The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  Ripley cast a big net when it came to attracting students—in recent years the glossy brochure and website had been joined by targeted Facebook ads—but though the applicant pool had certainly swelled, there hadn’t yet been a session for which the number of applicants had been greater than the number of spots. In short, anyone who wanted to attend Ripley, and could afford to attend Ripley, was welcome at Ripley. (On the other hand, it wasn’t impossible to get thrown out once you were in; this distinction had been achieved by more than a few students since the Symposia began, most commonly due to extreme obnoxiousness in class, carrying a firearm, or just generally acting batshit crazy.) As predicted, the group broke down more or less evenly between students who dreamed of winning National Book Awards and students who dreamed of seeing their books in a spinning rack of paperbacks at the airport, and as neither of these were goals Jake himself had accomplished he knew he had certain challenges to overcome as their teacher. His workshop contained not one but two women who cited Elizabeth Gilbert as their inspiration, another who hoped to write a series of mysteries organized around “numerological principles,” a man who already had six hundred pages of a novel based on his own life (he was only up to his adolescence) and a gentleman from Montana who seemed to be writing a new version of Les Misérables, albeit with Victor Hugo’s “mistakes” corrected. By the time they reached the savior of the bottle opener, Jake was fairly sure the group had coalesced around the absurdity of the numerologist and the post–Victor Hugo guy, mainly because of the blond dude’s barely hidden smirking, but he wasn’t sure. Much would depend on what happened next.

  The guy crossed his arms. He was leaning back in his chair, and somehow made that position look comfortable. “Evan Parker,” the guy said without preamble. “But I’m thinking about reversing it, professionally.”

  Jake frowned. “You mean, as a pen name?”

  “For privacy, yeah. Parker Evan.”

  It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.

  “And what kind of fiction?”

  “I’m not so much about the labels,” said Evan Parker/Parker Evan, sweeping that lock of thick hair off his forehead and back. It fell immediately over his face again, but perhaps that was the point. “I just care about the story. Either it’s a good plot or it isn’t. And if it’s not a good plot, the best writing isn’t going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn’t going to hurt it.”

  This rather remarkable sentence was met with silence.

  “Are you writing short stories? Or are you planning on a novel?”

  “Novel,” he said curtly, as if Jake doubted him somehow. Which, to be fair, Jake absolutely did.

  “It’s a big undertaking.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Evan Parker said caustically.

  “Well, can you tell us something about the novel you’d like to write?”

  He looked instantly suspicious. “What kind of ‘something’?”

  “Well, the setting, for instance. The characters? Or a general sense of the plot. Do you have a plot in mind?”

  “I do,” said Parker, with now overflowing hostility. “I prefer not to discuss it.” He looked around. “In this setting.”

  Even without looking at any of them directly, Jake could feel the reaction. Everyone seemed to be at the same impasse, but only he was expected to respond to it.

  “I suppose,” Jake said, “that what we’d need to know, then, is how I—how this class—can best help you improve as a writer.”

  “Oh,” said Evan Parker/Parker Evan, “I’m not really looking to improve. I’m a very good writer, and my novel is well on track. And actually, if I’m being honest about it, I’m not even sure writing can even be taught. I mean, even by the best teacher.”

  Jake noted the wave of dismay circling the seminar table. More than one of his new students, more likely than not, were considering his wasted tuition money.

  “Well, I’d obviously disagree with that,” he said, trying for a laugh.

  “I certainly hope so!” said the man from Cape Cod.

  “I’m curious,” said the woman to Jake’s right, who was writing a “fictionalized memoir” about her childhood in suburban Cleveland, “why would you come to an MFA program if you don’t think writing can be taught? Like, why not just go and write your book on your own?”

  “Well”—Evan Parker/Parker Evan shrugged—“I’m not against this kind of thing, obviously. The jury’s out on whether it works, that’s all. I’m already writing my book, and I know how good it is. But I figured, even if the program itself doesn’t actually help me, I wouldn’t say no to the degree. More letters after your name, that never hurts, right? And there’s a chance I could get an agent out of it.”

  For a long moment, no one spoke. More than a few of the students seemed newly distracted by the stapled writing samples before them. Finally, Jake said: “I’m glad to hear you’re well along on your project, and I hope we can be a resource for you, and a support system. One thing we do know is that writers have always helped other writers, whether or not they’re in a formal program together. We all understand that writing is a solitary activity. We do our work in private—no conference calls or brainstorming meetings, no team-building exercises, just us in a room, alone. Maybe that’s why our tradition of sharing our work with fellow writers has evolved the way it has. There’ve always been groups of us coming together, reading work aloud or sharing manuscripts. And not even just for the company or the sense of community, but because we actually need other eyes on our writing. We need to know what’s working and, even more important, what’s not working, and most of the time we can’t trust ourselves to know. No matter how successful an author is, by whatever metric you measure success, I’m willing to bet they have a reader they trust who sees the work before the agent or publisher does. And just to add a layer of practicality to this, we now have a publishing industry in which the traditional role of ‘editor’ is diminished. Today, editors want a book that can go straight into production, or as close to that as possible, so if you think Maxwell Perkins is waiting for your manuscript-in-progress to arrive on his desk, so he can roll up his sleeves and transform it into The Great Gatsby, that hasn’t been true for a long time.”

