For the first fifteen minutes they chatted about her early writing life, and Amy’s favorite novels, and then Brie’s. Amy asked as many questions as Brie; they were comfortable with each other. Brie was settling down. This was fun: Amy was less anxious here in this quiet room than anywhere else, except her own home. Even when teaching, or visiting Carla, she always felt unsettled. Here was the equivalent of a warm hearth on a cold night.
“In a recent interview,” Brie said, “you listed all the books on your shelf you haven’t read yet.”
“Well, not all of them. That would have taken too long.”
“And I loved that they were great books and not-so-great books, and you just jumbled them together. William Faulkner and Mickey Spillane.”
“And why not?”
“And why not! But nobody ever does that. Nobody ever talks about F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jackie Susann.”
“And John Cheever and O Henry—”
“And Agatha Christie and—”
“Doris Lessing—”
“Yes,” said Brie. “And why is that?”
Amy thought. “It’s probably not that nobody reads all of those writers. I mean, I’ve read a lot of them, and I can’t be the only one. It has something to do with the old highbrow-lowbrow distinction and the need for people to label themselves. They say they’re too heartland for Orwell. Too devoted to Shakespeare to read Stephen King. Or so they say.”
“Or too wrapped up in movies to read at all.” Brie turned to face Amy, her notebook forgotten. “Do you think we’re all going to stop reading? Is this the end of the age of books?” She looked dewy and anxious and gazed at Amy as though Amy were some sort of sibyl.
Don’t ask me, Amy wanted to say, but of course she was asking her. Apparently that was the point of an interview. “It’s the end of the age of something,” she said. “Words are running wild and free on the Internet. Nobody knows what’s going to happen. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Suppose the publication of new books were interrupted for ten or twenty years, while publishers merged and diversified, thrashed and sank. Suppose there were a de facto moratorium on the brand-new printed word. Suppose all we were left to hold in our hands and read were the books that were already out there.”
“Wouldn’t that be terrible?” asked Brie.
“Why? For the first time in a hundred years, readers would have time to read all the books they’d been meaning to get to, and the tens of thousands more that they never even heard of. Nosebleed-inducing farces. Horror stories guaranteed to rob us of sleep. Pulse-pounding page-turners. Sprawling, sumptuous histories. Best of all, those books that the critics have told them were essential to our lives. Insightful novels of intoxicating ferocity. Intoxicating novels of ferocious insight. There’s a million of them, each one ‘compelling.’”
“I’ve never understood that adjective,” said Brie.
“Me neither. But maybe if we got a chance to read them all, we’d find out.”
“But meanwhile, what would happen to all the writers?”
Amy smiled. In her utopia, she said, most of them would give up and turn to meaningful employment. By the time the presses started rolling again, the ratio of readers to writers would have returned to its ideal proportions. The sort enjoyed by Dickens and Twain, and even Hemingway and Dreiser.
Brie asked if in Amy’s utopia everyone would be forced to read highbrow.
“Absolutely not. There’d be something for everyone. Just not so much of it. And when we finished reading a book, we’d have a real shot at finding someone else who read it too, and discussing it with them.”
“Well, isn’t that what bestseller lists are for? So that we’ll all—okay, I take it back.” The rabbit blushed, annoyed with herself. “I hate bestseller lists,” she said.
“Good for you.”
Brie’s eyebrows knitted. “What’s the ideal proportion? Of readers to writers?”
Amy paused, as though calculating. “Ideally, there should be more readers than writers.”
Brie studied Amy’s face, clearly unsure whether Amy was kidding.
She was a bright girl, but young. If she’d been in one of Max’s classes, he’d have already used the Irony Klaxon, an old bicycle horn he always kept handy when lecturing. “They’re not wired for irony yet,” he explained to her, “so I have to help them. Your brain must be fully developed before you can cope with a straight-faced joke. They think you’re serious unless you’re smirking.” Max hated to smirk, although he was quite good at it. Amy didn’t know how.
