The Plot

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  PART TWO

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Exile

  Two and a half years later, Jacob Finch Bonner—author of The Invention of Wonder and former faculty member at the at least respectable low-residency Ripley Symposia—edged his elderly Prius into the icy lot behind the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts in Sharon Springs, New York. The Prius, never particularly robust, was trudging through its third January in this area west of Albany (known, somewhat whimsically, as “The Leatherstocking Region”) and its ability to climb even gentle inclines in snow—the hill leading to the Adlon was anything but gentle—had diminished with each passing year. Jake was not optimistic about its survival, or frankly his own while continuing to drive it in winter, but he was even less optimistic about his ability to afford another car.

  The Ripley Symposia had laid off its teaching staff in 2013, abruptly and by means of a tersely worded email. Then, less than a month after that, the program had managed to reconstitute itself as an even lower-residency, in fact an entirely-online-no-residency-at-all program, swapping video conferencing for the now nostalgic charms of Richard Peng Hall. Jake, along with most of his colleagues, had been rehired, which was a definite salve to his sense of self-worth, but the new contract Ripley offered him fell well short of sustaining even his modest New York City existence.

  And so, in the absence of other options, he had been forced to consider the dreadful prospect of leaving the center of the literary world.

  What was out there, in 2013, for a writer whose two tiny patches of real estate on the great cumulative shelf of American fiction were being left farther and farther behind with each passing year? Jake had sent out fifty résumés, signed up for all of the online services promising to spread the good news of his talents to prospective employers everywhere, and gotten back in touch with every single person he could bear to see, letting them know he was available. He went in for an interview at Baruch, but the program administrator couldn’t stop himself from mentioning that one of their own recent graduates, whose first novel was about to come out from FSG, had also applied for the position. He’d chased down a former girlfriend who now worked for a wildly successful subsidy publisher based in Houston, but after twenty minutes of forced reminiscences and cute stories about her twin toddlers, he just couldn’t bring himself to ask about a job. He even went back to Fantastic Fictions, but the agency had been sold and was now a tiny part of a new entity called Sci/Spec, and neither of his two original bosses seemed to have survived the transition.

  Finally, and with a sense of utter defeat, he did what he knew others had done, and created a website touting his own editorial skills as the author of two well-received literary novels and a longtime faculty member at one of the country’s best low-residency MFA programs. And then he waited.

  Slowly, came the nibbles. What was Jake’s “success rate”? (Jake responded with a lengthy exploration of what the term “success” might mean to an artist. He never heard back from that particular correspondent.) Did Mr. Bonner work with Indie Authors? (He immediately wrote: Yes! After which that correspondent also disappeared.) What were his feelings on anthropomorphism in YA fiction? (They were positive! Jake emailed back. What else was he going to say?) Would he be willing to do a “sample edit” of fifty pages of a work-in-progress, so the writer could judge whether there was value in continuing? (Jake took a deep breath and wrote: No. But he would agree to a special fee discount of fifty percent for the first two hours, which ought to be enough for each of them to make a decision on whether or not to work together.)

  Naturally, this person became his first client.

  The writing he encountered in his new role of online editor, coach, and consultant (that marvelously malleable word) made the least of his Ripley students seem like Hemingway. Again and again he urged his new correspondents to check their spelling, keep track of their characters’ names, and give at least a tiny bit of thought to what basic ideas their work should convey, before they typed those thrilling words: THE END. Some of them listened. Others seemed somehow to believe that the act of hiring a professional writer magically rendered their own writing “professional.” What surprised him most, however, was that his new clients, far more than even the least gifted of his Ripley students, seemed to regard publication not as the magical portal it had always represented to him and to every other writer he admired (and envied), but as a purely transactional act. Once, in an early email exchange with an elderly woman in Florida who hoped to complete a second tranche of her memoir, he had politely complimented her on the recent publication of part one (The Windy River: My Childhood in Pennsylvania). That author, to her credit, had bluntly declined his flattery. “Oh please,” she’d responded, “anybody can publish a book. You just write a check.”

  It was, he had to admit, a version of anybody can be a writer that even he could get behind.

  In some ways, things were actually a whole lot nicer on this side of the divide. There were still astounding egos to contend with, of course, and there were still huge distances between the perceived and actual qualities of the stories and novels and memoirs (and, even though he certainly didn’t seek it out, poetry) his clients emailed him. But the honest, direct exchange of filthy lucre for services, and the clarity of the relationships between Jake and the people who came to his website (some of them even referred by clients he’d already “helped”) was, after so many years of false camaraderie … downright refreshing.

