The Plot полностью

Matilda, for one, remained sanguine, or so she was at pains to convey. This was all an unfortunate side effect of success, she said again, and the world—the world of writers in particular—was full of bitter people who believed they were owed something or other, by someone or other. The logic of this being something like:

If you could write a sentence you deserved to consider yourself a writer.

If you had an “idea” for a “novel” you deserved to consider yourself a novelist.

If you actually completed a manuscript you deserved to have someone publish it.

If someone published it you deserved to be sent on a twenty-city book tour and have your book featured in full-page ads in The New York Times Book Review.

And if, at any point on this ladder of entitlement, one of the aforementioned things you deserved failed to materialize, the blame for that must rest at whatever point you’d been unfairly obstructed:

Your daily life—for not giving you an opportunity to write.

The “professional” or already “established” writers—who’d gotten there quicker because of unspecified advantages.

The agents and publishers—who could only protect and burnish the reputations of their existing authors by keeping new authors out.

The entire book industrial complex—which (following some evil algorithm of profit) doubled down on a few name-brand authors and effectively silenced everyone else.

“In short,” Matilda said—and not being a natural soother, it came out sounding strained and wrong—“please, do not worry about this. Also, you’re going to get a ton of sympathy from your peers, and people whose opinion you actually care about. Just wait.”

Jake waited. She was right, of course.

There was a keep-your-chin-up! email from Wendy, and another from his contact at Steven Spielberg’s West Coast office, and still others from some of the writers he had once hung out with in New York (the ones who’d made it into the famous MFA program before he had). He heard from Bruce O’Reilly in Maine (Man, what is this moronic trash?) and from a number of his former coaching clients. He heard from Alice Logan at Hopkins, who helpfully listed a number of plagiarism scandals from the land of poetry and mentioned that she and her new husband were expecting. He heard from his parents, who were offended on his behalf, and several of his MFA classmates, one of whom countered with his own stalker: She decided my second novel was a codebook about our relationship. Which didn’t exist, incidentally. Don’t worry, they go away.

At around four that afternoon he heard from Martin Purcell in Vermont.

Someone posted it on our Ripley Facebook group, he wrote in an email. Do you have any idea who’s saying this stuff?

I was thinking, maybe, you? Jake thought. But naturally he said no such thing.

Almost exactly two years later, Samantha’s father collapsed in the parking lot of the central maintenance office at Colgate University and was dead before the ambulance arrived. The biggest change in Samantha’s life, following this event, was an abrupt decline in financial security and the fact that her mother started obsessing over some woman her father had been sleeping with, apparently for years. (Why she’d waited until her husband was dead to reveal all this made no sense, at least not to Samantha. It was too late to do anything about it now, wasn’t it?) On the other hand, Samantha got her late father’s car, a Subaru. That was a big help.