Novelists

by C. P. Boyko

  Over the next hour, Guntur delivered a moving paean to Novel #1; it was one of his own nominations, written by a friend of his, and translated for the jury into English by himself, so he knew better than anyone its excellence. The story of a poor village that wins the lottery, The Lottery Pool follows the villagers’ gradual discovery that riches are meaningless if everyone around you is rich too. Only a hobo passing through town is willing to do any work for pay, and, able to set his own prices, soon departs again with the villagers’ fortunes, after cutting their lawns, trimming their hedges, and painting their houses but leaving their roads, park, and school in their original state of disrepair. Guntur began his eulogy to this novel in a gracious and grateful mood, welcoming his new friends by flamboyant gestures into the comfortable and spacious sanctum of his tribute. But the momentum of his rhetoric soon carried him past eulogy to apology; he began anticipating criticisms in order to refute them; his tone acquired a shrill and defensive edge. The tale was not at all allegorical or fantastical, he assured them; the novelist had researched lotteries meticulously and had even lived for several months in a small town. Realism was very important to the author; once, needing to describe convincingly the contents of a woman’s purse, he had run out into the street and snatched three of them. Several times Guntur used the word “autobiographical” as an unqualified accolade. He also stressed how hard the author had worked at the novel, and how many revisions he had submitted it to; he was a perfectionist, and the result of his perfectionism was, quite simply, perfection. If the other jurors did not agree that this was a perfect novel, they were crazy. If they could not understand the power and beauty of this novel, they could not understand the power and beauty of his country; this novel was his country. If they did not like The Lottery Pool, they must be racists. If they did not like this book, they did not like him. Well, was that it? Did they all hate him? No one spoke. Guntur collapsed sobbing into his seat, vowing to kill himself as soon as the opportunity arose. Clint—who, with the rest of the room, had not understood a word of Guntur’s heavily accented speech—thanked him for his conviction and invited responses.

  Lun Li Tseng, who genuinely loved every novel she read, said that The Lottery Pool was wonderful. Ilse Mienemin said that it was a piece of crap. Ndatti Mbalu agreed, citing its unnecessary length. She herself wrote with great difficulty, never producing more than 250 words a day after eight or ten hours of intense, hand-wringing, hair-pulling effort; consequently she hated long novels. Hiroki Yomo begged to differ: The novel’s size was one of its great strengths, allowing the reader not merely to look into it from outside, but to enter and become part of its world. He himself wrote with great facility, never producing fewer than five cinderblock-sized novels a year. He wrote constantly, jotting down notes and composing entire chapters while riding buses or drinking in pubs with friends or waiting in line at grocery stores. He had, that morning while Guntur spoke, written the first five thousand words of what was to be a sweeping satirical epic about an international literary prize jury; his snickers of delight and self-satisfaction had contributed in no small part to the other man’s paranoid breakdown.

  Blanquita Reverberone de Calle hastened to agree with Hiroki: The length of this novel was very—long; and length in a novel was something that was—a good thing. She had been waiting desperately for some such intelligent but general comment to which she could affix her support, for she was anxious to conceal the fact that she had read none of the novels. For the past month she had been deeply preoccupied by her agent. Arturo certainly had some of the characteristics of an ideal agent: He was madly enthusiastic about her work, and loved unconditionally everything that she wrote. He was also a tireless promoter, inflicting his enthusiasm on everyone he encountered. But he was not successful. In the ten years that she had known him, he had not managed to sell any of her novels to anyone. And as she was his only client, he had been for ten years without income; she let him sleep on her couch. For nine years and eleven months she had attributed his failure to mysterious market forces; but a month ago she had begun to suspect that Arturo was incompetent; a month ago she had met a new agent. Esteban was everything that Arturo was not: impassive, disdainful, and effective. He told her that her novels were not by any means great literature, nor could they pass as potboilers—but that was no reason why they should not be bought and read. To prove his point, he flipped open his phone and made three brief calls, at the end of which he had elicited a three-book contract, an interview on national radio, and an invitation to sit on this jury. However, she had not seen him again since their first meeting. He did not return her calls, nor answer her letters, nor honor his appointments with her. His secretary’s secretary explained that he was kept very busy by more important, more lucrative clients. Meanwhile Arturo continued to sleep on her couch and moon about her apartment, rereading her manuscripts and sighing, gasping, and weeping with admiration. She didn’t know what to do.

