How I Became a Famous Novelist

by Steve Hely

  There are people we turn to. Luke, now an old man, lies in a hospital bed as Grandmother opens the window. Two larks flutter away in the streaming sunlight.

  There are journeys we must take. Close-up on Silas and Grandmother, in their beat-up Ford Maverick. A shot from a helicopter that shows a herd of mule deer running in between oil derricks along the highway, as scrubby Texas mountains rise in the distance.

  There are promises we keep. Luke walks up to the church door of a Slovenian hill town. Then we cut to Grandmother and Silas, holding an urn as a tornado (done with computers) surges along the prairie in front of them.

  And loves we find, and make our own. Genevieve (ideally Scarlett Johansson, but whatever, sort of a smarter-looking version of Gretchen Mol) walks off the stage in a Western bar lit by Budweiser signs. She sits down at the bar. Silas slides her a whiskey over ice.

  The tempo picks up. One of the country singer’s songs plays (opportunity for licensing—maybe a sexed-up cover of an old Loretta Lynn tune). A quick montage: Luke fighting behind a crashed and burning airplane in the Tunisian desert; Vegas cops kicking in the door of Silas’s apartment; Luke playing smash-mouth football in a sweater and leather helmet. Silas and Genevieve dancing and laughing in the rain under an iron bridge that spans the Mississippi. Grandmother clutching Luke to her sweatered shoulder as he sobs. Luke sampling wine in a Peruvian vineyard as the workers celebrate and play their Andean panpipes.

  Based on the acclaimed bestselling novel by Pete Tarslaw would be Chyroned on the screen. Genevieve, Silas, and Grandmother stand on the hood of their Ford, grimacing in spiritual revelation as a tornado prepares to envelop them.

  THE TORNADO ASHES CLUB. I doubt I’d write the screenplay, but maybe I’d take an uncredited cameo as a French resistance fighter or tornado expert.

  Picturing myself in the theater watching it, I almost teared up. Yet it was impossibly far away.

  FOUR ANECDOTES ABOUT WRITERS TO ILLUSTRATE MY PROBLEM

  1. The essayist Dalton Tierguard was once asked by an interviewer what he hated most about being a writer. Without a second’s hesitation he answered, “Writing.”

  2. The nineteenth-century French writer Jean-Jacques Plachet so despaired of ever finishing his novel Les Femmes Laides that he loaded a hunting rifle and shot himself in the right foot. Thus immobilized at his desk, he was able to finish his masterpiece.

  3. The stories for which Scottish writer Hamish Baird is known were all written during a six-year period, after which Baird took a job cleaning the sewers of Glasgow. He said his second career was a welcome relief from the misery of writing.

  4. American novelist Amy Abbott McNicholas found writing so difficult that each morning she had her servant lock up all the chamber pots in the house, and keep them locked up until she was presented by her mistress with ten pages of prose. McNicholas died at forty-eight of a bladder infection.

  When you think of the great writers, penning a novel seems terribly romantic. You think of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a Riviera breeze billowing his curtains and the sounds of the Cap d’Antibes street cut by the tapping of his typewriter, as he lacerates the rich and dreams of the past. Or Hemingway, in a hotel in Pamplona in the heat of the afternoon, as bullfighters take their siesta and drops of water bead on a bottle of kirsch. Or Joyce, squinting his Irish bead-eyes as he blends his classical training and his Gaelic imagination to summon up allusive rhythms and language dense and enfolding.

  Even lesser novelists seem glamorous. Some scribbler burning twigs in a boardinghouse in the second arrondissement as he dips his quill pen into the ink. Or a slim and shoeless thirty-something, taking a year off from his job as an alternative-marketing consultant to sit in a park in Vancouver or Park Slope and type into his PowerBook a wry yet soulful take on the paradoxes of hypermodernity.

  That is all delusion. Writing a novel is pathetic and boring. Anyone sensible hates it. It’s all you can do to not play Snood all afternoon.

  Understand that in my account here, I’ve cut a lot of the boring stuff out. It wasn’t like writing essays, where I could bang one out and go to Sree’s. This was three hundred pages. It’s not that it was hard, exactly. It was more like shoveling snow or cleaning out the attic, tedious labor toward a very distant end.

