The Plot полностью

“Evan, I love that you believe in what you’re doing. It’s how I hope all of your classmates feel, or will eventually feel, about their work. And even if a lot of the … the brass rings you’ve mentioned just now are very, very unlikely to happen, because there are a lot of great stories out there and they’re being published all the time, and there’s a lot of competition. But there are so many other ways to measure the success of a work of art, ways that aren’t connected to Oprah or movie directors. I’d like to see lots of good things happen to your novel, but before any of that you need to write the best possible version of it. I do have some thoughts about that, based on the little you’ve submitted, but I have to be honest: what I’m seeing in the actual pages I’ve read is a quieter kind of book, I mean, not one that screams A-list directors and bestseller, necessarily, but a potentially very good novel! The mother and the daughter, living together, maybe not getting along so well. I’m rooting for the daughter already. I want her to succeed. I want her to get away if that’s what she wants. I want to find out what’s at the root of it all, why her mother seems to hate her, if in fact her mother does hate her—teenagers are maybe not the most reliable guides on the subject of their parents. But these are all very exciting foundations for a novel, and I guess what I don’t understand is why you’re holding out for such extreme benchmarks of validation. Won’t it be enough to write a good first novel, and—I mean, let’s throw in a couple of goals we have less control over—find an agent who believes in you and your future, and even a publisher willing to take a chance on your work? That’s going to be a lot! Why put yourself in a position where, I don’t know, it will have failed if the director for the movie is B-list instead of A-list.”

For another long moment, maddeningly long, Evan did not respond. Jake was on the point of saying something else, just to cut the sheer discomfort, even if it meant ending the conference early, because what progress were they actually making, the two of them? They hadn’t even begun to look at the actual writing, let alone to talk about some of the more macro issues going forward. And also the dude was a narcissistic jerkoff of the first degree, this was now undeniable. Probably, even if he did manage to finish his tale of a smart girl growing up in an old house with her mother, the best it could likely aspire to was the same degree of literary notice Jake himself had too briefly enjoyed, and he was completely available to describe, if asked to do so, how profoundly painful that experience, or at least its aftermath, had been. So if Evan Parker/Parker Evan wanted to be the author of the next The Invention of Wonder, he was welcome to it. Jake himself would fashion a garland of laurels for him and throw him a party, and pass along the sad, sad advice his own MFA advisor had once tried to give him: You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.

“It’s not going to fail,” Jake heard Evan say. Then he said: “Listen.”