“Well, that’s good,” said Wendy, his editor. “We want you thinking about the new book, not this ridiculousness.”
“But we’ve been talking about it,” said Matilda. “Wendy and I have, and the team, and we thought it might be time to bring in Mr. Guarise—”
“Alessandro,” said the attorney. “Please.”
“To go through it with us. See if there are any steps we should be taking.”
Alessandro was handing around a spreadsheet, and Jake, to his utter horror, saw that it was a very comprehensive display of TalentedTom’s online activities thus far: every tweet and Facebook post neatly dated and appallingly reproduced, displayed in order of their appearance.
“What am I looking at?” said Matilda, staring at the page.
“I had one of my paralegals do a bit of digging on this guy. He’s been active, at least in a small way, since November.”
“Were you aware of any of this?” Wendy asked.
Jake felt a wave of illness. He was, it was clear, about to tell his first outright untruth of the meeting. It was unavoidable and it was necessary, but it was also excruciating.
“No idea.”
“Well, that’s just as well.”
The assistant stuck her head into the room and asked if anyone needed anything. Matilda asked for a water. Jake didn’t think he could get even that down his throat without spilling it everywhere.
“So listen,” said Wendy. “And I know you’ll forgive me for asking this, but it’s kind of a baseline thing and we just need to hear you say it. As far as this bullshit goes, and I understand that what he’s actually saying is completely vague and nonspecific, but do you have any idea what this joker’s talking about?”
Jake looked around at them. His mouth had gone about as dry as sandpaper. He wished he’d asked for the water.
“Uh, no. I mean, like you said, it’s … what, I’m a thief? Of what?”
“Well, exactly,” said Matilda.
“He does use the word ‘plagiarist’ in some posts,” said Alessandro helpfully.
“Yeah, love that,” Jake said bitterly.
“But Crib isn’t plagiarized,” Matilda said.
“No!” Jake nearly shouted. “I wrote every word of Crib myself. On a dying laptop in Cobleskill, New York. Winter, spring, and summer of 2016.”
“Good. And not that it will ever come to this, but I assume you have drafts, notes, and the like?”
“I do,” said Jake, but he was shaking as he said it.
“I’m struck by the fact that he refers to himself as ‘TalentedTom,’” said Wendy. “Should we infer he’s a writer himself?”
“A talented one,” said Matilda, with extravagant sarcasm.
“When I read that,” said the publicist, whose name was Roland, “I just automatically thought, you know: Ripley.”
Jake, caught unawares, felt the heat rush to his face. The attorney said: “Who’s that?”
“Tom Ripley. The Talented Mr. Ripley. You know that book?”
“I saw the movie,” Alessandro said, and Jake, slowly, let out a breath. Apparently no one in the room seemed to associate “Ripley” with a third-rate MFA program where he’d taught for a couple of years.
“I think it’s kind of creepy, actually,” Roland went on. “Like, even as he’s calling you a plagiarist he’s saying: I’m capable of a lot worse than that.”
“Well, but it’s only sometimes he says plagiarist,” Wendy said. “The other times it’s just the story he accuses you of stealing. ‘The story doesn’t belong to you.’ What does that even mean?”
“People don’t realize you can’t copyright a plot,” Alessandro said finally. “You can’t even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.”
“If you could copyright a plot there wouldn’t be any novels at all,” said Wendy. “Imagine just one person owning the rights to Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. Or Hero raised in obscurity discovers he’s incredibly important to an epic struggle for power. I mean, it’s absurd!”
“Well, this, to be fair, is a very distinctive plot. I think you said yourself, Wendy, that you’d never come across this before, not only in submissions but in your own experience as a reader.”
Wendy nodded. “That’s true.”
“What about you, Jake?”
Another dizzying breath, another lie.
“No. Never came across it in anything I’ve read.”
“And I think you’d remember!” Matilda said. “If a manuscript with this plot had come into my office at any time I’d have responded the way I did when Jake sent us his manuscript. But even if I weren’t the agent this writer chose to send it to, any agent would have been excited about a book with this plot. Eventually, I’d have heard about it just like the rest of us, which can only mean no such book exists.”
“Maybe unwritten,” Jake heard himself say.
The others looked at him.
“What do you mean?” Alessandro said.
“Well, I suppose it’s possible some writer had the same idea for a novel, but never actually wrote it.”
“Cry me a river!” Matilda threw up her hands. “We’re going to give credit to everyone out there who has an idea for a novel and just hasn’t gotten around to writing it down? Do you know how many people come up to me and say they have a great plot for a novel?”
“I might,” Wendy said, sighing.
“And you know what I say to them? I say, ‘Fantastic! Once you’ve written it, send it to my office.’ And guess how many of them ever have?”
I’m going with zero, Jake thought.
“Not one! In almost twenty years as an agent! So let’s say there’s somebody out there who came up with the same plot. Just say! Only he didn’t get around to actually writing his own damn novel and now he’s annoyed because another person, a real writer, did! And probably a lot better than he ever could have. So, tough. Next time maybe do the work.”