  He saw, to his sadness but not his surprise, that the name “Maxwell Perkins” was not familiar to them.

  “So in other words, if we’re wise we’ll seek out those readers and invite them into our process, which is what we’re all doing here at Ripley. You can make that as formal or informal as you like, but I think our role in this group is to add what we can to the work of our fellow writers, and open ourselves to their guidance as much as possible. And that includes me, by the way. I don’t plan on taking up the class’s time with my own work, but I do expect to learn a great deal from the writers in this room, both from the work you’re doing on your own projects and from the eyes and ears and insights you bring to your classmates’ work.”

  Evan Parker/Parker Evan had not stopped grinning once during this semi-impassioned speech. Now he added a head shake to underscore his great amusement. “I’m happy to give my opinion on everyone’s writing,” he said. “But don’t expect me to change what I’m doing for anyone else’s eyes or ears or noses, for that matter. I know what I’ve got here. I don’t think there’s a person on the planet, no matter how lousy a writer he is, who could mess up a plot like mine. And that’s about all I’m going to say.”

  And with that he folded his arms and shut tight his mouth, as if to ensure that no further morsel of his wisdom might slip past his lips. The great novel underway from Evan Parker/Parker Evan was safe from the lesser eyes, ears, and noses of the Ripley Symposia’s first-year prose fiction workshop.


  CHAPTER FOUR

  A Sure Thing

  The mother and the daughter in the old house: that was his writing sample. And if ever a work of prose pointed less to a stupendous, surefire, can’t-douse-its-fire plot it could only be something along the lines of an exposé on the drying of paint. Jake took extra time with the piece before his first one-on-one meeting with its author, just to make sure he wasn’t missing a buried Raiders of the Lost Ark springboard or the seeds of some epic Lord of the Rings quest, but if they were there, in the quotidian descriptions of the daughter’s homework practices, or the mother’s way of cooking creamed corn from a can, or the descriptions of the house itself, Jake couldn’t see it.

  At the same time, it sort of annoyed him to note that the writing itself wasn’t terrible. Evan Parker—and Evan Parker he would be, unless and until he actually succeeded in publishing his threatened masterwork and requiring a privacy-saving pen name—might have dwelt upon his supposedly spectacular plot in the workshop but Jake’s obnoxious student had produced eight pages of entirely inoffensive sentences without obvious defects or even the usual writerly indulgences. The bald fact of it was: this asshole appeared to be a natural writer with the kind of relaxed and appreciative relationship with language even those writing programs far higher up the prestige scale than Ripley’s were incapable of teaching, and which Jake himself had never once imparted to a student (as he, himself, had never once received it from a teacher). Parker wrote with an eye for detail and an ear for the way the words wove into sequence. He conjured his two apparent protagonists (a mother named Diandra and her teenage daughter, Ruby) and their home, a very old house in some unnamed part of the country where snow was general in winter, with an economy of description that somehow conveyed these people in their setting, as well as the obvious and even alarming level of tension between them. Ruby, the daughter, was studious and sullen, and she came up out of the page as a closely observed and even textured character. Diandra, the mother, was a less defined but heavy presence at the edges of the daughter’s perspective, as Jake supposed one might expect in a capacious old house with only two people in it. But even at opposite ends of the home they shared, their mutual loathing was radiant.

  He had been through the piece twice, already; once a few nights earlier in the course of his all-nighter, and again the night after his first class, when sheer curiosity had driven him back to the folders, hoping to learn a bit more about this jerk. When Parker made such sensational claims for his plot Jake had thought inevitably of that body discovered in the sand, aggressively decaying while still illogically in possession of “honeymelon” breasts, and he’d been more than a little surprised to discover that this memorable incongruity had sprung from the fertile mind of his student Chris, a hospital administrator from Roanoke and the mother of three daughters. A few moments later, when he realized that Evan Parker was the author of these particular pages—well written, to be sure, but utterly devoid of any plot, let alone a plot so scintillating even a “lousy writer” couldn’t mess it up—Jake had wanted to laugh.

  Now, with the author himself about to arrive for his first student-teacher conference, he sat down with the excerpt for a third and hopefully final time.

  Ruby could hear her mother, all the way upstairs in her bedroom and on the phone. She couldn’t hear the actual words, but she knew when Diandra was on one of her Psychic Hotline calls because the voice went up and got billowy, as if Diandra (or at least her psychic alias, Sister Dee Dee) were floating overhead, looking down at everything in the poor caller’s life and seeing all. When her mother’s voice was mid-range and her tone flat, Ruby could tell that Diandra was working for one of the off-site customer service lines she logged in to. And when it got low and breathy, it was the porn chat line that had been the soundtrack of most of the last couple of years of Ruby’s life.

