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.

He hadn’t gone looking for this. He had upheld the honor of writers who listened to the ideas of other writers and then turned responsibly back to their own. He had absolutely not invited the brilliant spark his student had abandoned (okay, involuntarily abandoned) to come to him, but come it had and here it was: this urgent, shimmering thing, already tap, tapping in his head, already hounding him: the idea, the characters, the problem.

So what was Jake going to do about that?

A rhetorical question, obviously. He knew exactly what he was going to do about that.

PART THREE

CHAPTER EIGHT

Crib Syndrome

Three years later, Jacob Finch Bonner, author of The Invention of Wonder and of the decidedly less obscure novel Crib (over two million copies in print and the current occupant of the number two spot on the New York Times hardcover list—after a solid nine months at number one), found himself on the stage of the S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium of the Seattle Symphony. The woman seated opposite him was a type he’d come to know well during his interminable book tour: a breathless, hand-flapping enthusiast who might never have read a novel before, she was so enraptured at encountering this particular one. She made Jake’s own job easier by virtue of the fact that she gushed incessantly and seldom formed a cogent question. Mainly all he was called upon to do was nod, thank her, and look out over the audience with a grateful, self-effacing smile.

This wasn’t his first trip to Seattle to promote the book, but the earlier visit had taken place during the first weeks of the tour as the country was just becoming aware of Crib, and the venues had been the usual ones for a not-yet-famous author: The Elliot Bay Book Company, a Barnes & Noble branch in Bellevue. To Jake, those were exciting enough. (There had been no book tour at all for The Invention of Wonder, and the personal request he’d made to read at the Barnes & Noble near his hometown on Long Island had yielded an audience of six, including his parents, his old English teacher, and the mother of his high school girlfriend, who must have spent the reading wondering what her daughter had ever seen in Jake.) What had been even more exciting about those first-round Seattle readings, and the hundreds like them all over the country, was that people actually came to them, people who were not his parents or high school teachers or otherwise somehow obligated to attend. The forty who’d shown up for that Elliott Bay reading, for example, or the twenty-five at the Bellevue Barnes & Noble, were complete strangers, and that was just astonishing. So astonishing, in fact, that it had taken a couple of months for the thrill to wear off.

It had worn off now.

That tour—technically the hardcover tour—had never really ended. As the book took off, more and more dates were added, increasingly for series where purchase of the book was part of the price of admission, and then the festivals started getting appended to the schedule: Miami, Texas, AWP, Bouchercon, Left Coast Crime (these last two, like so much else about the thriller genre he’d inadvertently entered, had heretofore been unfamiliar to him). In all, he’d barely stopped traveling since the book was first published, accompanied by a worshipful off-the-book-page profile in The New York Times, the kind that had once made him weak-kneed with envy. Then, after a few months of that, the novel’s paperback had been rushed into print when Oprah named it her October selection, and now Jake was returning to some of his earlier stops, but in venues even he had never conceived of.

The S. Mark Taper Foundation Auditorium, for example, had over 2,400 seats—Jake had looked that up in advance. Two thousand four hundred seats! And as far as he could tell from where he was sitting, every single one of them was occupied. Out there he could make out the bright kelly green of the new paperback’s cover on people’s laps and in their arms. Most of these people had brought their own copies, which he supposed did not bode well for the four thousand copies Elliot Bay was now unpacking at the signing tables out in the lobby, but man it was gratifying to him. When The Invention of Wonder was published nearly fifteen years earlier, he had settled on the I’ll-know-I’ve-made-it fantasy of seeing a stranger reading his book in public, and needless to say, this had never happened. Once, on the subway, he had seen a guy reading a book that looked tantalizingly like his, but when he edged closer, took a seat opposite, and checked it out, he’d discovered it was actually the new Scott Turow, and that had been only the first of several such crushing false alarms. Neither, obviously, had it happened with Reverberations, of which fewer than eight hundred copies had even been sold (and he’d purchased two hundred of them himself as cheap remaindered copies). Now this auditorium was full of living, breathing readers who had paid actual money for their tickets and were here in the enormous space, clutching his book as they leaned forward in their seats and laughing uproariously at everything he said, even the banal stuff about what his “process” was and how he still carried his laptop around in the same leather satchel he’d owned for years.

“Oh my god,” said the woman in the other chair, “I have to tell you, I was on a plane and I was reading the book, and I came to the part—I think you all probably know the part I’m speaking of—and I just, like, gasped! Like, I made a noise! And the flight attendant came over and she said, ‘Are you okay?’ and I said, ‘Oh my god, this book!’ And she asked me what book I was reading, so I showed her, and she started to laugh. She said this has been happening for months, people yelping and gasping in the middle of a flight. It’s like a syndrome. Like: Crib syndrome!”

“Oh, that’s so funny,” said Jake. “I always used to look at what people were reading on planes. It never used to be by me, I can tell you that!”

“But your first novel was a New & Noteworthy in The New York Times.”