How I Became a Famous Novelist (31 page)

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Authors: Steve Hely

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You maybe have seen this guy on
Fox News
. They love him there. He’s got long hair and he always wears a scarf, and he’s very pretty. His big idea, the idea that got him so much attention, is
free market criticism
.

Basically, he doesn’t believe in literary merit or anything like that. According to him, the only way to judge a book, or
any work of art, is by how popular it is. “Any other method,” he says, “is nothing more than elitism.”

When he got to Granby he sent me a very kind note. He said he was impressed by my “eye for the marketplace,” and he invited me out to join him for lunch.

MY LUNCH WITH MICHAEL MINTZ

I had him meet me at Stackers, for nostalgia’s sake. We both ordered Meaty Meat Combos, and he dove into his with manic English energy.

He told me he taught English 10B now, a class I myself had taken. I asked if they were up to
Middlemarch
yet.

“Oh no,” he said, “that’s been completely cut out. We’re reading
The Diary of Penelope Smoot
. Marvelous book—in the 1870s it outsold
Middlemarch
threefold. It’s a servant’s narrative of her cruel mistress, sort of a
Devil Wears Prada
of its day.”

He put his sandwich down and clasped his hands together. “What I ask students is—why? Why is a book so popular? What does it touch? Because people are the judge of books. Not academics. Not reviewers. People.”

This point got him very agitated. He started to go off on how stupid academics were.

“Why should we trust the ethereal ever-changing whims of a self-appointed elite?” he said. “A hundred years ago, the ‘learned professors’ would’ve had us all bogged down in Latin verse and racialist studies of man. I say throw out the theory. Let’s look at what’s quantifiable. What can be measured. What the People want. There’s no such thing as an ‘underappreciated’ novelist. Books are inexpensive to produce, inexpensive to buy—they’re
an almost perfect free market, perfectly efficient, and they resolve themselves.”

He went on in this vein for a while.

“But this is an idea that academics simply can’t grasp. Try telling this to Harold Bloom at that lunatic asylum they run down in New Haven. Did you know,” he said, “there was outrage—outrage—among a certain set of the Granby campus over signing me? Why? Because I was expensive! Well, absolutely! I’m good at what I do, and this is a free market! That’s why I came to the United States at all—I’m not coming for free, am I? But academics, of course, are simply not used to competing in a market like that.

“See, you, I think, grasp this.” The reason he’d invited me out here, it turned out, was that he wanted me to donate my papers to Granby. “We’re going to start a new archive on all this. This is the future of literary studies. Market motive. The long tail. Profit-taking.”

Then he started talking about Melville. “Think of Melville,” he said. “Why did he write?
For money
. One reason only. Money.”

“But wasn’t
Moby-Dick
a failure, moneywise?” I asked.

“Of course. We don’t read
Moby-Dick
in my class,” he said. “We read
Typee
. Huge best seller in its day. Full of cannibals. Look,” he said, “the novel was once a populist form, but these days it’s like opera, kept alive by foundations and a few wealthy patrons. It can’t sustain itself. If it wasn’t for the Guggenheims and the MacArthurs, Thomas Pynchon would have to write for
CSI: Miami
and Cormac McCarthy would be a blackjack dealer.”

Mintz went on—he was really worked up. “But what isn’t dead is
story
. Please! Tell me a story! Everyone is begging! Look
at the tabloids—Britney, Hazel Hollis, whatnot—they tell a story!

“What you should do now, of course,” he said, “is write a memoir. Far and away the most popular genre of our time. Nothing compares. The novel’s in the ash heap.”

So that’s what I decided to do. I decided to write a memoir.

But I resolved to make it as true as possible. I’d tell it the way it had happened. I’d get to the meat as efficiently as possible, cutting out the middle parts I’d learned to fill with lies and spackle. To tell my story, I’d need to include some examples of bullshit, but I’d leave those clearly cordoned off.

Here it is. I even managed to include a story about a murder.

Apologies to those who don’t come off so well. But I get it as badly as anyone.

Michael Mintz was right—people do want memoirs. If I told you the advance I got for this thing you’d vomit with disgust.

I wrote most of it down at Sree’s, after my house arrest was over. I’d drive down 93 and chat with Sree for a while. We’d talk about
Ghostbusters
. He told me the old man in the Patriots jacket had died. I’d order a fish fry and type.

During the time it took me to write this, I only read two books.

The first I found one day at the Stop & Shop. It was called
The Many Passions of the Bloodsweeps.
On the cover are the two impressively bosomed Bloodsweep sisters, Xenia and
Eustacia, in the respective embraces of Captain Topwater and Fermenteen Adanock. How this book compares to others in its genre I’m not sure, but there are some exquisite lines, like:
It was there, out in the poorly roofed bothy, between pitchforks and heaps of peat moss, pushed up against cracking oak boards, that Lady Xenia had first found the flower of her ladyhood blossoming, first felt the ache of woman, and first found its one effective salve—the arms of a boy, coiled with formations of muscle hewn from his labor.

But the important thing is that this book was written by my former coworker Alice Dwyer, and I’d like to make up for some childish pranking on my part by recommending it here.

The second book I read was the one Lucy had given me a long time ago:
Peking
by Bill Lattimore.

Peking
follows two characters. The first is a hunter-gatherer who’s traveling across a valley 300,000 years ago. The second is an American paleontologist, Charles Naughton, working in China, who discovers the first man’s skull in 1937. It’s the story of the fossil known as Peking Man.

I’d heard of Peking Man, in passing, in some class or another. But when I was finished reading
Peking,
I felt I had to fling the book across the room, to get it away from me, like it was radioactive.

That’s how powerful it was. It might be my special curse that I could tell just how good it was.

The book follows the story of the nameless man, who became a fossil. But it’s not all
Clan of the Cave Bear
stuff—the language has this unbelievable resonance, it’s like reading your own dream. The novel also tells the story of Naughton, who digs
up this fossil, millennia later, just before the Japanese invade. It’s two tiny stories, really, but somehow, together they slice a cross section of the whole of human experience.

It’s a book about searching, and losing things. It’s about human connections, how tangled we are with each other. How we struggle and grapple and claw our way across the earth. There are scenes in it, sentences even, that seem realer to me than my own memory—the man feeling a burning in his throat that his child has, too. Naughton turning the dust on his hands into mud as he pours a trickle of water down his arms. It’s about fear and seizing. The way you have to settle. The way we’re all cursed with an idea of perfect when the world is so messy. How there’s never enough of anything. Mostly it’s simple, tiny scenes—there’s the Japanese invasion, but it comes in a broken-down truck, the skinny officer trying to hide how bad he has it. There’s a tiger, but he’s seen in snatches and glimpses and a quiver on the skin and when they finally kill him, his flesh hangs in the sun and gets pecked away by birds and flies, viscus drying into dust. You can feel thumbs pressing against rocks, and you’re made to feel this stress, this weight we all shoulder, and you can feel the desperation to keep digging, to break through, to transcend the earth. As if there might be something other than the earth.

You get lost in the language of it, but not because it’s trying too hard. It’s not. What it’s really about—and I thought about this for a whole day, sitting at the bar at Wonderland—is how the cruelties we inflict on each other start out so small but become inevitable. It’s about what kind of creatures we are and how we came to be this way. These fictional characters that
only exist as words on a page somehow seem to know better than I do how to live your life. That the only way to live is to lose yourself.

I can’t even describe it right. And I won’t bother excerpting it here. Go find it.

I wish I’d written something that good.