The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The Hero’s Welcome

  By the time the welcome cookout commenced the following afternoon Jake was running on fumes, having dragged himself into that morning’s faculty meeting after a scant three hours’ sleep. It had been a small victory this year that Ruth Steuben was finally shifting the students who self-identified as poets away from him and to other teachers who also self-identified as poets (Jake had nothing of value to teach aspiring poets. In his experience, poets often read fiction, but fiction writers who said they read poetry with any regularity were liars), so it could at least be said that the dozen students he’d been assigned were prose writers. But what prose it was! In his through-the-night and fueled-by-Red-Bull read-through, narrative perspective hopped about as if the true narrator was a flea, traipsing from character to character, and the stories (or … chapters?) were so simultaneously flaccid and frenetic that they signified—at worst, nothing, and at best, not enough. Tenses rolled around within the paragraphs (sometimes within the sentences!) and words were occasionally used in ways that definitely implied the writer was not overly clear on their meanings. Grammatically, the worst of them made Donald Trump look like Stephen Fry and most of the rest were makers of sentences that could only be described as … utterly ordinary.

  Encompassed in those folders had been the shocking discovery of a decaying corpse on a beach (the corpse’s breasts had been, incomprehensibly, described as “ripe honeymelons”), a writer’s histrionic account of discovering, via DNA test, that he was “part African,” an inert character study of a mother and daughter living together in an old house, and the opening of a novel set in a beaver dam “deep in the forest”). Some of these samples had no particular pretensions to literature, and would be easy enough to deal with—nailing down the plot and red-penciling the prose into basic subservience would be enough to justify his paycheck and honor his professional responsibilities—but the more self-consciously “literary” writing samples (some of them, ironically, among the worst written) were going to suck his soul. He knew it. It was already happening.

  Fortunately, the faculty meeting wasn’t terribly taxing. (It was possible Jake had even dozed, briefly, during Ruth Steuben’s ritual intoning of Ripley’s sexual harassment guidelines.) The returning professors of the Ripley Symposia got on reasonably well, and while Jake couldn’t have said he’d become actual friends with any of them, he did have a well-established tradition of a once-per-session beer at The Ripley Inn with Bruce O’Reilly, retired from Colby’s English Department and the author of half a dozen novels published by an independent press in his native Maine. This year there were two newcomers in the Richard Peng lobby-level conference room, a nervous poet called Alice who looked to be about his own age and a man who introduced himself as a “multigenric” writer, who intoned his name, Frank Ricardo, in a way that definitely implied the rest of them recognized it—or at any rate ought to recognize it. (Frank Ricardo? It was true that Jake had stopped paying close attention to other writers around the time his own fourth novel began to collect rejections—it had simply been too painful to continue—but he didn’t think he was supposed to have heard of a Frank Ricardo. (Had a Frank Ricardo won a National Book Award or a Pulitzer? Had a Frank Ricardo lobbed an out-of-nowhere first novel onto the top of the New York Times bestseller list via viral word of mouth?) After Ruth Steuben finished her recitation and went over the schedule (daily and weekly, evening readings, due dates for written evaluations, and deadlines for judging the Symposia’s end-of-session writing awards) she dismissed them with a smiling but steely reminder that the welcome cookout was not optional for faculty. Jake leapt for the exit before any of his colleagues—familiar or new—could talk to him.

  The apartment he rented was a few miles east of Ripley, on a road actually named Poverty Lane. It belonged to a local farmer—more accurately his widow—and featured a view over the road to a falling-down barn that had once housed a dairy herd. Now the widow leased the land to one of Ruth Steuben’s brothers and ran a daycare in the farmhouse. She professed herself to be mystified about the thing Jake did that got made into books, or how it was getting taught over at Ripley, or who might actually pay to learn such a thing, but she had held the apartment for him since his first year at Ripley—quiet, polite, and responsible with rent were apparently too rare a combination not to. He had made it to bed at about four that morning and slept until ten minutes before the faculty meeting began. It wasn’t enough. Now he pulled the curtains and passed out again, waking at five to begin assembling his game face for the official start of the Ripley term.

