she’d felt at least neutral about living in this house and in the orbit of her mother, who was pretty much her only extant family member (certainly the only family member she ever saw). She could recall doing the things she supposed most other children did—playing in dirt, looking at pictures—without any accompanying grief or anger, and she knew enough by now to recognize that as unpleasant as her home life and “family” might be, there were endless versions of worse out there in what she had come to understand as the wider world. So what had brought her to this bitter precipice? What had made her normal child-self into the Ruby huddled over her at-home history test on which so much—in her mind, at least—depended, who (literally) counted the days until her departure? The answer was inaccessible. The answer had never been shared with her. The answer was no longer of any concern, only its attendant truth, which she’d figured out years ago and had never once questioned: her mother loathed her, and probably always had.
What was she supposed to do with such information?
Exactly.
Pass her test. Ask Mr. Brown to write a teacher recommendation (for which, with luck, he’d regurgitate this very anecdote about the girl who insisted on being assigned extra work). And then, take her clearly superior brain out from under that canopy of old pineapples and into a world that would at least appreciate her. She had learned not to expect love, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she’d managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother’s presence. Fifteen down. One—please, God, only one—to go.
Jake set the pages down. Mother and daughter, closely confined, somewhat isolated but hardly hermits (mother shops at supermarket, daughter attends high school and has a teacher interested in her welfare), with obvious and extreme tension between them. Okay. Mother is gainfully (if dubiously) employed and keeping a roof over their head and subprime food on the table. Okay. Daughter is ambitious and aiming to leave home and Mom for college. Okay, okay.
As his own writing teacher in his own MFA program had once said to one of the more self-indulgent prose writers in their workshop: “And … so what?”
A plot like mine, Evan Parker had called it. But in fact, was there even such a thing as “a plot like mine”? Greater minds than Jake’s (and even, he was willing to bet, than Evan Parker’s) had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself: The Quest, The Voyage and Return, Coming of Age, Overcoming the Monster, et al. The mother and the daughter in the old clapboard house—well, specifically the daughter in the old clapboard house—looked pretty likely to be a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but compelling as these stories could be, they hardly acted as stunning, surprising, twisting and hurtling stories, so compelling in themselves that they could be immune to bad writing.
Over the years of his teaching career, Jake had sat down with plenty of students who’d possessed an imperfect grasp of their own talent, though the disconnect tended to center on basic writing ability. Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader. Others believed a single detail was enough to render a character memorable, but the detail they chose was always so pedestrian: female characters merely described as “blond,” while for a man “six-pack abs”—He had them! Or he didn’t have them!—were all any reader apparently needed to know. Sometimes a writer set out sentence after sentence as an unvarying chain—noun, verb, prepositional phrase, noun, verb, prepositional phrase—without understanding the teeth-grinding irritation of all that monotony. Sometimes a student got bogged down in their own specific interest or hobby and upchucked his or her personal passion all over the page, either with an overload of less than scintillating detail or some kind of shorthand he or she thought must be sufficient to carry the story: man walks into a NASCAR meet, or woman attends reunion of college sorority friends on exotic isle (which, indeed, was how one particular honeymelon-endowed corpse had ended up on a beach). Sometimes they got lost in their pronouns, and you had to go back, over and over, to figure out who was doing what to whom. Sometimes, amid pages of perfectly serviceable or even better-than-all-right writing … absolutely nothing happened.
But they were student writers; that’s why, presumably, they were here at Ripley and why they were in Jake’s office in Richard Peng Hall. They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently engaged in their lives, or that there wasn’t enough information about NASCAR or the college sorority reunion for him to understand the significance of what was being described (or not described), or that the prose felt heavy or the dialogue meandered or the story itself just made him think so what? … they tended to nod, take notes, perhaps wipe away a tear or two, and then get down to work. The next time he saw them they’d be clutching fresh pages and thanking him for making their work in progress better.
Somehow he didn’t think that was going to be the case here.
Evan Parker could be heard making his leisurely way down the corridor, despite the fact that he was nearly ten minutes late for their appointment. The door was ajar and he entered without knocking, setting his Ripley water bottle down on Jake’s desk before taking the extra chair and angling it, as if the two of them were gathered around a coffee table for a comradely discussion rather than facing each other across a desk with any degree of formality or disparity in (nominal) authority. Jake watched him take from his canvas bag a legal pad, its topmost pages torn raggedly away. This he put on his own lap, and then—just as he had in the conference room—he crossed his arms tightly against his chest and gave his teacher an expression of not entirely benevolent amusement. “Well,” he said, “I’m here.”
Jake nodded. “I’ve been looking again at the excerpt you sent in. You’re quite a good writer.”
He had made up his mind to open with this. The use of the words “quite” and “good” had been thoroughly interrogated, but in the end this he had felt to be the best way forward, and indeed his student seemed ever so slightly disarmed.
“Well, glad to hear that. Especially since, as I said, I’m not at all sure writing can be taught.”
“And yet here you are.” Jake shrugged. “So how can I help?”
Evan Parker laughed. “Well, I could use an agent.”
Jake no longer had an agent, but he did not share this fact.
“There’s an industry day at the end of the session. I’m not sure who’s coming, but we usually have two or three agents and editors.”
“A personal recommendation would probably go even farther. You probably know how hard it is for an outsider to get his work in front of the right people.”
“Well, I’d never tell you connections don’t help, but just remember, no one has ever published a book as a favor. There’s too much at stake, too much money and too much professional liability if things don’t go well. Maybe a personal relationship can get your manuscript into somebody’s hands, but the work has to take it from there. And here’s something else: agents and editors really are looking for good books, and it’s not like the doors are shut to first-time authors. Far from it. For one thing, a first-time author isn’t dragging around disappointing sales numbers from previous books, and readers always want to discover someone new. A new writer’s interesting to agents because he might turn out to be Gillian Flynn or Michael Chabon, and the agent might get to be his agent for all the books he’s going to write, not just this one, so it’s not just income now, it’s income in the future. Believe it or not, you’re actually much better off than somebody who’s connected, if they’ve published a couple of books that weren’t wildly successful.”