The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

But she couldn’t want it as fervently as Ruby herself did. She couldn’t even come close.

  The previous summer Ruby had gone to work for the bakery in town, off the books, of course. And then, that fall, she picked up a Sunday job for a neighbor, watching a couple of the younger kids while the rest of the family went to church. Half of whatever she made went into the house account for food and the occasional repair, but the other half Ruby wedged into an AP Chemistry textbook, which had to be the last place her mother would ever think to look for it. The chemistry had been a necessary slog the year before, a deal she’d made with her advisor to let her move ahead in her school’s bare-bones science track, and it hadn’t been easy to manage alongside her humanities classes at the community college, the independent French project, and of course her two jobs, but it was all part of the plan she had formed around the time she’d opened that first can of spaghetti. That plan was called Get-The-Fuck-Away-From-Here, and she’d never deviated from it for a single second. She was fifteen now and an eleventh grader, having already skipped her kindergarten year. In a couple of months she’d be able to apply to college. A year from now, she’d be gone for good.

  She hadn’t always been this way. She could recall, without too much mental heavy lifting, a time when she’d felt at least neutral about living in this house and in the orbit of her mother, who was pretty much her only extant family member (certainly the only family member she ever saw). She could recall doing the things she supposed most other children did—playing in dirt, looking at pictures—without any accompanying grief or anger, and she knew enough by now to recognize that as unpleasant as her home life and “family” might be, there were endless versions of worse out there in what she had come to understand as the wider world. So what had brought her to this bitter precipice? What had made her normal child-self into the Ruby huddled over her at-home history test on which so much—in her mind, at least—depended, who (literally) counted the days until her departure? The answer was inaccessible. The answer had never been shared with her. The answer was no longer of any concern, only its attendant truth, which she’d figured out years ago and had never once questioned: her mother loathed her, and probably always had.

  What was she supposed to do with such information?

  Exactly.

  Pass her test. Ask Mr. Brown to write a teacher recommendation (for which, with luck, he’d regurgitate this very anecdote about the girl who insisted on being assigned extra work). And then, take her clearly superior brain out from under that canopy of old pineapples and into a world that would at least appreciate her. She had learned not to expect love, and wasn’t even sure she wanted it. This was the most profound wisdom she’d managed to glean from the fifteen years she had spent in her mother’s presence. Fifteen down. One—please, God, only one—to go.

  Jake set the pages down. Mother and daughter, closely confined, somewhat isolated but hardly hermits (mother shops at supermarket, daughter attends high school and has a teacher interested in her welfare), with obvious and extreme tension between them. Okay. Mother is gainfully (if dubiously) employed and keeping a roof over their head and subprime food on the table. Okay. Daughter is ambitious and aiming to leave home and Mom for college. Okay, okay.

  As his own writing teacher in his own MFA program had once said to one of the more self-indulgent prose writers in their workshop: “And … so what?”

  A plot like mine, Evan Parker had called it. But in fact, was there even such a thing as “a plot like mine”? Greater minds than Jake’s (and even, he was willing to bet, than Evan Parker’s) had identified the few essential plots along which pretty much every story unfurled itself: The Quest, The Voyage and Return, Coming of Age, Overcoming the Monster, et al. The mother and the daughter in the old clapboard house—well, specifically the daughter in the old clapboard house—looked pretty likely to be a Coming of Age story, or Bildungsroman, or maybe a Rags to Riches story—but compelling as these stories could be, they hardly acted as stunning, surprising, twisting and hurtling stories, so compelling in themselves that they could be immune to bad writing.

