How I Became a Famous Novelist Read online

  Polly was brilliant.

  If I could’ve stayed in college forever, everything would’ve been fine. Sometimes, on dull afternoons, I’d duck down to the Talbot Reading Room, a wood-paneled chamber in the library, full of voluptuous leather chairs. I’d take out Stackpool of Granby College, a nineteenth-century boy’s book set at my very institution. It tells the story of Stackpool, who after a few missteps wins the big game for the Granby eleven in between innocent hijinks and courting visits to the daughter of a local farmer. Here’s Stackpool’s assessment of College Days:

  Bless the blissful idyll! Bless the companionable pipe, and the low arm-chair, by now well-broken for comfort. Bless evenings among that hearty fellowship, reading the old volumes and filling the head with wonders. Bless days free to wander in the scholar’s revelry, before the cares and labors of the world press down upon the brow. Bless those days before the summons of manhood must be answered, and one may linger for a fading hour as a carefree youth.

  Exactly. I’d fall asleep and dream of Polly.

  Stackpool ended his college career carried off the field in triumph. I was not so lucky.

  I should have known. The signs were everywhere. I even saw a test prep book in her room once. She claimed it was her roommate’s. And I guess I just wanted to believe her.

  Polly Pawson was cheating on me. With the LSAT. The whole time she was secretly working on her law school applications. Those times when she told me she was taking a second nap—a second nap! Think of how I loved her!—she was working.

  She hid her law school acceptances from me until graduation day. And then she broke up with me. I pleaded. I told her about my plans for us (conning a wealthy dowager) and she retorted that they weren’t “realistic.” It was awful. There were hysterics and there would’ve been worse hysterics if I hadn’t been so hung over. I swore at her before vomiting on the granite steps of Prendil Hall.

  So I was shoved, bloodied, into adulthood.

  My friend Lucy told me to get a job like hers. She became an assistant at Ortolan Press in Manhattan. But I knew they’d find some twisted assignment like making me edit textbooks. The last thing I needed was for the universe to impose a Twilight Zone ironic twist.

  Anyway, that summer I decided to stop reading, because of the worst book I ever read.

  The Worst Book I Ever Read

  During the Dark Period, right after graduation, I loafed around the Granby campus, sleeping on a friend’s futon, working at a sandwich place called Stackers. If you ate at Stackers that summer you should know that I rarely washed my hands.

  Worried about my condition, my mom paid me a visit. She gave me a copy of The Chronicles of Esteban, which her lesbian sister had told her was inspiring. It said “a touching, uplifting narrative of love, pain and healing” right on the cover. Sounded like just what I needed.

  Wrong. Here’s the plot of The Chronicles of Esteban. As his ten-year-old daughter lies in a hospital bed, dying of leukemia, Douglas entertains her by telling a story of his own invention. It’s about a shipwrecked sailor from the Spanish Armada, Esteban, who’s stranded in Ireland.

  The daughter gets sicker and sicker. Meanwhile Douglas continues the story, in which Esteban gets sick. Esteban is helped along by kindly spirits and fishermen full of folk sayings. He searches Ireland for a mystical spring that’s been blessed by either Saint Patrick or some leprechauns, depending on who he asks. All of Douglas’s characters talk in a ludicrous brogue, but they all agree that there’s a spring somewhere with healing powers.

  Here’s the last paragraph of The Chronicles of Esteban. Douglas is talking to his daughter:

  “There, beside the cool and clear and dark, the placid waters, Esteban raised his hand. Trembling. He grasped at the thin mist as though he might capture it in his palm like a butterfly.” Douglas paused. And he knew, in the silence, that the strained, timid breathing that had been to him like a second heartbeat, that faint and fickle dream of love and life, was gone. The moonlight illuminated the unforgiving steel of the respirator and cast its pale light across the bed. But Douglas wouldn’t look, knew he couldn’t look, not until he finished his tale. And so he continued, summoning everything within him. Memories and hands and remembered laughter he called upon now, to keep his voice steady. So he could finish his story, into the still air. “Esteban bowed before the waters, the sacred waters he had seen in visions. The waters that promised to heal. To restore. To give. He dipped his face, closing his eyes as his lips touched. And he drank.”