  The barbeque was held on the college green, surrounded by the Ripley’s earliest buildings, which—unlike Richard Peng Hall—were reassuringly collegiate and actually very pretty. Jake loaded up a paper plate with chicken and cornbread and reached into one of the coolers to extract a bottle of Heineken, but even as he did a body leaned against him, and a long forearm, thickly covered with blond hair, tipped his own forearm out of its trajectory.

  “Sorry, man,” said this unseen person, even as his fingers closed around Jake’s intended beer bottle and pulled it from the water.

  “Okay,” Jake said automatically.

  Such a pathetically small moment. It made him think of those bodybuilding cartoons in the back of old comic books: bully kicks sand in the face of ninety-eight-pound weakling. What’s he going to do about it? Become a bulked-up bully himself, of course. The guy—he was middling tall, middling blond, thick through the shoulders—had already turned away, and was popping the bottle cap and lifting it to his mouth. Jake couldn’t see the asshole’s face.

  “Mr. Bonner.”

  Jake straightened up. A woman was standing beside him. It was the newcomer, from the faculty meeting that morning. Alice something. The nervous one.

  “Hi. Alice, right?”

  “Alice Logan. Yeah. I just wanted to say how much I like your work.”

  Jake felt, and noted, the physical sensation that generally accompanied this sentence, which he still did hear from time to time. In this context “work” could only mean The Invention of Wonder, a quiet novel set in his own native Long Island and featuring a young man named Arthur. Arthur, whose fascination with the life and ideas of Isaac Newton provides a through line for the novel and a stay against chaos when his brother dies suddenly, was not, emphatically not, a stand-in for Jake’s own younger self. (Jake had no siblings at all, and he’d had to do extensive research to create a character knowledgeable about the life and ideas of Isaac Newton!) The Invention of Wonder had indeed been read at the time of its publication, and, he supposed, was still read on occasion, by people who cared about fiction and where it might be heading. Never once had anyone used the phrase “I like your work” to refer to Reverberations (a collection of short stories which his first publisher had rejected, and which the Diadem Press of the State University of New York—a highly respected university press!—had recast as “a novel in linked short stories”), despite the fact that innumerable copies had been dutifully sent out for review (resulting in not a single one).

  It ought to be nice when it still happened, but somehow it wasn’t. Somehow it made him feel awful. But really, didn’t everything?

  They went to one of the picnic tables and sat. Jake had neglected, in the aftermath of that Heineken theft, to grab another drink.

  “It was so powerful,” she said, picking up from where she’d left off. “And you were … what, twenty-five when you wrote that?”

  “About that, yes.”

  “Well, I was blown away.”

  “Thank you, that’s so nice of you to say.”

  “I was in my MFA program when I read it. I think we were in the same program, actually. Not at the same time.”

  “Oh?”

  Jake’s program—and, apparently, Alice’s—had not been this newer “low residency” type but the more classic drop-your-life-and-devote-yourself-to-your-art-for-two-straight-years variety, and frankly it was also a far more prestigious prog
ram than Ripley’s. Attached to a Midwestern university, the program had long produced poets and novelists of great importance to American letters, and was so hard to get into that it had taken Jake three years to manage it (during which time he had watched certain less talented friends and acquaintances get accepted). He’d spent those years living in a microscopic apartment in Queens and working for a literary agency with a special interest in science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction and fantasy, never genres to which he had personally been drawn, seemed to attract a high quotient of—well, why not be blunt?—crazy in its aspiring author pool, not that Jake had anything to compare that to since every one of the very distinguished literary agencies he’d applied to after graduating from college had declined to make use of his talents. Fantastic Fictions, LLC, a two-man shop in Hell’s Kitchen (actually in the tiny back room of the owners’ railroad flat in Hell’s Kitchen) had a client list of about forty writers, most of whom left for larger agencies the moment they experienced any professional success. Jake’s job had been to sic the attorney on these ungrateful writers, to discourage over-the-transom authors intent on describing their ten-novel series (written or unwritten) with the agents over the phone, and above all to read manuscript after manuscript about dystopian alternate realities on distant planets, dark penal systems far below the surface of the earth, and leagues of post-apocalyptic rebels bent on the overthrow of sadistic warlords.