  Over the years of his teaching career, Jake had sat down with plenty of students who’d possessed an imperfect grasp of their own talent, though the disconnect tended to center on basic writing ability. Many fledgling writers labored under the misperception that if they themselves knew what a character looked like, that was sufficient to magically communicate it to the reader. Others believed a single detail was enough to render a character memorable, but the detail they chose was always so pedestrian: female characters merely described as “blond,” while for a man “six-pack abs”—He had them! Or he didn’t have them!—were all any reader apparently needed to know. Sometimes a writer set out sentence after sentence as an unvarying chain—noun, verb, prepositional phrase, noun, verb, prepositional phrase—without understanding the teeth-grinding irritation of all that monotony. Sometimes a student got bogged down in their own specific interest or hobby and upchucked his or her personal passion all over the page, either with an overload of less than scintillating detail or some kind of shorthand he or she thought must be sufficient to carry the story: man walks into a NASCAR meet, or woman attends reunion of college sorority friends on exotic isle (which, indeed, was how one particular honeymelon-endowed corpse had ended up on a beach). Sometimes they got lost in their pronouns, and you had to go back, over and over, to figure out who was doing what to whom. Sometimes, amid pages of perfectly serviceable or even better-than-all-right writing … absolutely nothing happened.

  But they were student writers; that’s why, presumably, they were here at Ripley and why they were in Jake’s office in Richard Peng Hall. They wanted to learn and get better, and they were on the whole open to his insights and suggestions, so when he told them he couldn’t tell from their actual words on the page what a character looked like or what they cared about, or that he didn’t feel compelled to go along with them on their personal journeys because he hadn’t been sufficiently engaged in their lives, or that there wasn’t enough information about NASCAR or the college sorority reunion for him to understand the significance of what was being described (or not described), or that the prose felt heavy or the dialogue meandered or the story itself just made him think so what? … they tended to nod, take notes, perhaps wipe away a tear or two, and then get down to work. The next time he saw them they’d be clutching fresh pages and thanking him for making their work in progress better.

  Somehow he didn’t think that was going to be the case here.

  Evan Parker could be heard making his leisurely way down the corridor, despite the fact that he was nearly ten minutes late for their appointment. The door was ajar and he entered without knocking, setting his Ripley water bottle down on Jake’s desk before taking the extra chair and angling it, as if the two of them were gathered around a coffee table for a comradely discussion rather than facing each other across a desk with any degree of formality or disparity in (nominal) authority. Jake watched him take from his canvas bag a legal pad, its topmost pages torn raggedly away. This he put on his own lap, and then—just as he had in the conference room—he crossed his arms tightly against his chest and gave his teacher an expression of not entirely benevolent amusement. “Well,” he said, “I’m here.”

  Jake nodded. “I’ve been looking again at the excerpt you sent in. You’re quite a good writer.”

  He had made up his mind to open with this. The use of the words “quite” and “good” had been thoroughly interrogated, but in the end this he had felt to be the best way forward, and indeed his student seemed ever so slightly disarmed.

  “Well, glad to hear that. Especially since, as I said, I’m not at all sure writing can be taught.”

  “And yet here you are.” Jake shrugged. “So how can I help?”

  Evan Parker laughed. “Well, I could use an agent.”

  Jake no longer had an agent, but he did not share this fact.

  “There’s an industry day at the end of the se
ssion. I’m not sure who’s coming, but we usually have two or three agents and editors.”

  “A personal recommendation would probably go even farther. You probably know how hard it is for an outsider to get his work in front of the right people.”

  “Well, I’d never tell you connections don’t help, but just remember, no one has ever published a book as a favor. There’s too much at stake, too much money and too much professional liability if things don’t go well. Maybe a personal relationship can get your manuscript into somebody’s hands, but the work has to take it from there. And here’s something else: agents and editors really are looking for good books, and it’s not like the doors are shut to first-time authors. Far from it. For one thing, a first-time author isn’t dragging around disappointing sales numbers from previous books, and readers always want to discover someone new. A new writer’s interesting to agents because he might turn out to be Gillian Flynn or Michael Chabon, and the agent might get to be his agent for all the books he’s going to write, not just this one, so it’s not just income now, it’s income in the future. Believe it or not, you’re actually much better off than somebody who’s connected, if they’ve published a couple of books that weren’t wildly successful.”

  Somebody like me, in other words, thought Jake.

  “Well, that’s easy for you to say. You were actually once a big deal.”

  Jake stared at him. So many directions to go. All of them dead ends.

  “We’re all only as good as the work we’re doing now. Which is why I’d like to focus on what you’re writing. And where it might be going.”

