by Steve Hely
That’s how I felt about The Tornado Ashes Club. Lucy spent the summer editing my manuscript, while I watched Red Sox games in my underwear, indifferent to the outcome. She’d e-mail me a question almost every day. “How did Luke learn Spanish?” “Why doesn’t Silas just explain to the police that he didn’t kill his boss?” “Does a dying deer really smell faintly of cinnamon?” “You use the word sallow four times, and I’m not sure you ever use it right.” She seemed to be catching on to the slapdash nature of my work: “On page 41 you say that Albuquerque is ‘a hot, blast furnace of a city,’ but then eight pages later you say that ‘mountain breezes kept it cool as a treehouse in October.’ ”
Finally I had to tell her she should just do whatever was necessary and stop bothering me with it.
I had nightmares where I saw copies of The Tornado Ashes Club staring up at me from the remainders table, crowded next to other rejects, their covers pathetically desperate, like the faces of misshapen girls at a middle school dance. The image haunted my afternoon naps. It was amazing how quickly my swagger had turned to cowardice.
Then, in June, I got a call from Jon Sturges. When he called I was taking a bath, which is an inexpensive way of eating up time. He started telling a story about how high-born Roman women paid extravagant sums to sleep with famous gladiators, which was interesting but not relevant to anything.
“So, I’m expanding on a new frontier. Really pushing aggressively.”
“Right on.”
In fairness to what would eventually transpire, I’ll note that in his description of his new business plan, Sturges used lots of terms like “malleable” and “freely structured.” So I should’ve realized he hadn’t done the legal legwork. But what he described sounded to me like the kind of low-level, you-don’t-get-caught sort of illegal.
The job he offered me was writing out some sales materials for a mutual fund he had founded. He claimed he had a long list of “serious investors” who were already involved.
“See, I’m great at picking companies, you know? I just have a talent for it. But I can’t always—you know—articulate their strengths in written form. That’s your talent, bro.”
“Right.”
“So, I’ll send you some—you know—basics, and you write it up. Rome—that’s the theme. The strength of—you know— Rome.”
“I think I can do that.”
“We’re really dynamically shifting the way capital is gonna flow, Pete. It’s a fully integrated system. But we need somebody with your kind of focused clarity.”
“How much will you pay me?”
“A thousand dollars.”
“Okay.”
I should stress here that I didn’t know what happened to my writing when I was done with it. I assumed it ended up in some kind of newsletter I never saw.
The truth is, I just didn’t worry about it. On the Web site there were stock pictures of Roman ruins and a place to type in your credit card info. I’d work for one hour every day during the 11 A.M. airing of The Price Is Right. Most of that summer I spent on the couch.
In August, Lucy sent me a mock-up cover design: a tornado that looked like it’d been done in fingerpaint against a green field. The font was simple and all-American, like on an IHOP menu.
11
It’s long been my contention that the most influential man in the history of American fiction was Henry Ford. Ever since the first Model T rolled off the production line, narratives of road trips have been a mainstay of popular literature. One imagines all the drivers of American fiction of the past fifty years on the same freeway. They’d form a traffic jam as congested as downtown Los Angeles at 5:45 P.M., with Sal Paradise leaning on the horn.
Unfortunately, not all authors who take to the road are Homers and Kerouacs, nor is every meandering journey an odyssey. Consider The Tornado Ashes Club, the debut novel of one Pete Tarslaw. Beginning with a gunshot in Las Vegas, Tarslaw launches his characters on a dizzying zigzag trip across time and space that leaves one reaching for the car-sick bag. The convoluted plot is rife with all manner of roadside oddities: French peasants, high school football, blossoming love. But it’s much like a Las Vegas buffet: everything’s there, but none of it’s very good. Tarslaw’s prose seems to never catch its breath. He squanders the reader’s patience by rendering every loose hubcab and half-eaten cheeseburger into a listless rhetorical faux-exuberance, all of it weakly undergirded with a primer of vague Christian metaphor. With a slurry of mixed images and tiresome characters, in language as worn out and withered as the sixty-some-odd bar slattern nursing a cigarette and a whiskey sour at a cheap casino, his is a road trip that makes you wish you’d taken the plane.