  Ruby was downstairs in the kitchen, retaking an at-home history test by her own special request to her teacher. The test had been on the Civil War up through the postwar reconstruction, and she’d gotten an answer wrong about what a carpetbagger was, and where the word came from. It was only a little thing, but it had been enough to kick her out of her usual spot at the top of the class. Naturally she’d asked for another fifteen questions.

  Mr. Brown had tried to tell her the 94 on her original test wasn’t going to hurt her grade, but she refused to let it go.

  “Ruby, you missed a question. It’s not the end of the world. Besides, for the rest of your life you’re going to remember what a carpetbagger is. That’s the whole point.”

  It wasn’t the whole point. It wasn’t any part of the point. The point was to get an A in the class so she could argue her way out of the so-called Advanced American History junior spring class and take history at the community college instead, because that would help her get out of here and into college—hopefully with a scholarship, hopefully far, far away from this house. Not that she felt the least inclination to explain any of this to Mr. Brown. But she pleaded, and eventually he gave in.

  “Okay. But a take-home test. Do it on your own time. Look stuff up.”

  “I’ll do it tonight. And I promise, I absolutely will not look stuff up.”

  He sighed and sat down to write another fifteen questions, just for her.

  She was writing a longer than necessary response about the Ku Klux Klan when her mother came down the stairs and padded into the kitchen, phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, already reaching for the refrigerator door.

  “Honey, she’s close by. Right now. I can feel her.”

  There was a pause. Her mother, apparently, was gathering information. Ruby tried to return to the Ku Klux Klan.

  “Yes, she misses you, too. She’s watching over you. She wanted me to say something about … what is it, honey?”

  Diandra was now standing before the open refrigerator. After a moment, she reached for a can of Diet Dr Pepper.

  “A cat? Does a cat mean anything to you?”

  Silence. Ruby looked down at her test sheet. She still had nine answers to go, but not with the psychic world filling the little kitchen.

  “Yes, she said it was a tabby cat. She used the word ‘tabby.’ How’s the cat doing, honey?”

  Ruby sat up straight against the little banquette. She was hungry, but she’d promised herself not to make any dinner until she’d done what she needed to do, and finished proving to him what she needed to prove. It was the tail end of their grocery week, and not a whole lot in the fridge, she’d checked, but there was a frozen pizza, and some green beans.

  “Oh, that’s good to know. She’s so happy about that. Now honey, we’re almost at half an hour. Do you have more questions for me? Do you want me to stay on the line with you?”

  Now Diandra was walking back to the staircase and Ruby watched her go. The house was so old. It had belonged to her grandparents, and her grandfather’s parents even farther back, and though there’d been changes, wallpaper and paint and a wall-to-wall carpet in the living room that was supposed to be beige, there was still old stenciling on the walls in some of the rooms. Around the inside of the front door, for example: a row of misshapen pineapples. Those pineapples had never made sense to Ruby, at least not until her class had gone on a day trip to some early American museum and she’d seen the exact same thing in one of the buildings there. Apparently, the pineapple symbolized hospitality, which made it about the last thing that belonged on the wall of their home, because Diandra’s entire life was the opposite of hospitality. She couldn’t even remember the last time somebody had stopped by with a misdelivered piece of mail, let alone for a cup of her mother’s terrible coffee.

  Ruby returned to her test. The tabletop was sticky from that morning’s breakfast syrup, or maybe the mac and cheese of last night’s dinner, or maybe something her mother had eaten or done at the table while she’d been at school. The two of them never ate at the table together. Ruby declined, as much as was possible, to place her nutritional well-being in the h
ands of her mother, who evidently maintained her girlish physique—literally girlish: from the back, mother and daughter looked absurdly alike—through an apparent diet of celery sticks and Diet Dr Pepper. Diandra had stopped feeding her daughter around the time Ruby turned nine, which was also around the time Ruby had learned how to open a can of spaghetti for her own damn self.

  Ironically, as the two of them grew ever more physically similar they had less and less to say to each other. Not that they’d ever enjoyed what you might call a loving mother-and-daughter relationship; Ruby could remember no bedtime cuddles or pretend tea parties, no indulgent birthdays or tinsel-strewn Christmas mornings, and never anything in the way of maternal advice or unsolicited affection, the kind she sometimes encountered in novels or Disney movies (usually right before the mother died or disappeared). Diandra seemed to skate by with the barest minimum of maternal duties, mainly those related to keeping Ruby alive and vaccinated, sheltered (if you could call this freezing house a source of shelter), and educated (if you could call her unambitious rural school a source of education). She seemed to want it all to be over every bit as fervently as Ruby herself did.