  Once he actually had ferreted out an exciting prospect for his bosses, a novel about a spunky young woman who escapes from a penal colony planet aboard some kind of intergalactic junk ship, and discovers a mutant population among the garbage which she transforms into a vengeful army and ultimately leads into battle. It had definite potential, but the two losers who’d hired him let the manuscript languish on their desk for months, waving off his reminders. Eventually, Jake had given up, and a year later, when he read in Variety about ICM’s sale of the book to Miramax (with Sandra Bullock attached), he’d carefully clipped the story. Six months later, when his golden ticket to the MFA party arrived and he quit his job—O Happy Day!—he’d placed the clipping squarely on his boss’s desk atop the dusty manuscript itself. He’d done what he’d been hired to do. He’d always known a good plot when he saw one.

  Unlike many of his fellow MFA students (some of whom entered the program with actual publications, mostly in literary journals but in one case—thankfully that of a poet and not a fiction writer—the effing New Yorker!), Jake had not wasted a moment of those two precious years. He dutifully attended every seminar, lecture, reading, workshop, and informal gathering with visiting editors and agents from New York, and declined in the main to wallow in that (itself fictional) malady, “Writer’s Block.” When he wasn’t in class or auditing lectures at the university he was writing, and in two years he’d banged out an early draft of what would become The Invention of Wonder. This he submitted as his thesis and for every eligible award the program offered. It won one of them. Even more consequentially, it got him an agent.

  Alice, it turned out, had arrived at the Midwestern campus only weeks after his own departure. She’d been there the following year when his novel was published, and a copy of its cover pinned to the bulletin board marked ALUMNI PUBLICATIONS.

  “I mean, so exciting! Only a year out of the program.”

  “Yeah. Heady stuff.”

  That sat between them like something dull and unpleasant. Finally he said: “So, you write poetry.”

  “Yes. I had my first collection out last fall. University of Alabama.”

  “Congratulations. I wish I read more poetry.”

  He didn’t, actually, but he wished he wished he read more poetry, which ought to count for something.

  “I wish I could write a novel.”

  “Well, maybe you can.”

  She shook her head. She seemed … it was ridiculous, but was this wan poet actually flirting with him? What on earth for?

  “I wouldn’t know how. I mean, I love reading novels, but I’m exhausted just writing a line. I can’t imagine, pages and pages of writing, not to mention characters that have to feel real and a story that needs to surprise you. It’s absurd, that people can actually do that. And more than once! I mean, you wrote a second one, didn’t you?”

  And a third and a fourth, he thought. A fifth if you counted the one currently on his laptop, which he’d been too disheartened to even look at for nearly a year. He nodded.

  “Well, when I got this job you were the only person on faculty I knew. I mean, whose work I knew. I figured it was probably okay if you were here.”

  Jake took a careful bite of his cornbread: predictably dry. He hadn’t encountered this degree of writerly approbation for a couple of years, and it was incredible how quickly all of the narcotically warm feelings came rushing back. This was what it was to be admired, and thoughtfully admired at that, by someone who knew exactly how hard it was to write a good and transcendent sentence of prose! He had once thought his life would be crowded with encounters just like this, not just with fellow writers and devoted readers (of his ever-growing, ever-deepening oeuvre) but with students (perhaps, ultimately, at much better programs) thrilled to have been assigned Jacob Finch Bonner, the rising young novelist, as their supervising writer/instructor. The kind of teacher you could grab a beer with after the workshop ended!

  Not that Jake had ever grabbed a beer with one of his students.

  “Well, that’s kind of you to say,” he told Alice with studied modesty.

  “I’m starting as an adjunct at Hopkins this fall, but I’ve never taught. I might be in pretty far over my head.”

