“There’s an industry day at the end of the session. 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.”
“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.”
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.