“Look,” she said. “There may still be more readers than writers, but surely we’re approaching some kind of catastrophic tipping point.” Amy had no idea if this was true, but she liked the sound of it. A world choked with writers, like an echoey room crammed with chatterboxes, was an enervating thought.
Brie was quiet for what must have seemed like a long time to anyone actually listening. She turned back to her notebook. “In that recent interview, you were asked how a particular event felt. I won’t go into the event here, because the important thing is that you challenged the reporter to tell you how it felt. Your point, if I understand you correctly, is that she should have been able to imagine those feelings for herself. That we all should. You didn’t come right out and say, ‘That’s a stupid question.’ You were nice about it. But I think that’s what you meant. You said, ‘Feelings are not news.’ You said, ‘Experience is over-rated.’ Could you explain what you meant by that?”
“I can explain what I think I meant. After all, the interview was some time ago, and it all came and went pretty quickly.” Amy wondered why she was bothering with the truth, or at least some technical version of it, at this stage. “I think I meant, for one thing, the obvious point that news should confine itself to what actually happened and why and who was responsible and how it could be avoided or repeated in the future, depending on whether it was a bad event or a good one. It’s my business if somebody hits you over the head and steals your wallet, because the same thing could happen to me. It’s not my business how you responded to it emotionally.
“The other thing I may have meant is this: Feelings are not news, but they are the rightful province of art. If you want to know how it feels to be a young black man watching another black man being tortured and lynched, read ‘Big Boy Leaves Home.’ If you want to know how a poor boy feels when he’s trapped and yearning for a beautiful rich girl, read An American Tragedy. Fiction, when it’s done right, does in the daylight what dreams do at night: we leave the confines of our own experiences and go to common ground, where for a time we are not alone. Where we don’t have to ask how it feels, because we feel it for ourselves.” Amy sat back, happy about what she had just said, although she wished she had come up with some more examples. She hadn’t thought on her feet like this for years. Perhaps ever. Explaining what you said when you were not in your right mind was a challenge.
“Common ground,” repeated Brie. She was about to say something else when Mary Martin warbled again, signaling the end of the interview.
Afterward, vigorously shaking hands with Amy, she reassured her that they’d be doing this again “soon.” She seemed sincere—she seemed downright eager—but Amy didn’t take her seriously. This was Southern California, where all promises were hypothetical. I’ll call you Monday, if I remember to. We’ll do dinner, if I ever feel like it. I’ll drive you to the hospital for your cancer surgery, unless my boyfriend wants to take me to Laughlin.
* * *
When Maxine asked her the next day how it had gone, Amy said fine, nothing special. A week later Maxine told her NPR was running the interview on All Things Considered. “You’re a hit, kid,” she said. “Keep writing, by the way. The Atlantic bought ‘Shadow.’”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Blind Submission
It had now been almost three months since Amy cracked her head on the birdbath, and in that time, and as a result of the accident, she had completed two and a half stories, been
interviewed on radio, and gotten her first acceptance from The Atlantic, which had played tag with her decades ago but never before consummated an adult relationship. Like the kraken, and with that creature’s formidable reach, her old agent had risen from the deep, bringing with her another mythic creature, a Munster, with the power to thrust Amy into the literary limelight, or what passed for the literary limelight in the early days of the twenty-first century. Amy awoke most days feeling perky, for her. While she did not actually look forward to the day, she was curious about what was going to happen next.
She was so pleased by the Atlantic thing and so wrapped up in her third new story that she completely forgot about Carla and her writer’s retreat, so it was a genuine surprise when she got an E-card in her email inbox, inviting her to a “Virtual Gathering.” This turned out to be an online chat thing involving the old workshop gang (Carla, Ricky, Dr. Surtees, Harry B, and Tiffany) and three prospective new students. When Amy called Carla up to beg off she was met with spectacular whining and pleading. One of the prospects was a doctor, Carla said. Amy said that Surtees was a doctor too, and so what. “Another one’s a journalist,” said Carla. “Think about it. I just advertised the retreat a week ago, and we’ve already got two professionals.”