  I read that last section while I was adding bacon to a Stackers Meat Combo. In furious disbelief, I almost dropped the book into the vat of spicy southwest sauce.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” I shouted, alarming several customers.

  It wasn’t that big of a deal at the time. I stopped reading. Whatever. The tide had already been turning me toward TV for a while.

  *

  At the end of the summer I found the EssayAides job on Monster.com. Jon Sturges was impressed by my Granby degree and my shallow but convincing erudition. In a practice test, I turned a Korean high schooler’s dense babble into a tidy five paragraphs about how her pet snail taught her to love biology.

  Now here was Hoshi Tanaka. A core of earnestness runs through all four paragraphs of Tanaka’s work. You can tell he means what he says, whatever that may be.

  Hoshi did manage to get across that he worked in the auto industry and this had taught him something or another. So I made up a story where Hoshi learned about how important cars were from an aging mechanic. The mechanic took him into the shop and showed him how all the pieces had to fit together just so. It was a nice moment, ending with a grease-stained handshake. This, I’d have Hoshi conclude, was a good metaphor for running a company.

  This had all the elements of a tight business school essay. There was a vague metaphor, a sense of respect, a mentor figure, evidence that the applicant didn’t think it was all about money, and creative thinking (but not too creative). It sounded plausibly Japanese. Pleased with myself, I decided to knock off for lunch.

  For lunch I favored Sree’s USA Nepal Food Fun, located in a strip mall across a four-lane highway from the Hamilton. Trying to cross without being killed was the most invigorating part of my day. This was in January, too, so there was the obstacle of melting snowpiles to add to the challenge. The thrill made Sree’s feel extra-relaxing, like sitting on the beach of a remote island surrounded by sharks.

  Sree’s was decorated with Nepalese posters for the movie Ghostbusters. Sree loved Ghostbusters, and he liked me. So, solid guy.

  “Hello! Pete.”

  “Hi, Sree.”

  “Did you see Conan O’Brien show last night?”

  “No.”

  Sree heaved with silent laughs. “Oh! He had a comedy who talked about women’s thighs. Oh!”

  This may not have been the conversation we had that day, but it’s the kind of conversation we had. Actually, I think that day he was in the back, setting traps for an animal of some kind, so I ordered from his wife who was shaped like a squash. I got the Nepalese Fish Fry, which was fish sticks with some sort of pineapple sauce smeared on top, $3.99.

  The only other regular was there. He was a lopsided old man with chapped lips who always wore a New England Patriots parka, ate a Curry Hamburger, and drank a Bud Light. When he finished his food, he would saunter over to me. He would tell me about his daughter, who lived in Arizona, and how when she was a little girl she could sing like Judy Garland. Then he would start alluding to terrible things he’d done as a Marine in Korea.

  Hearing him out was the closest thing I did to charity, but today I didn’t want to deal. So to keep him away, I’d brought Hobart’s Sunday New York Times along with me. I ate hunched over the magazine. I stared at the ads for houses in the back, sprawling Gothic castles in places called Bass Harbor and Elm Neck, and wondered how I would get the requisite 3.5 million dollars. I flipped through an article about the next generation of kitchen designers.<
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  Turning the page, I saw a full-page photograph that captivated me.

  It was black-and-white, and this is what it showed: in front of the shattered window of a discount electronics store, the mystery novelist Pamela McLaughlin was squatting, clutching a notebook. She was leaning over the chalk outline of a body. Her tube top was pulled tight over her fulsome cleavage by the weight of a pistol in her shoulder holster, and she stared grimly at the camera. Next to the chalk outline lay a book. Unclear what book, but you don’t have to be the steel-willed and firm-bodied, half-Vietnamese, half-Cuban crime reporter/freelance investigator Trang Martinez to realize that’s an important clue.

