Jake remembered the day a certain key moment in The Invention of Wonder had suddenly been there with him, in the world—no preamble, no warning—and despite the fact that this had never happened to him before, his very first thought in the instant that followed its appearance had been:
Grab it.
And he had. And he had done right by that spark, and written the best novel he could around it, the New & Noteworthy first book that had turned—so fleetingly—the attention of the literary world in his direction.
He’d lacked even a pallid little frisson of an idea with Reverberations (his “novel in linked short stories,” which had really only ever been … short stories), though obviously he had finished that book, limping along to some point at which he was permitted to type the words “The End.” It had been the end, all right, to his period of “promise” as “a young writer to watch,” and it might have been wiser not to publish it at all, but Jake had been terrified to lose the validation of The Invention of Wonder. After each and every one of the legacy publishers, and then an entire tranche of the university presses, had rejected the manuscript, the importance of publishing his second book had swelled until his entire being seemed to be on the line. If he could only get this one out of his way, he’d told himself at the time, maybe the next idea, the next spark, would come.
Only it hadn’t. And while he’d continued to have the occasional crusty and serviceable idea in the years since—boy grows up in family obsessed with dog breeding, man discovers older sibling has been institutionalized since birth—there’d been nothing tap, tapping away at him, compelling him to write. The work he’d done since then, on these and a couple of even worse ideas, had petered, excruciatingly, out.
Until, if he was being completely honest with himself, and just now he was being completely honest with himself, he’d stopped even trying. It had been more than two years since he had written a word of fiction.
Once, long ago, Jake had done his best to honor what he’d been given. He had recognized his spark and done right by it, never shirking the hard thinking and the careful writing, pushing himself to do well and then to do better. He had taken no short cuts and evaded no effort. He had taken his chance against the world, submitting himself to the opinions of publishers, reviewers and ordinary readers … but favor had passed over him and moved on to others, What was he to do, who was he to be, if no other spark ever came to him again?
It was unbearable to contemplate.
Good writers borrow, great writers steal, Jake was thinking. That ubiquitous phrase was attributed to T. S. Eliot (which didn’t mean Eliot hadn’t, himself, stolen it!), but Eliot had been talking, perhaps less than seriously, about the theft of actual language—phrases and sentences and paragraphs—not of a story, itself. Besides, Jake knew, as Eliot had known, as all artists ought to know, that every story, like single work of art—from the cave paintings to whatever was playing at the Park Theater in Cobleskill to his own puny books—was in conversation with every other work of art: bouncing against its predecessors, drawing from its contemporaries, harmonizing with the patterns. All of it, paintings and choreography and poetry and photography and performance art and the ever-fluctuating novel, was whirling away in an unstoppable spin art machine of its own. And that was a beautiful, thrilling thing.
He would hardly be the first to take some tale from a play or a book—in this case, a book that had never been written!—and create something entirely new from it. Miss Saigon from Madam Butterfly. The Hours from Mrs. Dalloway. The Lion King from Hamlet, for goodness’ sake! It wasn’t even taboo, and obviously it wasn’t theft; even if Parker’s manuscript actually existed at the time of his death, Jake had never seen more than a couple of pages of the thing, and he remembered little of what he had seen: the mother on the psychic hotline, the daughter writing about carpetbaggers, the ring of pineapples around the door of the old house. Surely what he, himself, might make from so little would belong to him and only to him.
These, then, were the circumstances in which Jake found himself that January evening at his computer in his cruddy Cobleskill apartment in the Leatherstocking Region of upstate New York, out of pride, hope, time and—he could finally admit—ideas of his own.