  Even with semi-regular consulting work alongside his new Ripley responsibilities, however, Jake couldn’t make things work in New York anymore. When one client, a Buffalo-based writer of short stories, mentioned that she’d recently returned from a “residency” at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, Jake jotted down the unfamiliar name, and after the video call ended he found the website and read up on what had to be a fairly new idea: a subsidy artists’ colony doing apparently good business in a place he’d never heard of, an upstate village called Sharon Springs.

  He himself, of course, was a veteran of the traditional artists’ colonies, which existed to offer succor and respite to serious artists. Back in his own halcyon period just after The Invention of Wonder was published he’d received a named fellowship to Yaddo, and flown out to Wyoming to spend a couple of productive weeks at the Ucross Center. He’d done Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, too, and also Ragdale, and if Ragdale had marked the end of his lucky streak a year after Reverberations was published, then at least he could (and did!) list those august institutions on his résumé and on his website for their sheer writerly luster. At none of these places had Jake ever been asked for a dime of his own money, however, so he had to read deep into the Adlon website before he understood what new entity this place represented: a self-sponsored artists’ retreat, at which the celebrated environment of a Yaddo or a MacDowell was made available, not just to the elite or traditionally advantaged person of letters, but to anyone in need of it. Or at least, anyone in need of it with a thousand dollars per week to spend.

  Jake examined the photographs of the old place: a great white hulk of hotel, listing slightly (or was that merely the angle of the photograph?), and dating to the 1890s. The Adlon was one of several large hotels still standing in Sharon Springs, a former vacation town arrayed around sulfur springs and once dotted by Victorian spa buildings. Sharon Springs was located an hour southwest of its more celebrated counterpart, Saratoga Springs, but had been rather less prosperous even back then and certainly was today. The town had entered its decline at the turn of the last century, and by the 1950s its half-dozen hotels were variously collapsed, torn down, shut up, or withering away as their guests abandoned longstanding summer routines or simply died. Then, somebody in the family that owned the Adlon had come up with this novel idea to avert or at least temporarily delay the inevitable, and so far it was working. Writers had apparently been gathering at the hotel since 2012, paying for the peace and quiet, the clean rooms and studios, and the communally served breakfasts
and dinners (plus lunch in a folksy wicker basket, discreetly left at the door so as not to interrupt the writing of Kubla Khan). They came when they wished, spent their time as they wished, and socialized with their fellow artists if and when they wished, and left when they wished.

  Actually, the place kind of sounded like … a hotel.

  At the top of the web page, he had idly clicked on Opportunities and found himself reading the job description for a program coordinator, on site, to begin just after the New Year. It didn’t mention a salary. He looked up the town to see if it was commutable from the city. It wasn’t. Still, it was a job.

  He really had needed a job.

  A week later he was on a train to Hudson to meet the young entrepreneur—“young” meaning, in this case, a full six years his junior—whose family had run the Adlon for three generations and who’d managed to pull this particular rabbit out of the hat. By the time they finished their meeting at a coffee shop on Warren Street, and despite Jake’s obvious lack of program-directing experience, he was hired.

  “I like the idea of a successful writer greeting the guests when they arrive. Gives them something real to aspire to.”

  Jake opted not to correct this remarkable statement in any of the ways he might have done.

  It was a temporary solution, anyway. Nobody left New York for a tiny town in the exact middle of nowhere on purpose, or at least not without a plan to return. His own plan had a lot to do with the relative rent he was paying in newly fabulous Brooklyn and the one he expected to pay in Cobleskill, a few miles south of Sharon Springs, and the fact that he would be retaining his private writing clients and his gig work for the reconstituted Ripley Symposia even as he received a paycheck from the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts. All of it added up to an exile of a couple of years, three at the most, which was also ample time to begin and even complete another novel after the one he was writing now!

  Not that he was really writing one now, or had the tiniest idea for another.

  The job itself was a kind of hybrid of admissions officer, cruise director, and plant supervisor, but even cumulatively these were not particularly taxing. More onerous, of course, was the fact that he was required to be physically present at the Adlon during the daytime (and technically on call at night and on the weekends), but given the actual labor associated with most jobs, Jake tended to feel pretty fortunate. He was living frugally and saving money. He was still in the world of writing and writers (albeit farther than he had ever been from his own writerly ambitions). He was still able to work on his novel in progress (or he would be, if he had one), and in the meantime he could continue to nurture and mentor other writers, beginning writers, struggling writers, even writers like himself undergoing what might be called a mid-career retrenchment. As he had once long ago opined, in a cinder-block conference room on the old Ripley campus (which, last he’d heard, had been purchased by a company that did corporate retreats and conferences), this was merely what writers had always done for one another.

