How I Became a Famous Novelist

by Steve Hely

  “Why do you think we’re so afraid of tornadoes?” Michelle asked as a practice question as we walked around to the sugar shack. “I’m sorry. I’m just trying to prepare you.”

  “No, that’s okay, that’s okay.” I put on my best writer face.

  “Tornadoes are a kind of chaos,” I said, in my best writer voice. “A kind of churning and disorder we’re all afraid of. I think my novel, really, is an attempt to bring some sense to that. To draw some order, some poetry out of the swirling madness we call life.”

  Michelle clenched my arm. “Good!”

  “Listen, when you’re about to say some shit like that, scoot in close to Tinsley so I can frame it with her hair,” Skee said. “’Cause that kind of thing, they’ll want to use it, but if her hair and part of her face isn’t in it, she’s gonna bitch me out, she’s gonna bitch the editors out. It’s gonna make my life real fucking miserable, and they’re gonna be there till fucking two in the morning trying to splice it together, and that’s gonna come down on me, and everybody’s gonna be fucking pissed off all because you blew your best stuff and her hair wasn’t in it! So don’t fire off any of that shit on some shot where I’m getting you from behind, okay? Wait, and we’ll get it when I’m shooting you straight on, or with one of these walls in the background. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Here, we’ll practice. Say that again,” he said, and he hoisted his camera to his shoulder.

  “Uh, tornadoes are a kind of chaos—”

  “Nope. See there, all I got behind you is that car, okay? And Michelle, she’s playing Tinsley, she’s not even in the shot yet. So, wait, here, I’ll put my hand up like this when you should start talkin’, and that’ll mean I got it all framed.”

  We ran it through again, with Michelle standing in.

  “Tornadoes are a kind of chaos, a kind of churning and disorder we’re all afraid of—”

  “Get up in her face, okay? Just so you’re almost rubbing up against her boobs.”

  I slid closer to Michelle. “I think my novel, really, is an attempt—”

  “Get really up in there, don’t be shy.”

  “An attempt to bring some sense to that,” I continued, almost rubbing up against Michelle’s boobs. It all seemed much sillier at that distance. I could feel my voice getting weaker. “To draw some order, some poetry out of the swirling madness we call life.”

  “Good, all right, see, that’s a shot I got, and won’t have to fuckin’ hear it from the guys in the editing bay that their wives were screaming at ’em for not getting home until fucking four-thirty.” Weep-laughter from Michelle.

  The last shot we rehearsed was up in the guest room, as I sat on the bed and Michelle pretended to be Tinsley, and I sat on a wicker chair with Aunt Evelyn’s copy of Hearts of Ice and Blubber propped beside me.

  “Novels may not seem sexy,” I practiced saying, in a way that suggested novels were totally sexy. “But they may just save us.”

  “Good!” said Michelle. Skee smiled, showing yellowed teeth.

  “Dude, I’ve heard a lot of this shit, but that was some of the best. Some of these guys, they try and explain like actually every little thing that they’re doing. They get all tripped up trying to find like the right word or whatever. And you want to tell them, ‘Listen, just say some shit, make my life easy, let’s get this done.’ That’s what you’re doing. That shit, ‘novels are saving us’ and whatever? That’s making the editors’ lives easy.”

  “All right!” said Michelle, checking her watch. “We need to hook up with the rest of the crew, and we’ll be back—shooting in two hours!” She patted me on the knee. “You’re gonna be great!”

  Skee waited for her to leave.

  “Listen,” he said, as he packed up his camera. “She won’t tell you this, but another thing—Tinsley hasn’t read your book. No knock on you, she doesn’t read any of ’em. But just don’t trip her up with talking about some specific thing that happened in it. I’ve seen guys do that, it slows the whole fucking thing down, and she gets real pissed about it. Just say your shit about novels and stuff. And keep her hair in the shot.”

  There wasn’t any time to think things through. In the kitchen the hair and makeup lady dolled me up. I could see Tinsley through the curtains, tinier than I’d expected. Then they checked the light and spotted me by the door. Through the cracks I could see the camera lights come on.

  “Speed,” I heard Skee say, and I heard footsteps scuffle into position on the doorstep.