“Matilda.” Wendy sighed again. (Despite their current frustration, the two were old friends.) “I completely agree. That’s why we’re here, to protect Jake.”
“But, we can’t stop people from saying crap on the internet,” Jake said bravely. “There wouldn’t be an internet if we did. Shouldn’t we just ignore it?”
The lawyer shrugged. “We’ve ignored it so far, and the dude doesn’t seem to be stopping. Maybe not ignoring it will work better.”
“Well, what would not ignoring it look like?” Jake said. It came out sounding a little harsh, as if he was angry. Well of course he was angry! “I mean, we don’t want to poke the bear, right?”
“If it is a bear. Frankly, a lot of the time, these guys are more of a deer in the headlights than a bear. You shine a bit of a light on them and they run away. Some underachiever might have keyboard courage but if he states or implies a provably false statement of fact, not just an opinion, that’s defamation. They don’t want to get their names published, and they definitely don’t want to be sued. We don’t hear from them again.”
Jake experienced a faint pulse of hope.
“How would you do it?”
“We’d write something official-sounding in the comments. Defamation, invasion of privacy, portrayal in a false light—all viable bases for a lawsuit. At the same time we contact the host websites and the ISPs and ask them to remove the postings voluntarily.”
“And they’ll do that?” Jake said eagerly.
Alessandro shook his head. “Usually they don’t, no. The Communications Decency Act of 1996 says they can’t be held liable for defamation made by third parties. They’re considered a vector for other people’s free speech, technically, so they’re in the clear. But they all have content standards and none of them want to go broke standing up for some anonymous loser who probably isn’t paying a dime for their services, so sometimes we get lucky and it stops there. We like to get the host on our side if we can, because we’ll still want to clean up the metadata, even if we get
the posts taken down. Right now if you Google ‘Jacob Finch Bonner’ plus the word ‘thief,’ this comes right up at the top of the results. If you Google Jake’s name and ‘plagiarism,’ same thing. Search engine optimization techniques can mitigate some of that, but it’s much easier if we have the host helping out.”
“But wait,” said Roland, the publicist. “How can you even suggest that you’re going to sue him if you don’t know who he is?”
“We file a lawsuit against ‘John Doe.’ That gets us subpoena power. We can also serve on the ISPs to try to get the guy’s registrant information, or even better, his IP address. If it’s a shared computer, like a library, we’ll be out of luck, but it can still be useful information. If this is coming from bumfuck nowhere maybe it turns out Jake knows somebody who lives in bumfuck nowhere. Maybe you stole his girlfriend in college or something.”
Jake tried to nod. He had never stolen anyone’s girlfriend in his life.
“And if it’s a work computer, that’s the best news of all, because then we can amend the complaint not just to add the person’s name but also the name of his employer, and that’s quite the powerful lever right there. He’s brave enough when nobody knows it’s him, but if he thinks we’re going to sue his employers, you better believe he’s going to shut up and go away.”
“I certainly would!” said Roland cheerily.
“Well, that’s … encouraging,” Matilda said. “Because it isn’t fair that Jake should have to be dealing with this. Any of us, but Jake especially. And I know it’s been worrying him. He hasn’t said so, but I know.”
For a moment Jake thought he might cry. He shook his head quickly, as if disagreeing, but he didn’t think they were fooled.
“Oh no!” said Wendy. “Jake, we’re on this!”
“Right,” said the attorney. “I’m going to do my thing. That sound you’re about to hear is a deer in the headlights, running away through the woods.”
“Okay,” Jake said with a blatantly false heartiness.
“Honey,” his agent said, “like I said. It’s pathetic, but it’s a point of honor. Anyone who accomplishes anything in this life has someone out there dying to tear him down. You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. You are not to think of this as your problem.”
But he had. And it was. And that was the ongoing hell of it.
CRIB
BY JACOB FINCH BONNER
Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 43–44
Samantha’s father drove her as far as the front door of the hospital. Her mother walked her into the lobby but declined to go farther. It was all a regular ABC After-School Special, except for the absurd amount of physical pain she was in. She’d been hoping for some drugs, but there was a distinctly punitive aspect to the way the nurses, in particular, seemed to handle her labor. In the end, she got nothing until somebody told her it was too late, at which point she got more nothing. To make matters worse—and worse was hardly what she needed—the mother of one of her classmates was in labor at the same time, which meant that the boy, a wrestler with raging acne, was on site, in and out of his mother’s room, walking her down the corridor, and sneaking fascinated looks in Samantha’s direction every time he passed her open doorway.
It was a long and interesting day, punctuated by indignities and agony and the very new and fascinating attentions of the hospital social workers, who seemed especially interested in the question of how she’d be filling out the Baby’s Father line on the forms.
“Can I say Bill Clinton?” she asked between contractions.
“Not if it isn’t true,” said the woman, who didn’t even smile. She wasn’t from Earlville. She looked like she came from money. Cooperstown, maybe.
“And you plan to remain in the family home after your child is born.”