  He looked at her, his reserve of goodwill, already small, now swiftly draining away. Adjunct at Johns Hopkins was nothing to sneeze at. It probably meant a fellowship for which she’d had to beat a few hundred other poets. The university press publication was likely also the result of a prize, it occurred to him now, and just about everyone coming out of an MFA program with a manuscript went in for every one of those. This girl, Alice, was quite possibly some version of a big deal, or at least what passed for a big deal in the poetry world. The thought of that deflated him utterly.

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine,” he said. “When in doubt just encourage them. That’s why they pay us the big bucks.” He went for a grin. It felt horribly awkward.

  Alice, after a moment, produced her own grin, and looked just as uncomfortable as he was.

  “Hey, you using that?” said a voice.

  Jake looked up. He might not have recognized the face—long and narrow, blond hair flopping forward into hooded eyes—but he recognized that arm. He followed it to its point of termination: a rather sharp fingernail on an extended index finger. There was a bottle opener on the picnic table’s red check plastic table covering.

  “What?” said Jake. “Oh, no.”

  “Because people are looking for it. It’s supposed to be over by the beers.”

  The accusation was plain: Jake and Alice, two obviously unimportant people, had deprived this throbbing talent at the heart of the Ripley Symposia, and his friends, of access to the crucial bottle-opening tool, which in turn deprived these obviously talented students access to their beverage of choice.

  Neither Alice nor Jake responded.

  “So I’ll be taking it back,” the blond guy said, doing just that. The two faculty members watched in silence: again, that back turned, middling height, middling blond, broad shouldered, stalking away, bottle opener brandished in triumph.

  “Well, there’s a charmer.” Alice spoke first.

  The guy stalked off to one of the other tables, which was packed to capacity, people sidesaddle at the ends of the benches and seated in dragged-over lawn chairs. The very first night of the session and this group of brand-new students had clearly established itself as an alpha-clique, and judging from the hero’s welcome the blond guy with the bottle opener was receiving from his table-mates, their censorious friend was its obvious epicenter.

&nb
sp; “Hope he doesn’t turn out to be a poet,” Alice said with a sigh.

  Not much chance of that, Jake thought. Everything about the guy screamed FICTION WRITER, though the species itself broke down more or less evenly into the subcategories:

  1. Great American Novelist

  2. New York Times Bestselling Author

  Or that highly rare hybrid …

  3. New York Times Bestselling Great American Novelist

  The triumphant savior of the abducted bottle opener might want to be Jonathan Franzen, in other words, or he might want to be James Patterson, but from a practical standpoint it made no difference. Ripley did not divide the literary pretentious from the journeyman storyteller, which meant that one way or another this legend in his own mind was very likely going to walk into Jake’s own seminar the following morning. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Evan Parker/Parker Evan

  And lo: there he was, swaggering into Peng-101 (the lobby-level conference room) with the others the following morning at ten, glancing idly at the end of the seminar table where Jake was sitting, showing not the slightest recognition of the person (Jacob Finch Bonner!) who was the obvious authority figure in the room, and taking a seat. He reached for the stack of photocopies at the center of the table and Jake watched him impassively flip through the pages, give them a preemptive sneer, and set them down beside his own notebook and pen and water bottle. (The Ripley Symposia gave the bottles out at registration, the program’s first and final freebie.) Then he fell into loud conversation with his neighbor, a rotund gentleman from the Cape who’d at least introduced himself to Jake the night before.

  At five past the appointed time, the class commenced.

  It had been another moist morning and the students—nine of them in all—began to shed layers of outerwear as the workshop got underway. Jake did much of this on autopilot: introducing himself, sketching his own autobiography (he didn’t dwell on his publications; if they didn’t care, or if they declined to hold his accomplishments in high esteem, he preferred not to see it on their faces), and talking a bit about what could and could not be accomplished in a creative writing workshop. He set some optimistic parameters for best practices (Positivity was the rule! Personal comments and political ideologies were to be avoided!) and then invited them each to say a bit about themselves: who they were, what they wrote, and how they hoped the Ripley Symposia might help them to grow as writers. (This had always been a reliable way to use up most of the inaugural class. If it didn’t, they would move on to the three writing samples he’d had photocopied for their first meeting.)