  Max Ür cried, “Kunst entsteht wenn Frustration auf Freizeit trifft!”1

  Clint thanked him. Did anyone else have anything to add? Buchanan? Tiffany? Konstantina?

  Konstantina Kurgev had said nothing thus far, for she did not know exactly how she felt, and she had made a vow to never do or say anything but what she felt. This had originated as an artistic principle, one which she had developed during her first experience working with an editor: How dare anyone tell her how to write her novels! How could she put her name on the cover if it was in fact the production of a committee? And so on. In this way laziness and touchiness conspired to mask themselves as integrity and honesty. She made no changes to her prose that were not corrections of errors, and even preserved some of the errors as idiosyncrasies. She stopped writing by schedule and instead waited for inspiration to strike—and so stopped writing. This philosophy of zero compromise found a home in her heart and soon spread to every corner of her life. She strove to make her existence a true expression of her deepest, most unique nature. This meant renouncing many things that she found disagreeable, such as baths and vegetables. She slept when she was tired and not when the clock told her to. She demanded money from her mother and their car keys from her mother’s boyfriends, and she received these allowances without giving thanks. As an artist she felt exempt from the soul-staining tedium of a job, and she could no more feel gratitude for this dispensation than a plant could feel gratitude for oxygen. Above all, she spoke her mind. But this she found easier to do at home with her mother than with a roomful of strangers. The matter was complicated too by the fact that often she did not know her own mind—or rather, that some parts of her mind often contradicted other parts. She would have loved to leap to her feet and rain excoriations on this novel as a piece of trash and nonsense; equally she would have been pleased to leap to her feet and pour praise upon it as a masterpiece of fearlessness and insight. But in fact she was ambivalent. She liked the story but didn’t care for the prose, was charmed by some of the characters but repelled by others, loved especially the beginning but thought the end dragged on. She could hardly leap to her feet to say all that. So she shrugged, scowled, and said nothing.

  It was now nearly lunchtime. Clint decided to call a vote, reflecting that at this rate they would require three months to complete their deliberations. They had been given three days.

  He was even more alarmed when the vote was close. Not counting Max, who had voted both ways, The Lottery Pool escaped being precipitately named the best novel of all time by a single abstention. He realized that he must be more careful in the future to withhold all power of choice from the others until the options had been whittled down to a few finalists—which few must naturally include Brownhoffer. In the meantime, the frustrations of democracy vented themselves, as they usually do, not on those who had voted poorly, but on those who had not voted at all. Who had abstained, he demanded, and why?

  “Don’t look at me, chum,” said the telephone technician.

  István Bakic ha
d not voted because he was not in the room; indeed, he was not in Norway. His exit visa had been denied at the last minute, without explanation. Consequently he had subjected his conscience to a minute probing, which inevitably turned up several peccadilloes. He had burned most of his library and denounced his mother-in-law to the secret police before it occurred to him that perhaps his government objected not to him but to the Godskriva Prize. To be sure, the novels he had submitted were all on the national approved reading list, but perhaps the Ministry of Arts and Culture resented the implication that there could be any higher authority than themselves, let alone a foreign one. In any case, he had received no official prohibition to participate, so he supposed he was obliged to see it through, if only to save face. He had already told all the poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists, and bartenders in the city that he was travelling to Norway to sit on the Godskriva jury; now he had to tell them that the Godskriva Collective, as a special favor to his renown and to his ulcer, had permitted him, alone among the jurors, to take part by telephone. Luckily the prestige of an international telephone call was on par with that of international air travel, both being equally rare. He arranged for the call to be put through to him at The Punctilious Goose, haunt of the capital’s literati and purveyor of the capital’s most popular imitation stew.