It was a statement. Could it be a question?
“Do I have to? I mean, could I leave?”
The woman put her clipboard down. “Can I ask why you would want to leave the family home?”
“It’s just that, my parents don’t support my goals.”
“And what are your goals?”
To hand this baby off to someone else and finish high school. But she never got that out, because the next contraction hit her like a boulder, then something started beeping on the monitor and two nurses came in and after that she couldn’t remember much. When the pain stopped she was just waking up, it was the middle of the night outside, and next to her bed was something that looked like a portable aquarium, inside of which a red and wrinkled creature was squalling. That was her daughter, Maria, apparently.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
An Unfortunate Side Effect of Success
About a week after their meeting, the attorneys representing Jake’s publisher inserted the following notice in the comments section after several of TalentedTom’s known appearances:
To the person posting here and elsewhere as TalentedTom: I am an attorney representing the interests of Macmillan Publishing and its author, Jacob Finch Bonner. Your malicious spreading of inaccurate information and unfounded suggestion of bad actions on the part of the author are unwanted and unwelcome. Under the laws of the State of New York it is unlawful to make deliberate statements with intent to harm a person’s reputation without factual evidence. This serves as a pre-suit demand that you immediately cease and desist all verbal attacks on all social media platforms, websites, and via all forms of communication. Failure to do so will result in a lawsuit against you, this social media platform or website, and any related or involved responsible party. Representatives of this social media platform have been contacted separately. Sincerely, Alessandro F. Guarise, Esq.
For a few days there was blessed silence, and the dreaded daily trawl of his Google alert for Jacob+Finch+Bonner produced nothing but reader reviews, gossip about casting for the Spielberg film, and an actual Page Six “sighting” of himself at a PEN fundraiser, shaking hands with an exiled journalist from Uzbekistan.
Then, in the space of a Thursday morning, it all went to shit: TalentedTom produced a communiqué of his own, this one sent—again, via email—to Macmillan’s Reader Services but also posted on Twitter, Facebook, and even a brand-new Instagram account, accompanied by lots of helpful tags to attract the attention of book bloggers, industry watchdogs, and the specific reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal who covered publishing:
I regret to inform his many readers that Jacob Finch Bonner, the “author” of the novel Crib, is not the rightful owner of the story he wrote. Bonner should not be rewarded for his theft. He is a disgrace and deserving of exposure and censure.
So much for the deer in the headlights theory.
And so the day unfolded. It was a terrible day.
Within moments the contact form on his author website was forwarding comment requests from half a dozen book bloggers, an interview query from The Rumpus, and a nasty if illogical dispatch from somebody named Joe: I knew your book was crap. Now I know why. The Millions tweeted something about him by midafternoon and Page-Turner was hot on its heels.
Matilda, for one, remained sanguine, or so she was at pains to convey. This was all an unfortunate side effect of success, she said again, and the world—the world of writers in particular—was full of bitter people who believed they were owed something or other, by someone or other. The logic of this being something like:
If you could write a sentence you deserved to consider yourself a writer.
If you had an “idea” for a “novel” you deserved to consider yourself a novelist.
If you actually completed a manuscript you deserved to have someone publish it.
If someone published it you deserved to be sent on a twenty-city book tour and have your book featured in full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review.
And if, at any point on this ladder of entitlement, one of the aforementioned things you deserved failed to materialize, the blame for that must rest at whatever point you’d been unfairly obstructed:
>
Your daily life—for not giving you an opportunity to write.
The “professional” or already “established” writers—who’d gotten there quicker because of unspecified advantages.
The agents and publishers—who could only protect and burnish the reputations of their existing authors by keeping new authors out.
The entire book industrial complex—which (following some evil algorithm of profit) doubled down on a few name-brand authors and effectively silenced everyone else.
“In short,” Matilda said—and not being a natural soother, it came out sounding strained and wrong—“please, do not worry about this. Also, you’re going to get a ton of sympathy from your peers, and people whose opinion you actually care about. Just wait.”
Jake waited. She was right, of course.
There was a keep-your-chin-up! email from Wendy, and another from his contact at Steven Spielberg’s West Coast office, and still others from some of the writers he had once hung out with in New York (the ones who’d made it into the famous MFA program before he had). He heard from Bruce O’Reilly in Maine (Man, what is this moronic trash?) and from a number of his former coaching clients. He heard from Alice Logan at Hopkins, who helpfully listed a number of plagiarism scandals from the land of poetry and mentioned that she and her new husband were expecting. He heard from his parents, who were offended on his behalf, and several of his MFA classmates, one of whom countered with his own stalker: She decided my second novel was a codebook about our relationship. Which didn’t exist, incidentally. Don’t worry, they go away.
At around four that afternoon he heard from Martin Purcell in Vermont.
Someone posted it on our Ripley Facebook group, he wrote in an email. Do you have any idea who’s saying this stuff?
I was thinking, maybe, you? Jake thought. But naturally he said no such thing.
CRIB
BY JACOB FINCH BONNER
The Plot Page 14