  “Good, are we good?” I heard Tinsley say.

  “Yes, go on you. Doorbell’s on the right,” I heard Michelle say.

  The doorbell rang. And as scripted, I opened it for what would be the first shot.

  At that distance, with full makeup, in that light, Tinsley’s face didn’t look porcelain at all. Her features seemed huge, distorted, like in the ritual masks of the Haida people of the Pacific Northwest. So that threw me off.

  And behind her was a small phalanx of people—a boom mic guy, and a kid holding a plastic rectangle thing designed to reflect light, and Michelle in the back with a clipboard.

  And right in front of me, almost wedged between us, was Skee, his eyes obscured by the camera, his mouth gnarled with strain.

  You don’t think in a situation like that. It’s beyond consciousness. Time washes you along before you can grab on to a thought.

  That’s why at first I just went through the motions. I shook Tinsley’s hand, and she asked me questions I can’t even remember. I spouted answers without knowing what I was saying. Words left my mouth before I had a chance to run them through the scanner, but bullshit being my default mode, they were at least semicogent bullshit.

  That’s how it went at first, anyway, and Tinsley and I were filmed walking down the driveway. All I remember hearing is the sound of the crunching gravel.

  But in the second shot, a shot we’d rehearsed, I was supposed to sit at my desk in the sugar shack, with my computer in front of me, and pretend to be writing. A sort of Unsolved Mysteries–style dramatization of writing my novel. When we practiced I’d been fine with it.

  But as we were doing it—I was sitting there, and Skee was crouched right next to me, filming up on my furrowed brow—I knew I couldn’t keep it going. The Xpo, Pamela McLaughlin’s fingers tracing a murder on a napkin, Miller Westly’s two-pooled house, the audience in Montana, Marianne, the frozen fire-watcher, Leaves of Grass, the wedding, Polly touching my cheek, Margaret watching from an upstairs window, it was all part of it, I’m sure, all chips on the foundation. Until suddenly, sitting at the desk, fake-writing, I felt the whole structure collapse inside me.

  People have asked me if I went crazy, or if something Tinsley did made me snap, or if I was just angry that day. But it was the opposite. Suddenly I felt a kind of dreary, resigned calm.

  No one noticed at first. Skee got his footage, and Tinsley and the crew moved out, and Michelle led me out to the sugar-woods, and stood me by one of the maple trees that we’d picked out earlier. We’d had Aunt Evelyn set it up with the tubes and the pipes and all. It was a good metaphor, we’d all agreed at the time. I stood there waiting while they checked the light and Tinsley had her face touched up.

  And then the camera was on.

  “Speed.”

  “Okay, on Tinsley.”

  She leaned in close to keep her hair in the shot. I could feel Skee, just over my shoulder, breathing through his yellow teeth.

  “Does writing flow from you, Pete, like the sap from these trees?” Tinsley asked.

  “What?”

  “Is creating a novel really a matter of tapping in, and drawing the words out?”

  I didn’t say anything at first. Tinsley tried again.

  “When you’re writing, do you feel it flow, like maple sap?”

  I looked at Tinsley. Maybe she really did want to know if writing flowed like tree sap. Maybe she didn’t. It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, I decided not to lie to her.

/>   “No. I mean, look.”

  My posture relaxed. My muscles eased. Relief washed over me.

  “Look, I wanted to write a book that would be popular. And, you know, I made kind of a study of these things, and I’d read one of Preston Brooks’s books, the one with the cancer kid and that guy wandering all over Ireland and all that, and I just decided, Okay, fine. If that’s what they want, great. I’m gonna fill it with mushy prose, and, you know, promises, and faintly heard songs, and lost loves. All that stuff.

  “And, yeah, I mean, once I decided that, that I was gonna write, you know, the baldest, most sentimental book ever, yeah, I guess it did come pretty easily. If I was stuck, you know, I’d just put in a dying Frenchman or an immigrant carrying a baby in a shopping bag, whatever. A dying dog on the road. It’s easy enough to come up with that kind of crap, once you’ve decided to do it.

  “So, yeah, I guess it did flow like syrup. It’s not like I was James Joyce up here, slaving over every word. Give people what they want. If they want this crap, fine. You got it. It’s a bunch of bullshit anyway. So, yes. Syrup, or whatever you said.”

