The Plot полностью

Two and a half years later, Jacob Finch Bonner—author of The Invention of Wonder and former faculty member at the at least respectable low-residency Ripley Symposia—edged his elderly Prius into the icy lot behind the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts in Sharon Springs, New York. The Prius, never particularly robust, was trudging through its third January in this area west of Albany (known, somewhat whimsically, as “The Leatherstocking Region”) and its ability to climb even gentle inclines in snow—the hill leading to the Adlon was anything but gentle—had diminished with each passing year. Jake was not optimistic about its survival, or frankly his own while continuing to drive it in winter, but he was even less optimistic about his ability to afford another car.

The Ripley Symposia had laid off its teaching staff in 2013, abruptly and by means of a tersely worded email. Then, less than a month after that, the program had managed to reconstitute itself as an even lower-residency, in fact an entirely-online-no-residency-at-all program, swapping video conferencing for the now nostalgic charms of Richard Peng Hall. Jake, along with most of his colleagues, had been rehired, which was a definite salve to his sense of self-worth, but the new contract Ripley offered him fell well short of sustaining even his modest New York City existence.

And so, in the absence of other options, he had been forced to consider the dreadful prospect of leaving the center of the literary world.

What was out there, in 2013, for a writer whose two tiny patches of real estate on the great cumulative shelf of American fiction were being left farther and farther behind with each passing year? Jake had sent out fifty résumés, signed up for all of the online services promising to spread the good news of his talents to prospective employers everywhere, and gotten back in touch with every single person he could bear to see, letting them know he was available. He went in for an interview at Baruch, but the program administrator couldn’t stop himself from mentioning that one of their own recent graduates, whose first novel was about to come out from FSG, had also applied for the position. He’d chased down a former girlfriend who now worked for a wildly successful subsidy publisher based in Houston, but after twenty minutes of forced reminiscences and cute stories about her twin toddlers, he just couldn’t bring himself to ask about a job. He even went back to Fantastic Fictions, but the agency had been sold and was now a tiny part of a new entity called Sci/Spec, and neither of his two original bosses seemed to have survived the transition.

Finally, and with a sense of utter defeat, he did what he knew others had done, and created a website touting his own editorial skills as the author of two well-received literary novels and a longtime faculty member at one of the country’s best low-residency MFA programs. And then he waited.

Slowly, came the nibbles. What was Jake’s “success rate”? (Jake responded with a lengthy exploration of what the term “success” might mean to an artist. He never heard back from that particular correspondent.) Did Mr. Bonner work with Indie Authors? (He immediately wrote: Yes! After which that correspondent also disappeared.) What were his feelings on anthropomorphism in YA fiction? (They were positive! Jake emailed back. What else was he going to say?) Would he be willing to do a “sample edit” of fifty pages of a work-in-progress, so the writer could judge whether there was value in continuing? (Jake took a deep breath and wrote: No. But he would agree to a special fee discount of fifty percent for the first two hours, which ought to be enough for each of them to make a decision on whether or not to work together.)

Naturally, this person became his first client.