  To his surprise, Evan threw back his head and laughed. Jake looked up at the clock over the doorway. Four thirty. The meeting was half over.

  “You want the plot, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Oh, please. I told you I had something great I was working on. You want to know what it is. You’re a writer, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, I’m a writer,” Jake told him. He was doing everything he could to remove the offense from his voice. “But right now I’m a teacher, and as a teacher I’m trying to help you write the book you want to write. If you don’t want to say more about the story, we can still do some work on the excerpt you submitted, but without knowing how that’s going to connect, ultimately, within the context of a larger story, I’m going to be at a disadvantage.”

  Not that it makes any difference to me, he added silently. It’s not as if I give a fuck.

  The blond asshole in his office said nothing.

  “The excerpt,” Jake tried. “It’s part of the novel you mentioned?”

  Evan Parker seemed to sit with this very innocuous question for far longer than it warranted. Then he nodded. His thick blond wedge of hair nearly obscured one eye. “From an early chapter.”

  “Well, I like the detail. The frozen pizza and the history teacher and the psychic help line. I get a stronger sense of who the daughter is than the mother from these pages, but that’s not a problem, necessarily. And of course I don’t know what decisions you’re making about narrative perspective. Right now it’s the daughter, obviously. Ruby. Are we going to stay with Ruby all through the novel?”

  Again, that hardly warranted pause. “No. And yes.”

  Jake nodded, as if that made sense.

  Parker said: “It’s just … I didn’t want to, you know, give it all away in that room. This story I’m writing, it’s like, a sure thing. You understand?”

  Jake stared at him. He wanted desperately to laugh. “I don’t think I do, actually. A sure thing for what?”

  Evan sat forward. He took his Ripley water bottle and unscrewed the top, and he tipped it back into his mouth. Then he folded his arms again and said, almost with regret: “This story will be read by everybody. It will make a fortune. It will be made into a movie, probably by somebody really important, like an A-list director. It will get all the brass rings, you know what I mean?”

  Jake, now truly lost for words, feared that he did.

  “Like, Oprah will pick it for her book thing. It will be talked about on TV shows. TV shows where they don’t usually talk about books. Every book club. Every blogger. Every everything I don’t even know about. This book, there’s no way it can fail.”

  That was too much. That broke the spell.

  “Anything can fail. In the book world? Anything.”

  “Not this.”

  “Look,” said Jake. “Evan? Is it okay if I call you that?”

  Evan shrugged. He seemed suddenly tired, as if this declaration of his greatness had exhausted him.

  “Evan, I love that you believe in what you’re doing. It’s how I hope all of your classmates feel, or will eventually feel, about their work. And even if a lot of the … the brass rings you’ve mentioned just now are very, very unlikely to happen, because there are a lot of great stories out there and they’re being published all the time, and there’s a lot of competition. But there are so many other ways to measure the success of a work of art, ways that aren’t connected to Oprah or movie directors. I’d like to see lots of good things happen to your novel, but before any of that you need to write the best possible version of it. I do have some thoughts about that, based on the little you’ve submitted, but I have to be honest: what I’m seeing in the actual pages I’ve read is a quieter kind of book, I mean, not one that screams A-list directors and bestseller, necessarily, but a potentially very good novel! The mother and the daughter, living together, maybe not getting along so well. I’m rooting for the daughter already. I want her to succeed. I want her to get away if that’s what she wants. I want to find out what’s at the root of it all, why her mother seems to hate her, if in fact her mother does hate her—teenagers are maybe not the most reliable guides on the subject of their parents. But these are all very exciting foundations for a novel, and I guess what I don’t understand is why you’re holding out for such extreme benchmarks of validation. Won’t it be enough to write a good first novel, and—I mean, let’s throw in a couple of goals we have less control over—find an agent who believes in you and your future, and even a publisher willing to take a chance on your work? That’s going to be a lot! Why put yourself in a position where, I don’t know, it will have failed if the director for the movie is B-list instead of A-list.”

