The Plot, Jean Korelitz [read e books online free txt] 📗

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.

The writing he encountered in his new role of online editor, coach, and consultant (that marvelously malleable word) made the least of his Ripley students seem like Hemingway. Again and again he urged his new correspondents to check their spelling, keep track of their characters’ names, and give at least a tiny bit of thought to what basic ideas their work should convey, before they typed those thrilling words: THE END. Some of them listened. Others seemed somehow to believe that the act of hiring a professional writer magically rendered their own writing “professional.” What surprised him most, however, was that his new clients, far more than even the least gifted of his Ripley students, seemed to regard publication not as the magical portal it had always represented to him and to every other writer he admired (and envied), but as a purely transactional act. Once, in an early email exchange with an elderly woman in Florida who hoped to complete a second tranche of her memoir, he had politely complimented her on the recent publication of part one (The Windy River: My Childhood in Pennsylvania). That author, to her credit, had bluntly declined his flattery. “Oh please,” she’d responded, “anybody can publish a book. You just write a check.”

It was, he had to admit, a version of anybody can be a writer that even he could get behind.

In some ways, things were actually a whole lot nicer on this side of the divide. There were still astounding egos to contend with, of course, and there were still huge distances between the perceived and actual qualities of the stories and novels and memoirs (and, even though he certainly didn’t seek it out, poetry) his clients emailed him. But the honest, direct exchange of filthy lucre for services, and the clarity of the relationships between Jake and the people who came to his website (some of them even referred by clients he’d already “helped”) was, after so many years of false camaraderie … downright refreshing.

Even with semi-regular consulting work alongside his new Ripley responsibilities, however, Jake couldn’t make things work in New York anymore. When one client, a Buffalo-based writer of short stories, mentioned that she’d recently returned from a “residency” at the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts, Jake jotted down the unfamiliar name, and after the video call ended he found the website and read up on what had to be a fairly new idea: a subsidy artists’ colony doing apparently good business in a place he’d never heard of, an upstate village called Sharon Springs.

He himself, of course, was a veteran of the traditional artists’ colonies, which existed to offer succor and respite to serious artists. Back in his own