How I Became a Famous Novelist (30 page)

“You wrote your book to have a joke. To fool people. To impress a few girls and make a buck. You’re like a naughty boy who apes the principal so he can get a few laughs.

“All right. Well let me tell you why I wrote my books.

“In 1653, England was falling apart. Young men like you were running about, smashing churches, tearing down altars. Laughing. Throwing mud.

“But in that year, in a place called Stanton Harold, a man built a church. There’s a plaque in that church. I’ve seen it. And here’s what it says.”

Preston Brooks closed his eyes and declaimed. If you haven’t seen the video, and you want to know what it sounded like, then read this next paragraph slowly and precisely, in a booming preacher voice:

“In the year 1653, when across the nation all things sacred were being demolished and profaned, this church was built by Sir Robert Shirley. It is his special praise to have done the best of things in the worst of times. And to have hoped in the most calamitous.

“To do the best of things in the worst of times,” said Preston. “To hope in the most calamitous. That’s why I write, young man.

“Are my efforts adequate? Are my books good enough? True enough? Do they capture what it feels like to be a widow who lost her husband in a foolish war? Or a teacher who sees her classroom flooded with swamp water? No. Hell no.

“But every day I sit down at my typewriter. Every day. And I make an honest try. Can you say that?”

He paused here.

My
Third Joke
: “Well, no, I don’t use a typewriter.”

No one laughed.

Preston breathed in through his nose.

“I make an honest try. Because I’m a writer. And that’s
what a writer does. That’s what a human being does. To try and capture this folly we call the world. This joy and this sorrow we call life. I write, sir.

“And if you think all my work is some trick, or some folly, well then let me say this so you can understand: if you think I’m a silly old man who still believes in silly nonsense like truth and love and beauty and honor and pride and sorrow and joy—
you’re damn right I do
.”

So, okay. Given a few seconds, given an interjection from Ted or a station break or something, I could’ve thought of a response. I could’ve hit back. I bet I could’ve even made a fourth, and this time, good, joke.

I could’ve won the crowd back. I know it.

But there wasn’t time.

Before I could think, before I could move, before I could figure out an appropriate expression and shift my face into it, I heard it.

It started snapping out from the back of the room. Patches of noise expanded and came together and grew stronger.

It’s not that I couldn’t believe it at first. But it took a few key seconds of neurons firing before I realized what it meant. My body figured it out first, actually, because suddenly my skin got blasted with sweat.

The crowd was erupting. Thundering, exhilarated, rapturous applause.

I looked up at the faces that blinded me like flashes. Through them, somehow, I made out the tan skirt girl, beating her hands, applauding as fast and as forcefully as she could.

They were with him. All of them. The ranchers, the intellectuals, everybody.

Something occurred to me then:
maybe there wasn’t something wrong with Preston Brooks. Or with the people who loved him. Maybe there was something wrong with me.

I felt a terrible, wrenching feeling in my stomach.

It wasn’t from the Dairy Queen.

21

Do you remember when we went to the old Presbyterian church? Grandmother said. The church up in Gethsemene? Up in that notch in the mountains that they called a village?

Yes, said Silas. I remember. I played in the rhododendrons. Pretended they were a cave. Pretended they were a pirate’s cave and I was burying treasure.

That’s right, said Grandmother, and she smiled. That’s right. Do you remember why we went up there?

For the funeral, Silas said. He remembered.

Remembered the touch of old sorrowful hands, pressing against his scalp. Remembered the sight of somber nods, passing one another in the pews and the aisles. Remembered the taste of maple syrup, poured over pancakes at a mournful breakfast.

For the funeral of my cousin, he said.

That’s right, said Grandmother. Poor girl. Poor girl burned to death, in a fire. Closed casket, shame to think. Pretty face like hers. “Amazing Grace” never sounded quite the same, not after she was gone. That voice of hers. That face.

But the choir sang it anyway, said Silas.

So they did, said Grandmother. So they did. And do you remember what you said to me, when they were finished singing?

I said it made my heart shake, Silas said.

That’s right. That’s right. It made your heart shake. And do you remember, Silas, what I told you when you said that?