  Intractable literary problems kept presenting themselves. Example: one night Derek called me from The Colonial Boy, so I went to meet him, we drank Salt Lick bourbon with ginger ale, and the next morning my brain was in a vice and my poop was viscous. I wrote nothing.

  A few days later there was a John Hughes marathon on WE, and to skip that would be downright un-American. Again, wrote nothing.

  Another day while napping I had a dream about an old Nintendo game called Kid Bubble where you float around in Soap Land and bop monsters with your bubble while avoiding cactus spikes and sharp birds, so I spent most of the day finding and playing a downloadable version. Wrote nothing. Each morning I’d wake up and see Preston Brooks, shoeing his horse, staring down at me. Taunting me.

  At the end of all this I had 112 pages of The Tornado Ashes Club groaning like a wounded deer in the road. The sooner I had a sharp rock in my hand to finish her off, the better.

  But out of desperation came an ingenious solution.

  First step: On a Friday about four weeks after I’d gotten fired, I waited for Hobart to come in. He arrived at about 11 P.M., haggard and pale.

  “Hey, Hobart. You know, I went on eBay, and I got us something.”

  There, on the coffee table, next to Peking, was an unopened DVD set of the original version of Summer Camp, made for Danish television.

  “It’s supposed to be extra screwed up.”

  It was. Instead of the comforting warmth of the Asian-American hostess on the American version, this thick-necked Danish guy with salami fingers barked out orders. The translations on the subtitles weren’t quite right either, so an eight-year old girl shrieking and crying at an adult in her cabin was translated as “You are far irritating!”

  And in the American network version, they go out of their way to assure you there’s no pedophile stuff going on. They’re much more cavalier about this in the Danish edition.

  Every night that week we watched an episode when Hobart got home. We did not speak.

  Once I ordered a pizza without telling Hobart. When it arrived I paid but said it was for both of us. Hobart stared at it like a refugee child being offered chocolate. Non-instant-mashed-potato food was foreign to him, but he pounced on it until grease and cheese dribbled down his stubble.

  The next week, I started making parries and thrusts of conversation. I asked him about his work at Lascar and his med school studies and what it was like to carve up a cadaver.

  “You stop seeing it as a person,” he said.

  “That’s interesting. I totally can see that.” I paused while the Danish campers lustily sang competing campfire songs. “Man, I could never make it in med school. I’ve always had trouble concentrating. Probably has something to do with never knowing my dad.”

  I left that one hanging there.

  When he got home a few nights later, I was wearing a button-up shirt and my finest dining-out pleateds. As he opened the door I was tonging ice into my two surviving Larry Bird commemorative glasses, our apartment’s finest drinkware.

  “Oh, hey Hobart.”

  “Hello.”

  “I thought, you know, Friday night and all, we should have a cocktail hour. Like gentlemen, you know?” I poured two glasses and offered him one. “It’s MacAllister eighteen,” I said, before a slow and gentlemanly sip. “Mmm, very peaty.”

  I handed him a Scotch.

  *

  Two hours later: Hobart was holding forth in a voice that quivered with anguish. Scotch slopped all over the carpet as he paced back and forth.

  “She says she’s ‘coming into her own as a woman.’ Into her own! That the distance is good for us! She said ‘we’re better as two separate entities that care about each other than as o
ne unit.’ Bullshit!”

  “Man.”

  “It’s bullshit! And she’s always, she’s mentioning all the time Nevin.”

  “Yikes.”

  “Some guy named Nevin who works at Washington Mutual. ‘You’d like him.’ She said that! I wouldn’t like him! I friggin’ … I hate him!”

  “That’s tough, man. But, you know, give it some time. It’ll work out.”

  “It sucks!”

  “Yeah man, I hear ya. I’ve been having a rough time, too. I lost my job.”

  “It sucks.”

  “Yeah. I mean, I’ve been working on my résumé, but I just have so much trouble concentrating.”

  “Concentrating. That’s all I ever do is concentrating.”

  “It’s just, you know, I don’t know if I’m gonna make rent.”

  This seemed to hit, triggering Hobart’s terror of disorder. He looked up at me. “Dude are you serious?” He seemed to grasp instantly how unnatural he sounded saying dude.