—excerpt from Charles Meredith’s “Of Books” column in the San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 2007
There’s a neat book called Panned!: Bad Reviews of Great Works. It’s made up of excerpts from contemporary reviews that completely missed the point. Slams of books, music, art, and movies we now recognize as genius. Like Huckleberry Finn: “Mr. Samuel Clemens, who styles himself ‘Mark Twain,’ has penned a riparian folly which, in its vulgarity and crude language, does discredit to himself as well as to the Negro race, the intended beneficiary of these strained efforts.” And The Great Gatsby: “One hopes Fitzgerald, whose lamplight burned so brightly in This Side of Paradise, can recover from this misstep. For beneath the jaundiced view of American enterprise and the juvenile obsession with the cocktail-and-party set, we sense the hand of a competent writer of romantic fiction.”
Maybe the best one is of Moby-Dick: “It is best read as a lesson in the inevitable failure of a writer of no Ambition. Mr. Melville wastes his labours. He chooses no grand theme, nor bothers much with the human condition, save a few comic sketches of the mad captain. Instead he bores the Public with a chronicle of whale-fishing, accounts of which are already numerous. Those wishing for an education in cetology will prefer Mayhew’s Whales of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.”
There’s a final chapter, too, made up of wildly positive reviews of now-forgotten works: “Odeon Unbound is that rarest of things, a novel in which greatness can be perceived in every sentence. It is our firm prediction that alongside Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson, our children will study the works of Gilbert Pentweed, and his name will be etched in the ranks of literary immortals.”
Aunt Evelyn sent me a copy of Panned! along with a batch of maple cookies. Her accompanying note was full of “buck up” platitudes. She was of course too polite to mention Charles Meredith’s review.
I try not to hate anybody. “Hate is a four-letter word,” like the bumper sticker says. But I hate book reviewers.
Book reviewers are the most despicable, loathsome order of swine that ever rooted about the earth. They are sniveling, revolting creatures who feed their own appetites for bile by gnawing apart other people’s work. They are human garbage. They all deserve to be struck down by awful diseases described in the most obscure dermatology journals.
Book reviewers live in tiny studios that stink of mothballs and rotting paper. Their breath reeks of stale coffee. From time to time they put on too-tight shirts and pants with buckles and shuffle out of their lairs to shove heaping mayonnaise-laden sandwiches into their faces, which are worn in to permanent snarls. Then they go back to their computers and with fat stubby fingers they hammer out “reviews.” Periodically they are halted as they burst into porcine squeals, gleefully rejoicing in their cruelty.
Even when being “kindly,” book reviewers reveal their true nature as condescending jerks. “We look forward to hearing more from the author,” a book reviewer might say. The prissy tones sound like a second-grade piano teacher, offering you a piece of years-old strawberry hard candy and telling you to practice more.
But a bad book review is just disgusting.
Ask yourself: of all the jobs available to literate people, what monster chooses the job of “telling people how bad different books are”? What twisted fetishist chooses such a life?
This
isn’t Don Rickles at a celebrity roast, where everyone’s having a laugh over shrimp cocktail and a Tom Collins. People still quote Dorothy Parker, because she was the last book reviewer who was funny. That was eighty years ago.
Nor do I cut book reviewers any slack for “advancing the arts” or “calling good work to our attention” or “keeping the culture of letters alive.” If a guy drove around your neighborhood with a bullhorn, pointing out which people were too fat, he would be advancing wellness, and calling fitness to our attention, and keeping public health alive. But you would hate him. You would throw rocks at him, as well you should.
Which brings me to Charles Meredith.
Charles Meredith is something of an institution at the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes a weekly column called, with appropriate pretension, “Of Books.” In that space, for seventeen years, he has issued jackass pronouncements in an obnoxious high-English patois of his own invention.
I’d never heard of Charles Meredith before he wrote a review of my book. But since he picked on me, unprovoked, it’s fair for me to pick on him.