You said—and Silas trembled, to think of the memory coming back. You said that’s how you know something’s true. You said that’s how you know something’s really true. When it makes your heart move inside you. That’s when you know it’s true.

—excerpt from
The Tornado Ashes Club
by Pete Tarslaw

An interesting fact about the US Attorney’s Office in Boston is that they serve good coffee, Bay State Bean or something. Aunt Evelyn was there with me, and she seemed indifferent to it, but she has a very refined palate.

They had us sitting on blue plush chairs in a little lobby, which made the proceedings seem not too serious. There were even magazines, albeit boring ones:
Massachusetts Lawyer
and so forth. After about fifteen minutes of waiting I reached for one, but Aunt Evelyn looked over at me and shook her head. And certainly it wouldn’t have helped if I’d been casually reading
Massachusetts Lawyer
when the prosecutors came in. The coffee was comfort enough.

Luckily for me, Aunt Evelyn was back to being kick-ass. She’d shown up for our meeting in an ageless gray wool lawyer suit. The frilly white-collar thing didn’t soften her at all—she looked like an East German torturess.

You may wonder why the engines of federal justice were turning in such a way in that it required my aunt to drive down from Vermont wearing a suit. And even now all the details have not been explained to my satisfaction. But Aunt Evelyn had made some calls and learned that the situation was indeed suit-wearing serious.

HOW WE’D ENDED UP HERE

An elderly Italian woman in an assisted living facility in Chelmsford received in the mail a packet of information about a mutual fund company called Via Appia.

She’d heard of mutual funds, and this one cited some intelligent-sounding ancient Roman analogies that warmed her heart and inspired confidence.

So she sent them all her money, which wasn’t much. Via Appia had invested all of it in a brine shrimp company, without bothering about the necessary regulations or paperwork. The money never came back.

The misfortune would’ve been this poor woman’s to bear alone, except that her son happened to be a Massachusetts state senator and the chairman of the Transportation Committee.

So the chairman called the attorney general, only to learn to his great indignation that defrauding old people in this particular way wasn’t really a crime, at least not a state crime, so then he called the governor and made some irresponsible threats about highway funding. Then the governor called the US attorney.

This chain of phone calls ended with state troopers tracking down Jon Sturges. They did so in a cloddish enough fashion that Jon Sturges moved to the Cayman Islands. He didn’t, however, allot much time to pack.

So the troopers found some pay stubs and such, which led them to my computer, which contained the very letter this elderly woman in Chelmsford had received. It had gone to some 200,000 nursing home residents, making it almost certainly the piece of my writing with the widest readership.

To be honest, after what had happened to me in Texas, I was numb to all this. I can’t really remember feeling much passion either way about it.

Maybe a part of me was almost happy about it, happy the way you are when you get the punishment you know you deserve.

Maybe that’s what made the coffee taste so good.

Finally the prosecutor came out and led us in. She wasn’t even slightly intimidating—she introduced herself as Carolyn and she couldn’t have been over thirty. She led us into a perfectly bland conference room. There was another prosecutor there, Mike, who was huge and buff, but in a going-to-the-gym-too-much way not in a busting-heads way.

There was a tape recorder, too. Aunt Evelyn took out her own tape recorder and put it next to theirs. “I trust no one objects?” This seemed to intimidate Mike and Carolyn, but they didn’t object.

Then there was a round of legal discussion between Mike and Carolyn and Aunt Evelyn. I’d been firmly instructed to stay out of it, so I did. If they included all that preliminary stuff in
Law & Order,
each episode would have to be nine hours long.

Then Mike was allowed to talk to me.

“Mr. Tarslaw, we don’t want to make a bigger deal out of this than it has to be. I can tell you quite explicitly that our goal is to bring charges against Mr. Sturges. Not against you or Mr. Mausbaumer.”

“Mr. Mausbaumer?”

“Hobart Mausbaumer. He’s your roommate, is he not?”

“Yeah, Hobart. He doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

Carolyn opened a folder and handed a paper to Mike, who looked it over.