“Carla, I said I’d read their submissions, and frankly, I wish I hadn’t. I didn’t promise any virtual get-togethers. I’m busy. Just have them send me their stuff.”
“Okay, but remember, you promised to aid in the admissions process.”
“Yes, the rigorous admissions process.”
“So I’ll be sending you six stories. There are the three new people, and three of us, but I won’t tell you who.”
“And how many of the six can your retreat accommodate?”
“Three, for now,” said Carla.
“So, just to get this straight,” said Amy, “you’re expecting me to reject three of the six?” This didn’t sound like Carla at all. It didn’t even sound like Amy. Her workshops, virtual and otherwise, were always first come, first served. She never excluded anybody because of an obvious lack of talent. For one thing, she’d go broke, and for another, talent wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Stamina, perseverance, and hunger for criticism were much more indicative of future success.
“Well,” said Carla, “right now I’m limiting it to three. Do your worst!”
“You can plan on it,” said Amy.
* * *
Amy planned to read the submissions as quickly as possible, giving them much shorter shrift than she would if they were actual students in her course. All she had to do was pass/fail: she wouldn’t need to explain herself. For a moment she felt absurdly powerful. This must be how editors felt, the paid readers at the gates of magazines and publishing houses, who got to chuck unsolicited manuscripts in the bin at the first sight of a cliché or misplaced modifier. Of course they were paid execrably, but then so was Amy, and editors had benefits.
Planning to race through the six manuscripts in an hour or so, Amy glanced at each. Per her instructions, these were blind submissions, all double-spaced in Times New Roman 12, with not a name in sight. Still she was unable to avoid identifying a submission by Tiffany Zuniga, which was virtually identical to a piece she’d submitted over a year ago, in Amy’s last workshop. Twenty pages in which a young woman named Maggie, who has lost both job and lover, lolls in bed, loath to rise and face another miserable day. If Amy’s memory served, Tiffany had added a whopping page and a half to the original manuscript. Now it was clear that Maggie didn’t even live in her own place, but sulked in her childhood room, even though she was twenty-five years old. The writing was clean, intelligent, observant, but there was even less narrative pull to these pages than there had been before the latest addition. Over a year had gone by, and she still hadn’t even come up with a title. Amy tossed it on the floor.
She had expected to identify Surtees in a heartbeat, and in fact she did, but she was surprised, in a quick once-over, to see that three of the manuscripts, not just one, were about hospitals. Womb to Tomb had to be the Surtees one. It was yet another stab at political suspense, or whatever the genre was called, the sort of thing they sell out at airports, with red, black, or silver covers and graphics that lean heavily on cross-hairs and the silhouettes of submarines and bombers. In Womb to Tomb, no doubt the logo would be a caduceus entwined by twin cobras with dripping fangs. His last effort had been an anti-HMO novel. Now he was apparently going to do for Obamacare what Code Black: A Medical Thriller had done for the whole notion of managed healthcare: zilch, if Amy had anything to do with it. A brief once-over of these twenty pages showed Surtees planned to bludgeon his readers with medical and health insurance jargon, then jangle their nerves with government conspiracies. True to thriller form, the opening chapter focused on a hapless old woman awaiting a routine pacemaker upgrade, drifting into a terminal Propofol haze while her local Death Board signs her exit papers. Womb to Tomb joined Tiffany’s piece on the floor.
Next was the outline and first chapter of another novel, The Driver, focusing on a romantic sad sack in Revere, Massachusetts who stumbles into participating in a robbery that goes horribly wrong. The writer had deliberately chosen an ordinary working-class character, not very bright but with a sweet streak. His best friend, an unemployed meth addict, talks him into driving him to a convenience store and then, at the last minute, tells him he’s going to rob it. The driver, unable to stop his friend, starts to drive off, when he hears gunfire. He rushes into the store to find his friend wounded by an armed clerk; he goes to drag him away when his friend takes out a gun and kills the clerk. The driver and his friend are both arrested and charged with felony murder. Throughout this chapter, the writer stayed firmly within the driver’s point of view, so that events which could have been rendered simply lurid were dreadfully sad. This one was a keeper.