  The only reason I know that’s exactly what I said is because I saw it on TV a week later.

  19

  TINSLEY HONIG: Was it challenging, writing a novel?

  PETE TARSLAW: Challenging? Not really. I mean, it’s a titanic pain in the ass to actually type out all the words. And it has to more or less make sense, which is tricky. But the big part is just figuring out what readers want to hear. And that’s easy; you just look at the bestseller list. Readers—or people who buy books, anyway—are really straightforward. Kind of dumb, even, in what they like. They like World War II, disasters, lost love. It’s not hard to come up with stuff. Shooting fish in a barrel, really.

  TINSLEY HONIG: Shooting fish in a barrel?

  PETE TARSLAW: Well, I mean, not that easy. I did have to write the whole thing.

  TINSLEY HONIG: So the actual writing was the most challenging part.

  PETE TARSLAW: Well … yeah. Sitting there and doing it.

  TINSLEY HONIG: How did you keep yourself sitting there?

  PETE TARSLAW: Uh, well, you know, I thought about the money I was gonna make. The prestige.

  TINSLEY HONIG: Mmm.

  PETE TARSLAW: I wish somebody had told me how little money there was in books!

  TINSLEY HONIG: [light laughter]

  TINSLEY HONIG: Who would you say are your biggest literary inspirations?

  PETE TARSLAW: Preston Brooks. You know that guy? Right, you interviewed him. Yeah—I mean that guy is such an obvious charlatan, his books are so cheesy in such stupid ways. Reading that guy, seeing him, I figured, yeah, I can definitely pull this off. I guess that’s not so much ‘inspiration.’ But—you get it. He’s just so terrible, I was like, if that guy can do it, I can do it.

  TINSLEY HONIG: [indicating maple trees] The countryside here is so beautiful. Did you try and include this place in your work?

  PETE TARSLAW: No. I mean—

  TINSLEY HONIG: The trees, the streams—

  PETE TARSLAW: No. I mean—I could’ve, I guess. But I figured, Vermont has so few people in it, not that many people buying books. And the countryside up here, it’s kind of complicated, you know? There’s rocks and stuff everywhere. But like a plain, or a field, that’s much easier to describe. You just say, you know, “It’s lush and golden and sweeping” and people get it. It seems like a bigger deal.

  —excerpts from the transcript of episode 217 of Dispatch, aired 05/06/08 on ABC

  How these things snowball is an interesting puzzle—Internet phenomena? Cultural controversies?—requiring a better sociologist than me, because not only am I not impartial, I observed the whole thing unfolding at the local FedEx/Kinko’s.

  To read the blog posts, the articles in Slate and Salon and the Weekly Standard—even the Huffington Post, where the fucking guy from Wings had an opinion—at my local FedEx/Kinko’s, I’d have to put my credit card in that little machine, and get issued a Kinko’s AccessKey or whatever it’s called, and sit in a comfortless chair and watch my 25-cent minutes tick away as I tracked the rhetorical combat about whether I was evil or just misunderstood.

  I couldn’t use my own computer because some state police guys had come to my apartment door for it on the very morning before my Dispatch segment aired.

  I hadn’t even been there; I’d been so nervous that morning I’d woken up early and gone for pancakes. They’d dealt with Hobart. The agents had flashed a warrant and explained to him that I was a “person of interest” in the “ongoing Jonathan Sturges investigation.” Then they seized my computer and took it away.

  He was panicking when I got back. He kept choking on his own spit as he tried to explain it to me. But I shut him up and told him to calm down. He didn’t know Sturges so the whole thing shocked him more than it did me.

  When state police guys seizing your computer is only the second-worst thing to happen to you in a given week, that’s a bad week. But I didn’t have any spare mental energy to devote to possible criminal charges because I was about to become a full-fledged pop-culture controversy.

  In retrospect it all makes sense: a young author goes on TV and issues sweeping derisions of literature. Of course it was a big deal. The only reason it wasn’t a bigger deal is that I wasn’t more famous. But it caught me by surprise.

  Like all controversies, it evolved in clear stages.