  It was part of one of those photo essays they have sometimes. This one was called Best Sellers, and it was all portraits of writers who were currently on the bestseller list.

  The Pamela McLaughlin photo suggested an editorial message, like “readers are America’s real victims.” You might agree, if you read Pamela McLaughlin’s latest, Fashion Victims, wherein Trang penetrates the lingerie industry in a desperate ploy to stop a serial killer who targets makers of bridal wear. For one regrettable chapter, Trang poses as a pre-op transvestite to lure a depraved leather magnate into an unwitting confession. The tagline on the paperback was Blood is the new pink.

  I took a bite of fish, and with a mouthful of saccharine sauce turned my attention to the opposite page: the sunglassed eyes of Nick Boyle, my beloved author of action thrillers, gleamed against the light. Nick Boyle was wearing a wind-breaker, and a baseball hat that said “USS Hornet—CV-12.” Framed against the sky, ocean spraying behind him, he was at the helm of a hulking World War II amphibious landing craft. True Nick Boyle fans wouldn’t call it a landing craft, of course. They’d identify it as an LCT Mk-5 or whatever, because you’ll find his books baffling if you can’t keep track of different pieces of military hardware.

  Nick Boyle has the smushed-up face of a bullfrog. His cheek-skin could be stretched into a full yard of normal face. I counted twenty-six folds of faceflesh, and eight isolated bulges. But he was grimacing with vindictive American anger. And he pulled it off. He looked ready to start setting wrong things right with the business end of a 20mm machine gun.

  The eyes of Nick Boyle, who’d given me so much weapons-related entertainment, accused me of civilian weakness. He looked at me with revulsion, knowing I was unworthy to stand beside him in the crush of battle. He looked at me as though the best thing I could do was get the hell out of his way, so he could launch armor-piercing shells and win freedom for pantywaists who didn’t know what to do with it. Later, at some salty bar where war banners hung, he and his comrades would mutter grimly over bourbon and nod at each other’s bloodstained shirts.

  I took a sip of Nepalese nut soda and turned the page.

  Next was Josh Holt Cready. He was done up like a Civil War tintype. Clever enough, although it looked like those oldtimey photos lame families get at amusement parks. Josh Holt Cready was the precocious author of Manassas, a novel about a precocious author named Josh Holt Cready who retraces the steps of his ancestor who fought for the Union and died at Cold Harbor. Writing a novel about the Civil War is lazy. Brother against brother, battles in peach orchards and wheat fields, all those Biblical names, the poignant geography, Abe Lincoln and slavery hanging over everything. There’s so much built-in pathos, it writes itself.

  But being lazy myself, I couldn’t fault Josh Holt Cready for cheating. So I didn’t hate him. Not even when his book first hit the bestseller list. Or when awestruck profiles of the fresh-out-of-Yale prodigy started cropping up everywhere. I certainly didn’t hate him when Entertainment Weekly ran a three-page feature and talked about him as though you were some kind of crazed nihilist if you failed to be floored by his brilliance. I didn’t hate him when his smarmy wide eyes stared out at Ann Curry on the Today show while I tried to get through a bowl of Froot Loops. And I didn’t hate him when he was briefly linked to Scarlett Johansson. Or when Sean Penn signed on to play Grant in the Manassas movie, to be directed by Tim Robbins.

  In a burst of not-hatred I turned the page so fast I gave myself a paper cut.

  There was Tim Drew, he of The Darwin Enigma, posed with his arms folded, in a natural history museum, in front of a Victorian phrenology model.

  Turning the page again, I was confronted by a man of about sixty. In contrast to Nick Boyle, the skin on this face was stretched tight around the skull like a drumhead. Two thin lines of beard converged on his chin into a vulpine point. He was sitting on a park bench, shot in dreary overcast gray. Along his arms and legs, birds were perched. Different kinds and sizes of birds. One nestled in the lap of his corduroy pants.