  For another long moment, maddeningly long, Evan did not respond. Jake was on the point of saying something else, just to cut the sheer discomfort, even if it meant ending the conference early, because what progress were they actually making, the two of them? They hadn’t even begun to look at the actual writing, let alone to talk about some of the more macro issues going forward. And also the dude was a narcissistic jerkoff of the first degree, this was now undeniable. Probably, even if he did manage to finish his tale of a smart girl growing up in an old house with her mother, the best it could likely aspire to was the same degree of literary notice Jake himself had too briefly enjoyed, and he was completely available to describe, if asked to do so, how profoundly painful that experience, or at least its aftermath, had been. So if Evan Parker/Parker Evan wanted to be the author of the next The Invention of Wonder, he was welcome to it. Jake himself would fashion a garland of laurels for him and throw him a party, and pass along the sad, sad advice his own MFA advisor had once tried to give him: You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.

  “It’s not going to fail,” Jake heard Evan say. Then he said: “Listen.”

  And then he spoke. He spoke and spoke, or more precisely, he told and told. And as he told it Jake felt both of those indelible women enter the room and stand bleakly on either side of the doorway, as if daring the two men to try to escape them. Jake had no thought of escape. He had no thought of anything but this story, which was none of the great plots—Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth (not really Rebirth), Overcoming the Monster (not really Overcoming the Monster). It was something
new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people. That was going to be, as his terrible student had so recently said, every book group, every blogger, every person out there in the vast archipelago of publishing and book reviewing, every celebrity with a bespoke book club of her own, every reader, everywhere. The breadth of it, the wallop of it, this out-of-nowhere and outrageous story. When his student finished talking, Jake wanted to hang his head, but he couldn’t show what he felt, the horror of what he felt, to the justly arrogant asshole who would one day, he now felt certain, become Parker Evan, the pseudonymous author of this stunning first novel, catapulted onto the top of the New York Times bestseller list via viral word of mouth. He couldn’t. So he nodded and made some suggestions about how to gradually bring the mother’s character into the foreground, and a couple of ways to consider developing and adapting the narrative perspective and the voice—all pointless, all thoroughly irrelevant. Evan Parker had been entirely correct: the worst writer on the planet could not mess up a plot like this. And Evan Parker could write.

  After he’d gone, Jake went to the window and watched his student walk away in the direction of the dining hall, which was on the far side of a small grove of pine trees. Those trees, he’d never noticed, formed a kind of opaque obstacle through which the lights of the campus buildings on the far side could barely be seen, and yet everyone went through them instead of around, every single time. Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Words he had known forever, but never, until this moment, truly understood.

  His own pathway had been lost a long time ago, and there was no chance, no chance at all, of finding it again. The novel-in-progress on his laptop was not a novel, and it was hardly in progress. And any ideas he might have had for another story would, from this afternoon on, suffer the fatal impact of not being the story he had just been told, in his temporary cinder-block office in a third-rate MFA program that nobody—not even its own faculty—took seriously. The story he had just been told, that was the only story. And Jake knew that everything the future Parker Evan had bragged about his novel’s future was absolutely going to happen. Absolutely. There would be a battle to publish it, and then more battles to publish it all around the world, and another battle to option it for film. Oprah Winfrey would hold it up to the cameras, and you would see it on the table closest to the front door of every bookstore you walked into, likely for years to come. Everyone he knew was going to read it. Every writer he’d competed with in college and envied in graduate school, every woman he’d slept with (admittedly not many), every student he’d ever taught, every Ripley colleague and every one of his former teachers, and his own mother and father who never even read books, who’d had to force themselves to read The Invention of Wonder (if, indeed, they actually had read it—he’d never made them prove it), not to mention those two jokers at Fantastic Fictions who had missed a chance to represent a novel that became a Sandra Bullock movie. Not to mention Sandra Bullock herself. Every last one of them would buy it and borrow it and download it and lend it and listen to it and gift it and receive it, the book this arrogant, piece of shit, undeserving, son of a bitch Parker Evan was writing. That fucking asshole, Jake thought, and immediately he was assailed by the fact that “fucking asshole” was a pathetic choice for someone of his supposed ability when it came to wielding words. But it was all he could come up with at that particular moment.