  1. The Inciting Incident

  My interview on Dispatch aired. Tinsley introduced me thus:

  “The Tornado Ashes Club, a bestselling novel about a grandmother, an unlikely fugitive, and a long-lost love, has touched the hearts of readers across the country. It’s a tale full of tenderness and well-turned phrases.”

  Good so far.

  “But the book’s author, a young man named Peter Tarslaw, has some views on writing that are … far from traditional. I visited Peter at his family’s maple sugar farm in Vermont, where he spoke about truth, fiction … and his literary rivals.”

  If you watched the segment on the oft-linked YouTube clips, then you know what followed: the opening bit of me lacing into Preston Brooks, the shots of Tinsley nodding, the series of set pieces as I spout out my various theories.

  My quibbles, when I first watched the piece, were mainly aesthetic: my voice sounded much whinier than I believe it to be, my pants looked much too short even though they’re not.

  Hobart had been watching with me.

  “What’d you think?”

  “You were great, definitely,” he said. He sounded nervous, which made me believe I really had been great. “Listen, about those state police guys—”

  “Hobart, seriously, don’t worry about that. It’s my stupid boss. It’s fine. I just got interviewed by Tinsley Honig!”

  “Yeah, yeah. That’s … it’s incredible,” he said.

  Then my phone rang. It was Mom, as purely and naïvely proud as any mom, and I soaked it up and assumed that was how the rest of the world would take it as well.

  If TV was still a one-shot deal, where you either saw something when it aired or you missed it forever, the signals zooming off unrecoverable into distant galaxies, then that would’ve been the end of it.

  2. Outrage

  Tracing it back in retrospect is like following the origins of some ghastly tropical disease—there are early cases, and threads and connection, and patches where it flares up especially strongly, but the very start is lost.

  But it went something like this. Some literary-blogger types saw my interview. In their garrets full of dog-eared copies of Emerson’s Essays and Barthes on Barthes, they cleaned their hands against their Powell’s Bookstore Tshirts and started weighing in on what I’d said to Tinsley.

  Somehow a clip of the interview got posted on YouTube. Now the blogger types had something to link to. More of these self-righteous vultures sat down at their stained desks and weighed in on the “Tarslaw Controversy.”

  What b
othered most of them was how jarringly frank I’d been—how I’d admitted baldly that I thought writing was just a con game.

  But then other bloggers started suggesting that maybe everything I’d said was sarcastic. And then that argument kept the whole thing going.

  The Controversy, really, was: What it did mean for fiction, what I’d said? Had I meant it? Did it matter? Very quickly people got lost in postmodern mazes of their own invention, and suddenly my simple frankness became a puzzle.

  3. Response

  Next time a Controversy arises, watch for this phase. It’s the easiest to identify: the stage at which enough people are arguing and making noise about something that self-important journalists decide they better stake out some ground on the issue.

  This stage got going the next morning, while I was still asleep. At nine I heard my phone ring and saw it was David Borer, but I assumed he was calling to congratulate me and rolled over. He kept calling, and I figured, Dude, I get it, you think I’m terrific. It wasn’t until about two that I heard his message about “damage control strategies.”

  By the time I got to Kinko’s, the Tarslaw Controversy had been kicking around long enough for distinct schools of thought to coalesce.

  SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON MY TINSLEY INTERVIEW

  • The Tarslaw-Is-a-Total-Bastard School, epitomized by a 2000-word rant on The Pathetic Fallacy: During his interview on the “news” show Dispatch last night, author Pete Tarslaw revealed the truth about publishing. Tarslaw’s comments showed him to be the epitome of snark, admitting to manipulating reader trust as casually as Dick Cheney manipulated prewar intelligence. Like the child molesters featured in the show’s first segment, Tarslaw coolly described his deplorable methods, as the manicured (?) hostess blithely nodded. It was the latest sign of how far we’ve fallen.

  • The It’s-All-Tinsley’s-Fault School, which cropped up on the message boards at BetterReadThanDead .com: Here we had a guy who was finally prepared to say what we’ve all been thinking about popular fiction, ready to blow the cover bestselling authors have been hiding under for years, and Tinzy (sic) starts asking him about how to make maple syrup!