  Despite his many hours of promotion for the event, István was astounded by the turnout on the day of the call. In addition to the expected writers and reporters, there were government spies angling for promotion, bored clerks hungry for entertainment, displaced peasants who had never seen a telephone, and the usual prostitutes and hawkers and beggar children drawn by any crowd. Altogether a festive, almost carnival atmosphere prevailed, which István did not think consonant with the dignity of the occasion. Five minutes before the scheduled phone call, he exited discreetly, re-entered majestically, and made an admonitory speech to the assembly about the delicateness of the telephonic mechanism. A reverent silence fell; even the pickpockets were still. At five minutes past the hour, the telephone rang, loud as a church bell in the cramped and tense room.

  “Hello please, István Bakic speaking here, who is it there thank you?”

  Not at all deterred by István’s use of English, the caller replied in his own rich, demotic native tongue, “Does your sandwiches have pickles? My missus don’t eat pickles.”

  István told the caller to get off the line.

  It was nearly two hours before the phone rang again, by which time excitement had replaced reverence and restlessness had succeeded excitement. István hissed for silence.

  “Hello please, István Bakic speaking … Hello?… Hello?… Hello!… Hello … Hello?… Hello … Hello?… Hello!… Hello?… Hello?… Hello!… Hello!… Hello please … Hello … Hello … Hello.”

  By his fifteenth or twentieth repetition of this powerful English word, István began to feel that the dignity of the occasion had been compromised. But he did not know what else to do. The line was not completely dead: occasionally from out of the tides of static there came ghostly knocks and taps, or tinny muffled sounds that might once have been voices. He dared not hang up; they might not call back. Meanwhile his audience began to fidget. In his consternation he shouted at them to shut up, their racket was interfering with the transmission waves. His old friend Janusz stood and explained softly and with greater tact that, though their national telephone was technologically superior to its foreign counterpart, a telephone connection was only as strong as its weakest link; he thanked them for their patience. Nevertheless, several people rose, muttering, and began shuffling towards the door.

  “Wait!” he cried. The receiver, pressed deep into his face, had come to life.

  “Hello, István, are you there?”

  It was Clint Lewes. István shook the telephone over his head triumphantly; the deserters returned muttering to their seats.

  “Perhaps you could help all of us here in Oslo out, István, by saying a few words about what you thought of The Lottery Pool.”

  “But of course, Clint. My pleasure.”

  It was the moment for which he had prepared so many times in his imagination. He cleared his throat, tweaked his posture, and embarked on an eloquent and largely grammatical speech, adaptable to most of the books on the shortlist, about why this novel was sadly inferior to many, if not most, and indeed perhaps all novels produced in his homeland over the past forty years since the Tremendous Revolution. When he was finished, the room exploded into applause which was, aside from that of the government spies, spontaneous and heartfelt.

  “István? Hello István, are you there? I’m afraid you were cutting out rather a lot. Do you mind saying that again?”

  By the third repetition, István began to feel that his lecture had lost its freshness; by the sixth, that it had lost its fluency: he could not complete a sentence without making sure that it had been received. By the ninth repetition, he was stuttering plaintively into a void. Eventually the telephone technician came on the line to inform him that the jury had adjourned.

  The next morning he tried a new tack: he pretended that the connection was fixed. He spent the day with a serious, thoughtful, judicious look on his face, which he occasionally seasoned with nods and grunts and isolated phrases of grudging agreement or considered disagreement. Unfortunately, this performance proved less entertaining than his humiliation of the day before, and his audience began to melt away. To hold those who remained he began to shout and wave his arms and kick his legs and call his imaginary interlocutors anti-revolutionary swine.