“On 5/06/08, when our agents visited 1815 Lindsay Street, Apartment Five, to execute a warrant on your computer, Mr. Mausbaumer informed them unprompted that he had provided you with an unscheduled pharmaceutical, Reutical. At that point he was advised of his legal rights and declined counsel.”

Mike looked up. “He’s described here as being
very agitated and upset
.”

“Goddamn it Hobart!”

Aunt Evelyn didn’t break. “I’d like to state clearly that this is new information. We’re here to discuss a proffer for a charge of mail fraud—”

“Look,” Carolyn said, “we’re not the FDA. Reutical—it’s not our business. You know the pressure we’re under. We just want to get this concluded so we can pursue Mr. Sturges.”

Then there was another round of legal discussion. Seriously, if
Law & Order
were even slightly accurate it would be crushingly dull.

The end result of all this is that I had to answer a few questions. Did I know Mr. Jonathan Sturges. Had I been in the employ of Via Appia Funds. Had I written documents on behalf of Via Appia Mutual Funds. So forth. There was only one that threw me.

“Do you know Mr. Hoshi Tanaka?”

“Wait—who?”

“Mr. Hoshi Tanaka. He’s Mr. Sturges’s partner.”

“Is he a Japanese guy who goes to Wharton?”

“I have an address here of 65 North 34th Street, Apartment Six, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.”

“Christ.”

“Do you know him?”

“No . . . I mean, no, I’ve never met him. I wrote his business school application essay.”

More legal discussion. Carolyn handed Aunt Evelyn a document. She read it over. I signed it.

The end of all this was I was sentenced to six months of house arrest. But—thank God for Aunt Evelyn—I wouldn’t have to wear one of those ankle bracelet things.

The house in which I was under house arrest was actually a condo. A move away from Hobart seemed like a good idea.

So I bought a one-bedroom place on Revere Beach. I had a view of the Atlantic after all. But if you’ve ever been to Revere Beach, you’ll realize this was not quite a home from the back of the
New York Times Magazine.
It’s one of those faded resort towns where framed pictures from century-old postcards are now unrecognizable. On the beach, chunky, grease-fattened seagulls pick their way through the waste of used condoms and torn-up lottery tickets, and Ziploc bags flap from the crevices in the wooden benches. Down the road is the dog track, Wonderland, the most ironically named place in the world, a hangout for degenerates who can’t afford a bus ticket to the Indian casino.

Still, I paid for my one-bedroom up front, in cash, because
The Tornado Ashes Club
kept selling.

“Any press is good press,” and there was plenty. Preston’s tirade against me was replayed on
Fresh Air,
and, I’m told—although I couldn’t watch—that the old bastard went on
Charlie Rose
. Once the criminal element was revealed, it was like a whole new basting and everybody went back for more. My name became a touchstone for pundits arguing about the vapidness of my generation and the demolition of standards.

The whole business raged on the Internet as well. I stopped Googling myself, out of sheer exhaustion, when somebody
discovered I’d plagiarized passages from
Hearts of Ice and Blubber.
They had to fire David Borer for lousy editing after that came out, and what became of him I don’t know. Lucy got his job. She also hooked up with Josh Holt Cready at a party.

My royalty checks got even bigger after the
Vanity Fair
article came out. I can’t blame them for doing the piece—young literary prodigy turned mutual fund con artist and plagiarist is kind of a home-run story. But I wasn’t thrilled with whom they chose to write it. Obviously, I’m no expert on ethics, but if Pamela McLaughlin’s going to do an “in-depth investigation” of me, she should at least mention our night of passion at the W.

But whatever—it sold books. Things weren’t so bad, really. I’d sit around and watch TV. Kelly’s Roast Beef was within my 2,000-foot restriction, so I ate a lot of clam strips.

Aunt Evelyn still believed in me. So much so, in fact, that she worked an “educational exceptions” provision into my plea bargain. If I wanted to leave my home for “legitimate educational purposes,” I just had to send a petition to Carolyn.

I only did this once, and it was to visit my alma mater.

Granby College had, at great expense and with enormous fanfare, hired away from Oxford this British professor of English Literature named Michael Mintz.