  “Yeah.” This was not true. Signing up for unemployment had been easy, made me feel like a real writer, and had me stable for a while.

  “That’s … God!”

  “Yeah. If I could just figure out a way to concentrate.”

  Hobart’s eyes showed determination as he struggled to stay seated upright. I saw my time to strike.

  “Hey, you guys at Lascar are working on a drug for that kind of stuff, for like hyperactivity and stuff?” A pause. Then he spoke, slurred, as though reading off a chart on the wall.

  “Reutical is a medication designed to reduce the symptoms of hyperactivity and ADD, improving focus and concentration in adolescent males.”

  “So it helps kids pay attention in school and stuff?” Heavy, thudding nods from Hobart.

  “I mean, it probably has something to do with never knowing my dad. I’ve tried all different stuff that doctors gave me.” This was not true. “But one of them said the only thing that might help was this Reutical thing. Do you think you could get me some?”

  There was a long pause, as his whiskey-soaked neurons made ethical calculations.

  “We’re only in phase two trials.” He said this as though it concluded the matter.

  “So that’s experiments, right?”

  “Yeah, experiments.”

  “Sweet. I mean, I’ll be an experiment.”

  Hobart laughed. “We’re all friggin’ experiments.” Some rolling of the head about his neck like a statue teetering on a podium.

  “You know it’s great what you do. It’s medicine, after all. To help people.”

  I fixed him with my eyes.

  “Hobart, you’re a good roommate. And a good friend. I knew you’d help me out on this. Because you’re a gentleman.” He looked at me. I knew I had maybe twelve seconds before he could say anything. So I dashed into the bathroom. I waited there. I heard him pour another glass. Then silence. I saw him passed out on the couch.

  Early, very early the next morning, I left a note on his desk saying “Hobs, thanks so much for promising to get me that Reutical.” Then I hid in my room.

  For two days I didn’t see Hobart. But I knew how his brain was working. He was thinking, “Pete can’t make rent. He has trouble concentrating. It probably has something to do with never knowing his dad. It’s medicine, to help people.” But above all he was thinking, “I promised him. He called me a gentleman. I am a gentleman. I’m better than Nevin. I made Pete a gentleman’s promise.”

  I walked into the living room one morning and found a clear plastic jar holding thirty gray oval pills.

  Beneath were eight pages written in his meticulous hand. It was warnings and instructions, with tidy arrows of emphasis, a diagram explaining in basic terms Reutical’s chemical structure, and charts. I skimmed it and got the main point, which was “don’t take Reutical with alcohol.” I gleaned the subtext, which was “please, Pete, don’t screw me on this.”

  In short, Hobart was as careful as possible and doesn’t deserve any blame.

  8

  On this morning, Prudence didn’t stop. She walked right into the shop.

  Her father and her brother Josiah and Gideon the apprentice didn’t notice, so busy were they at their planing and awling.

  “Good morning!” said Prudence.

  “Prudence!” said Father. “What brings you to us this morning? Has Mother sent you with blackberry currants for our midday meal?”

  “No,” said Prudence. “I’ve come because I’d like to learn to be a cooper.”

  “WHAT?!” cried Gideon. “Why, a girl cooper?”

  “Surely you’re joking, Prudence!” declared Josiah. “Why, I could sooner imagine our American colonies separating from Mother England!”

  The two boys laughed, quite meanly.

  Father put his hard hand on Prudence’s shoulder.

  “Prudence,” he said, “such foolishness doesn’t become you. You know as well as I that young girls are made for milking, mending clothes, and baking pies. Let’s be home with you, and hear no more nonsense.”

  But Prudence was very brave. She didn’t move a foot.

  “Father,” she said, “I would like to be a cooper. And if you teach me, why, I’ll make a barrel as well as might a boy!”

  The cruel boys laughed again.

  “Look, Gideon,” cried Josiah, “at the barrel made by Prudence!” He was holding up a broken stave.

  A tear welled in Prudence’s eye.

  “I will be a cooper!” she cried. “You’ll see!”

  She turned from the shop, and off she ran.

  —excerpt from the unpublished manuscript Prudence Whiddiecomb: The Girl Cooper by Evelyn Ewart and Margaret Wrenshall

  The next day I threw my laptop and a handful of underwear into my Camry and drove north, up 93 to Vermont.