  The Adlon, on this particular day, had six guest-writers, which meant that the center was only at about 20 percent capacity (though that was six people more than Jake imagined would choose to spend January in a snowbound latter-day spa town that hadn’t even had the good sense to turn into Saratoga Springs). Three of the guests were sisters in their sixties who were collaborating on a multigenerational family story, unsurprisingly based on their own family. Another was a vaguely menacing man who actually lived just south of Cooperstown, but drove to the hotel every morning, wrote all day, and left after dinner. There was a poet from Montreal—she didn’t say much, even when she was down for meals—and a guy who’d arrived a couple of days earlier from Southern California. (Why would any sane person leave Southern California in January to travel to upstate New York?) So far they were a quietly cooperative and nondramatic group, a far cry from some of the intramural insanity he’d personally witnessed at Ragdale and VCCA! The hotel itself was running as smoothly as a hundred-and-thirty-year-old building could be expected to run, and the Adlon’s pair of cooks, a mother and daughter from Cobleskill, were turning out very tasty meals, remarkable given the remoteness of the region in winter. And that morning, as far as Jake knew, the hours ahead promised nothing more than an opportunity to sit in his office behind the hotel’s former check-in desk and begin editing the fourth revision of a profoundly unthrilling thriller from a client in Milwaukee.

  An ordinary day, in other words, in a life that was about to become a whole lot less ordinary.

  CHAPTER SIX

  What Terrible Thing

  The guy from California made an appearance shortly after lunch, or at least after the lunch baskets had been taken upstairs and left by the doors of the writers’ rooms. He was a burly man in his late twenties with tattooed forearms and a kind of swept-aside chunk of hair that always fell back right away. He came storming into Jake’s little office behind the former check-in desk and set his basket down on Jake’s table.

  “Well, this is crap.”

  Jake looked up at him. He’d been deep in his client’s terrible thriller, a narrative so formulaic that he could have told you exactly what was going to happen, and in what order, even if this were the first time he was clawing his way through it, rather than the fourth.

  “Lunch?”

  “Crap. Some kind of brown meat. What is it, something you hit on the drive over here?”

  Jake actually smiled. The roadkill of Schoharie County was indeed broad in its range.

  “Do you not eat meat?”

  “Oh, I eat meat. I don’t eat crap, though.”

  Jake sat back in his chair. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and we can talk to Patty and Nancy about what you like and don’t like. We can’t always guarantee a separate meal, but we want you to be happy. With only six of you in residence now, we should be able to tweak the menus.”

  “This town is, like, pathetic. There’s nothing here.”

  Well, now. In that, Jake’s Californian friend was rather decisively wrong. Sharon Springs’s glory days might have been in the late nineteenth century (Oscar Wilde himself had once lectured at the Pavilion Hotel), but recent years had brought a promising revival. The town’s flagship American Hotel had been restored to a certain degree of elegance, and a couple of surprisingly good restaurants had taken root on the tiny main street. Most important of all, a couple of men from Manhattan, involuntarily separated from their media jobs in the 2008 downturn, had bought a local farm, acquired a herd of goats, and commenced making cheese, soap, and, more importantly, a great big stir in the world well beyond Sharon Springs, New York. They’d written books, starred in their own reality television show, and opened a shop that would have been right at home on the main streets of East Hampton or Aspen, directly across from the American Hotel. That place was getting to be a bona fide tourist attraction. Though maybe not in January.

  “Have you been out to explore? A lot of the writers go over to the Black Cat Café in the morning. The coffee there is great. And the food at the Bistro is excellent.”

  “I’m paying you enough to be here, and to work on my book here. The coffee here should be great. And the food here shouldn’t be shit. I mean, would it kill you to do an avocado toast?”

  Jake looked at him. In California, avocados might grow on trees—literally—in January, but he doubted this dude would approve of the rock-hard specimens down at the Cobleskill Price Chopper.

  “Milk and cheese are kind of the main thing around here. Maybe you’ve noticed all the dairy farms?”

  “I’m lactose intolerant.”

  “Oh.” Jake frowned. “Did we know that? Is it on your forms?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t fill out any forms.”

  The guy flipped back his thick hair. Again. And it fell forward into his eyes. Again. It made Jake think of something.

  “Well, I hope you’ll write down some of the foods you’d be happy to see at meals. I wouldn’t count on go
od avocados up here, not at this time of year, but if there are dishes you like I’ll talk to Patty and Nancy. Unless you want to do that.”

  “I want to write my book,” the guy said, so fiercely he might have been uttering a tagline in an adventure movie, something along the lines of You haven’t seen the last of me or Don’t underestimate what I’m capable of. “I came here to get this done, and I don’t want to be thinking about anything else. I don’t want to be listening to those three witches, cackling away all the time on the other side of my wall. I don’t want to have a bathroom with pipes that wake me up in the morning. And what’s with the fireplace in my bedroom I’m not allowed to have a fire in. I distinctly remember a fire in one of the rooms when I looked at your website. What the fuck is that?”