It’s not hard. Go ahead and do a Google image search for him. Gaze on the picture of his folds of fat forming oceanic heaves and swells through his turtleneck. Look at the way his neck is sheathed in a foreskin of flesh like an uncircumcised penis. It will be easy for you to envision him as I do: sitting at a restaurant alone, banging his breadbasket against the table to demand more rolls.
Why should Charles Meredith care if I wrote a bad book? Why go out of his way to point it out to people? Maybe he has some psychological problem. Maybe when he was a kid, the cool kids used to call him “fattyfattyboomballatty.” Maybe I should feel bad for Charles Meredith.
But I don’t.
How The Tornado Ashes Club swam into his ken I’ll never know. David sent me an e-mail, with the link and the message “any press is good press.”
It’s not “good press” to have your book described as “a slurry of mixed images and tiresome characters, in language as worn out and withered as the sixty-some-odd bar slattern nursing a cigarette and a whiskey sour at a cheap casino.”
The review appeared about three weeks after my book came out. The morning The Tornado Ashes Club had first appeared on Amazon, it started out at #253,477 in the sales rankings, between The Calendar Stones of North Wales and The Horseman of Alsace: A Novel of the Franco-Prussian War. By the time I got out of the shower, it had jumped to #128,980, I think because Aunt Evelyn and my mom bought copies. A pace of 124,000 spots every twenty minutes was solid, but it tapered off after the first leap. For comparison I checked on Peking, which Lucy was always raving about. We were in a close duel, so I ordered a copy of mine, bumping myself 2,156 slots.
At the downtown Barnes & Noble there was a “Staff Recommends” shelf. Under a copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, “Edward” had written, “A sweeping, powerful love story from one of the all-time best. Full of passionate, evocative prose that veers toward poetry, it touches on all of our most crucial national themes.” When nobody was looking, I swapped in my book—everything still applied.
I never reread my book—huge chunks of it made me cringe —but back home I set it on my coffee table next to a copy of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. They were both about the same size and shape. I think, asked to choose, an illiterate person would’ve picked mine.
And then Charles Meredith had to prowl in and fling his feces. Doubtless Polly saw that, and she and James cut it out, and put it on their fridge, and laughed and laughed and laughed.
So that night I got rocked at The Colonial Boy, and woke up in an apartment in Southie with the sinewy arm of Liz the bartendress across my chest. I’d started hitting on her, I remembered, because I’d asked her if she liked reading books and she said no.
I squirreled out of her bed, afraid that if I turned on the light to find my sweatshirt I’d wake her up, so I went home freezing and minus a well-loved sweatshirt.
The T across the river was full of hollow-eyed commuters who stared at the ground or read. Some of them read Tim Drew and Pamela McLaughlin and one guy had Nick Boyle’s thick latest. But nobody was reading my book.
The train stalled at Charles/MGH with a mumbled announcement over the speaker. I was cold, and my brain scrunched itself into a painful knot, and my stomach felt foul as if filled with fetid pond water.
My moniker was slapped on a book, but none of my problems had changed. Ghosts of literary suicides danced in my head—Hemingway and some French guy with a mustache whom I didn’t recognize.
Soon every copy of The Tornado Ashes Club would do the slow death march to the remainders table and the bargain bin, and then to Buck-A-Book, and then to the pulpery, to be shredded and boiled down and turned into egg crates. There’d be nothing for me but to keep drinking, and grow fat, and keep working for Jon Sturges until I died.
The train doors snapped open, and some sort of blonde aristocrat woman in a stylish purple trenchcoat dashed on. She sat down across from me, opened her heaving leather handbag, and took out a copy of Kindness to Birds by Preston Brooks.
12
Your boss getting shot might sound like a comic dream—for instance, if you work for Donald Trump. But for the hapless Silas Quilter, it’s a nightmare, especially when the cops finger him as the triggerman. The murder is just the starting point in Pete Tarslaw’s debut novel, The Tornado Ashes Club. It sends Silas to the arms—and Ford Maverick—of his storyteller grandmother, who leads him on an escape across twenty states as she tells a tale of her own lost lover. The story can get cloying, and Tarslaw’s awfully ambitious—Mexican ranchera music, World War II, and Peruvian vineyards are all crammed in. But he’s done his research (want to know what Tunisian fishermen eat? pages 213–217). And some of the dreamlike descriptions—an Iowa night is described as “a graceful ballet of grass entwined with starlight”—leave you asking for more. B.