  An easy way to get credibility as an author is to live someplace rugged. Publishers live in Manhattan, so they consider southern Connecticut to be a hinterland. They’re easily impressed, and it seemed foolish not to exploit that weakness.

  Preston Brooks has West Virginia. Upstate New York is a popular choice. That’s cordwood-chopping, run-down mill-town country. West Texas is fertile—cf. Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry. Wyoming and Montana give a writer a lot of seriousness points. Nobody’s gonna call you out when you start throwing around place-names like Bitterroot and Teton and Laramie. The point is to prove that your prose is as natural as a bushel of organic tomatoes or a cut of steak from a free-range longhorn.

  Territories are going fast. Before long novelists will have to set up camp in Burkina Faso or Sakhalin Island if they want any credit for being genuine voices.

  With a bottle of Reutical in my pocket, it wouldn’t be long until I was putting The Tornado Ashes Club on the market. I’d need the publishing assistants to say to their bosses “you’ve got to sign this guy—he’s a completely pure voice, he holed up in a cabin in like New Hampshire or someplace and wrote this fucking amazing book that’s so lyrical you’re gonna shit.”

  Plus I knew Hobart would almost immediately regret his decision, and I didn’t want to be around to deal with it.

  So I’d called up my Aunt Evelyn.

  THE STORY OF AUNT EVELYN

  Once Evelyn was a famously fierce lawyer. She wore pantsuits. She was in the papers and on TV a few years back when her firm had defended the city of Boston against some kids who claimed they’d been injured riding the subway. She was the one who tricked the main guy into admitting in court that their injuries were actually from filming a homemade break-dancing video. That was the same year she announced she was a lesbian. This didn’t bother anyone in our family, a fact which I think disappointed her because she was fired up to smoke any opposition. After that she mellowed out. She got a girlfriend, Margaret, who was only a few years older than me. Margaret had captained the Smith College rugby team to the national championship. She’s great. I did a bunch of shots with her at the commitment ceremony. A year or two later, Evelyn announced t
hat she was quitting the law. She and Margaret were going to move up to Vermont to open a maple sugar distillery. That was the kind of thing you could do if you didn’t have kids, my mom had commented ruefully.

  At about six I turned down the gravel road in Tracton toward their house, a solid rectangle of local stone set back among desapped trees.

  Margaret came out, the Joan of Arc dome of her hair bouncing as she ran up to me for the first round of hugs. Then into the kitchen for round two with Aunt Evelyn, who was ferociously eviscerating a cantaloupe.

  I was treated to a magnificent welcome dinner: organic spinach salad, mixed fruit puree, locally raised Connecticut River salmon with apple-maple chutney, homemade seven-grain bread, followed by traditional Native American corn pudding. This wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d imagined my stay in Vermont would be a hard literary asceticism, like a boxer in training camp. But I’d now been unemployed for almost two months so I ate like a grateful urchin.

  “Try the wine,” Aunt Evelyn said, “our friends Crispin and Lawrence sent it to us from Sorrento. It’s made by Trappist monks.”

  “Those monks know how to stomp a grape,” Margaret said.

  “So Pete, I think it’s wonderful that you’re working on a book. We’re so honored to have a young novelist for a guest. What inspired you to turn to matters literary?”

  “Mostly to humiliate Polly, and impress people at her wedding.”

  Margaret laughed. “Right on.” Margaret totally gets it.

  “Plus I wanted to get enough money so I don’t have to work anymore.”

  “Well, that doesn’t sound especially noble,” my aunt said, though she appeared at least slightly amused. “I’m considering embarking on a writing project of my own. A children’s book. I really think it’s a story that could be empowering to young girls. It’s about a girl who isn’t content to just become a wife and a mother. She wants to learn the trade of coopering. Barrel making.”

  “Huh.”

  “The best part is that it’s a true story. Her name was Prudence Whiddiecomb, and she lived over in Spayboro in the late eighteenth century. And while her father was off fighting in the Revolution, she took over his business. She became quite a successful cooper and also did some light smithing.” Evelyn told me about her explorations in the historical societies of local towns, in speech peppered with phrases like “the interesting thing about staves is …” and “now, in those days, Spayboro wasn’t the county seat, which complicates things.”