  The picture, like all those in the Best Sellers series, was identified only by the author’s name and his current bestselling book: “Preston Brooks, Kindness to Birds.” This was just too much, the old bastard sitting there with birds on his arms. I smushed some fish rind on his face, threw him in the garbage, and said good-bye to Sree.

  It’s likely I never would’ve thought about Preston Brooks again if it wasn’t for an e-mail that I read when I got back to my desk.

  2

  FROM: [email protected]

  TO: undisclosed recipients

  RE: announcing …

  Hello all—

  Sorry for the mass e-mail, but not sure when I’ll see some of you, and wanted to give you the news. It’s been a year and a half since I first met James. Back then I thought he was the only good thing about DC:) Last weekend we went up to the Shenandoah Valley, blankets, hot chocolate, lovely B&B. James played me a song on the piano (I know, almost too cheesy, right?) and—you know what’s coming—WE’RE GETTING MARRIED! So weird even to type it, but I’m giddy.

  Okay, so planning time, guys—wedding is a year from April. I know it’s a long way off, but now you’re committed! That’s the only time we can get the whole James clan in from Australia. And it’ll be cherry blossoms, Virginia spring—the works! Plus all of you are coming! OF COURSE you’re all coming. Mark those calendars. Big drunk wedding, cheesy band, crazy relatives, the whole deal.

  Anyways, drop me a line, let me know what’s happening. I’m still doing diligence (and avoiding office politics!) at Mintz Cohen. Probably get a chance to see you New York folks a bit this spring, and also hoping to get back to Granby and show James all the places I puked. You guys ALL have to call and fill me in!

  Cheers,

  Polly P.

  Polly Pawson

  Associate

  Mintz Cohen Condon Keane

  Washington, D.C.

  —E-mail sent to Pete Tarslaw

  Now, I’m not saying I’m blameless in all this—far from it. But read that e-mail. Start with the address—I don’t care if “pollypawson” and “ppawson” and “pawsonpolly” were all taken, “pollypizzazz” is unacceptable.

  Imagine reading that e-mail like I did, after everything I just told you. And I think I won’t seem quite so bad.

  The news wasn’t a surprise, really. She’d mentioned this “James” in our awkward and infrequent conversations. Losing Polly didn’t bother me. That false-hearted overcapitalizing strumpet was welcome to marry whatever Pacific Rim lout would call her missus.

  The problem was the wedding.

  I could picture it. I’d be seated at a table with the disgusting sort of apprentice adults with whom Polly had now made common cause. Strapping men with dimpled chins in khakis and blue oxford shirts, with false casual laughs and slappable shoulders, who look like they’re fresh from crewing the first boat and are now in the glorious rise as junior analysts at Bain. Men already accustomed to putting their BlackBerries and laptops through airport security as they fly back from Denver and Dallas.

  If it sounds like I’m describing someone specific, by the way, I am—this dude named Chad Cooley who went to Granby with us, a guy we used to mock when we’d see him jogging, who was now Friendsters with Polly (this was before the Facebook Revolution). I’d stuff a
rtichoke appetizers into my face as this vapid ant regurgitated magazine articles and spouted misremembered movie quotes and faulty sports analogies.

  Also at the wedding would be women, talking about how beautiful Polly looked. Secretly of course they’d all be full of the primal jealousy that surges through women at weddings. Their crazy woman-brains would be telling them they’d better get cracking if they wanted to avoid a life of barren spinsterhood.

  So there’d be that to deal with.

  Worst of all, Polly’s wedding would be filled with Australians. Men who forked snakes in the sun-baked desert, and popped the eyes out of dingos with old anzac rifles, and surfed between gaping shark mouths, all while downing 20oz. cans of Victoria Bitter. Men trained by gap years padding about Thailand and India in a drunken stupor, flipping off the local constabulary. These men, friends of the groom, would dare each other to feats of athletic drinking. One of them, the one called Bonky or Rhino, would collapse off his chair half conscious as his comrades hooted with raucous delight.

  The desperate women, bridesmaids especially, would swoon over these marsupials, and wedding-weakened ladies would be treated to vigorous matings on the coatroom floor.