—review of The Tornado Ashes Club, published in the December 8, 2007 issue of Entertainment Weekly magazine
Anyone who’s paying attention in America can tell you it’s strange which things become famous and popular and why. I like to imagine that, around 800 B.C., somewhere in ancient Greece, a guy, let’s call him Linus, wrote an epic poem. It was pretty good, full of adventures and strange animals and sexy goddesses and five-armed monsters and all the stuff epic audiences go for. Linus started orating it, or whatever they used to do. But somehow, people just liked The Odyssey better. No one could explain why. Maybe a particular king or something insisted on the Homer version, and everybody went along. Maybe Homer got there first, or had a better orating voice, or ran a better marketing campaign. But 2800 years later, we’ve all heard of Homer and nobody’s heard of Linus.
You could argue that The Odyssey was the better work. More intelligent or poetic, or addressing universal themes—and that’s why it lasted. But I don’t think so. There’s not much evidence that fame and popularity follow any kind of logical pattern. And who can tell these days anyway? The whole thing’s more or less a crap shoot. For every Charles Dickens who catches a break, there’s probably some guy named Bartles Osbrook who was just as good but less lucky. In some alternate universe they gather and read Osbrook’s classic A Christmas Fable around the holidays.
There are probably twenty books better than The Great Gatsby that we’ve never heard of. The only remaining copies are rotting on the shelves of those crammed used bookstores off country roads where everything smells like sawdust. Nobody’s bothering to read those books. Just because eighty years ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald gave a better interview or had cooler friends, or because he’s made for better biographies in the years after.
If you think I’m wrong, I’d invite you to take a good hard look at what becomes popular. See if it makes any damn sense.
Or consider the example of my own book. The Tornado Ashes Club is a case study in the pinball route to fame.
I’ve mostly cobbled this together from gossip and hearsay, but as I u
nderstand it, there were four distinct stages.
First Stage:
One of the marketing people at Ortolan Press was an insomniac. He lived out in New Jersey someplace, and when he couldn’t sleep he’d go out to the garage and walk a few miles on a treadmill while clicking around on an old TV. One night he got to watching one of these Christian talk shows, paid programming at 3:30 A.M. Around the office they’d been getting memos about appealing to the evangelical demographic, so he figured he’d see what the deal was. It was the Reverend Gary Claine, one of these tanned guys with the perma-grin. Gary Claine’s whole deal is that he used to play tight end for the University of Oklahoma. He still has an athletic energy—from the pulpit he waves his hands all over the place like he’s bidding at an auction. Anyway, the marketing guy watches Gary Claine tell smiley stories about the Good News. And he hears him advertise his magazine, called The Way. The marketing guy thinks that maybe an ad in The Way would be a good angle for selling Christian books. Those seem like the kind of cranks Ortolan’s trying to get at. Maybe they could even send a review copy to the Reverend Gary Claine himself. He jots down a note to himself.
About a month after The Tornado Ashes Club comes out, after it’s been panned by Charles Meredith and reviewed nowhere else, and it’s tanking on Amazon, the British bosses at Ortolan call a big meeting. They start chewing everybody out for not doing a better job of reaching “alternative markets.” They open the room up for ideas.
And the marketing guy stands up. Lucy was there, and she heard him tell about his insomnia, and the treadmill, and the Reverend Gary Claine, and The Way. Why waste our money on expensive ads in the Times, says the marketing guy. These are the customers we’re trying to reach, and we can reach them at cut-rate prices. One of the British bosses nods and says to the marketing guy, “Congratulations, you’ve just saved your job.”
So they take out a full-page ad in The Way. Most of the readers of the magazine are lonesome old women, the kind of ladies with nightstands covered with pill bottles. They can’t tell the difference between a full-page ad in The Way and the explicit blessing of the Reverend Gary Claine himself. So they send their sons-in-law off to buy them copies.