The second hospital novel was going to focus on a plain, middle-aged, divorced oncology nurse. Amy would have given it a thumbs-up even if it had been poorly written, simply for the quixotic choice of protagonist. Happily, the nurse was mordantly funny, both about herself and about working at Hope Memorial, which she and the other nurses refer to privately as Abandon All Hope. Chapter 1 focuses on a dying child, a deeply unlikeable teen whose only remaining pleasure in life is guilting his distraught, frantic mother. At the scene’s close, the kid drives his mother away with the line, “That makes two of us” (the mother having cried out, “I’d give anything if this were happening to me, and not you”). He looks at Ernestine, the nurse, and asks, “You think I’m a creep, don’t you?” and Ernestine says, “Yes.” Taken a little aback, the kid says, “Well, excuse me, if I didn’t have terminal cancer, I might have been a nicer person,” and Ernestine says, “We’ll never know, will we?” and leaves. Amy put it with The Driver. All she needed was one more.
And it wasn’t going to be Skinny White Chick. Above the title, the writer had typed: “To Whom It May Concern: This is most definitely NOT chick-lit! It’s Bitch-Lit, if you will. It is a rueful, humorous, sometimes bitter, often raunchy look at the plight of the modern American career woman. I promise no happy endings.” Amy threw it on the floor and then, sighing, picked it up again. She’d give it three out of twenty pages and then quit with a clear conscience. A brief scan of these pages revealed the words “mascara,” “strappy,” “chardonnay,” and “yeast,” which she jotted in her notepad for later use. The writer was literate but furious: a fine combination if you’re writing a polemic but deadly if you’re going for frothy wit. The skinny white chick, Margot, when she isn’t writing “brilliant, headstrong short fiction” that never gets published, edits children’s books by day and cruises upscale bars by night, picking up “bad boys.” The walls of her bedroom are plastered with rejection slips and temporary restraining orders.
The last of the six entries wasn’t a chapter at all, but a twenty-page outline, professionally typed and developed. Amy had heard of these, though she’d never written one, because
she’d never had to. She’d gotten her start in an era when all you had to do was send your stuff in and wait for it to come back. Now, unpublished hopefuls needed agents just to get their foot in the door, and in order to get agents, they had to pitch themselves like Slice-O-Matics.
The outline for Caligula’s Scalpel was impeccably formatted and error-free; each chapter was described in such detail that it was possible to read the entire novel in ten minutes, which Amy did. Its eponymous hero was Dr. Caligula Denton, which told Amy that his creator had to be too young to know what Dr. Dentons were. Could this be Ricky Buzza?
Caligula Denton is a “brilliant Boston brain surgeon” who diagnoses himself at a young age as a sadistic psychopath. He devotes himself, in his off hours, to the extensive study of his own condition, which he determines is organic in origin. Not that he has many off hours, since his days are spent mastering neurosurgery “at Olympic levels” and his nights killing people in vicious ways, earning himself the moniker of Hieroglyph because of the symbols he either carves into his victims or displays via arrangement of their body parts, or both. The Boston cops, aided by the lovely Clara McGee on the faculty of “Harvard University’s Department of Criminology,” soon are hot on the trail. All this happens in the first three chapters.
Amy rubbed her eyes and watched Alphonse root at the reject pile, which shouldn’t have smelled inviting, as there were no grease spots or food stains on the printout. Still, after circling the pile and stomping on it with his great basset feet, he lay down on top of it, rolled on his back, and began to writhe ecstatically, crinkling and ripping the papers, making that nasal “ong-ong-ong” noise he always made on his back, which apparently felt divine. He couldn’t be scratching his hide, since the paper was smooth. He displayed great abandon whenever he did this. All dogs were famously attracted to garbage, but only Alphonse could sniff it out in print. She really needed to clip his nails, but the clawing and shredding were immensely satisfactory to witness.
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