  Nevertheless, by the third morning only a few of his novelist friends, one extremely discouraged spy, and the resident alcoholics remained at The Punctilious Goose. István abandoned all pretense of dignity and sprawled across a corner table, the telephone receiver jammed between his shoulder and ear, drinking, chain-smoking, eating cold stew with his fingers, picking crusts from his free ear, and wallowing in his degradation. He overheard brief fragments of the jury’s deliberations but saw no point in contributing, now cynically certain of being cut off whenever he spoke.

  “… And beside of this, Loach is not a nice person.”

  “He’s an asshole, you mean.”

  “Yes, just so: an ass hole. He leaved his wife and two children alone and ran away with someone else.”

  “Please! The author’s character flaws have no bearing on the value of his novels.”

  “I disagree. In this case, the strong morality of the novel is totally weakened by the novelist’s own immoral life. I call that ‘hypocrisy.’”

  “On the contrary, it is all the more impressive an achievement! He has, in his work, surmounted his own limitations. Like all good art, this novel transcends its authorship.”

  “I heard that he has narcolepsy. It must be difficult to write with narcolepsy …”

  “… Wait, wait, wait. I think the Nazis were not nice persons. Are you saying that the Nazis were nice persons?”

  “I just think she is not fair to the Nazis. By making them all villains, she comes dangerously close to taking sides—to propaganda. Art should be neutral. Art should not be political. Art should exist for art’s sake.”

  “But, my God! If you lived during the war, and witnessed the atrocities that she must have witnessed—!”

  “Excuse me. I believe Cottan was born much after the war.”

  “Never mind. We agreed biography is not relevant …”

  “… Große Bücher verkaufen sich wie Gymnastikmitgliedschaften im Januar! …”2

  “… What I do not like is that Gawfler tells us how Lord Newbotham changes. This is not good writing. Good writing is to show us how Lord Newbotham changes.”

  “That is a large piece of nonsense. One of the wonderful abilities of the novelist is to tell stories. Telling and showing are not different; telling is only showing more quick. If you want to be shown everything, word by word, motion by
motion, you should go to films.”

  “Well, some novelists could learn much from screenplays, I think.”

  “On the counter hand, novelists must learn from screenplays how to not write novels. The same as photography confiscated realism from painting, movies should have now confiscated description away from novels. But look at this: five pages to describe the face of Lord Newbotham!”

  “Excuse me. Gawfler I think was writing before the time when movies were invented.”

  “That’s his tough luck. Art progresses, like science …”

  “… István? Hello, István, are you there?”

  Clint spoke rapidly. They were out of time. They needed his vote. They had narrowed the finalists down to two.

  István roused himself from his stupor and looked around. His friends had left; the drunks were passed out. To what he was about to say there would be only one witness: a thin, hawklike man who sat on the far side of the room and appeared to be absorbed in cleaning his fingernails with a fork.

  A spasm of petulant disgust shook the novelist. Only he had been denied permission by his government to fly to Oslo. Only he had been ostracized and muzzled by a faulty telephone connection—for which, he now had no doubt, the local technology was to blame. Only he had been humiliated in front of his neighbors, his colleagues, and his friends. None of this had happened to the other jurors; none of this could have happened anywhere but in the Land of the Tremendous Revolution.

  Clint took a deep breath, and summoned all the hysterical superlatives with which twenty years of blurb-writing had equipped him. Did István vote for Brownhoffer’s Gravy Train—a fiercely intelligent, vastly unique, inexorably complex, tragically beautiful masterpiece; a truly novel novel, a work of jaw-dropping intensity and spine-tingling genius, a triumph of the human spirit, a stirring dissection and fearless glorification of the ineluctable mystery and inestimable strangeness of existence by a shrewd observer of the psyche and astute physician of the soul operating at the very pinnacle of his powers? Or did István vote for Zoltán Szatt’s Pig?