For a few days there was blessed silence, and the dreaded daily trawl of his Google alert for Jacob+Finch+Bonner produced nothing but reader reviews, gossip about casting for the Spielberg film, and an actual Page Six “sighting” of himself at a PEN fundraiser, shaking hands with an exiled journalist from Uzbekistan.

Then, in the space of a Thursday morning, it all went to shit: TalentedTom produced a communiqué of his own, this one sent—again, via email—to Macmillan’s Reader Services but also posted on Twitter, Facebook, and even a brand-new Instagram account, accompanied by lots of helpful tags to attract the attention of book bloggers, industry watchdogs, and the specific reporters at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal who covered publishing:

I regret to inform his many readers that Jacob Finch Bonner, the “author” of the novel Crib, is not the rightful owner of the story he wrote. Bonner should not be rewarded for his theft. He is a disgrace and deserving of exposure and censure.

So much for the deer in the headlights theory.

And so the day unfolded. It was a terrible day.

Within moments the contact form on his author website was forwarding comment requests from half a dozen book bloggers, an interview query from The Rumpus, and a nasty if illogical dispatch from somebody named Joe: I knew your book was crap. Now I know why. The Millions tweeted something about him by midafternoon and Page-Turner was hot on its heels.

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.

CRIB

BY JACOB FINCH BONNER

Macmillan, New York, 2017, pages 71–73

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.

Her daughter, Maria, by then, was doing all of the normal things, like walking and talking, and one or two things Samantha considered not normal, like saying the names of letters everywhere she went and pretending not to hear Samantha when Samantha was speaking. She had been, from her first days of life, a malcontent, a blusterer, a pusher-away of other people (mainly Samantha, but also her two grandparents and the pediatrician). In due course she began kindergarten as a surly child in a corner with books, declining to parallel play (let alone cooperative play), interrupting the teacher with commentary when it was story time, refusing to eat anything but jelly and cream cheese on the heel of the supermarket loaf.

By then, all of Samantha’s former tenth-grade classmates had passed out of the crepe-paper-decorated gymnasium holding their rolled-up diplomas, and they’d scattered—a few to college, others to work, the rest to the wind. If she ran into one of them in the supermarket or at the Fourth of July parade along Route 20 she felt such a surge of fury that it rushed upward into her mouth and burned her tongue, and she had to grit her teeth together when she made polite conversation. A year after those classmates moved on, her original classmates—the ones she’d leapfrogged past as a sixth grader—also graduated, and all that anger seemed to go with them. What was left after that was a kind of low-grade disappointment, and as the years continued to pass she lost even the power to remember what it was she was disappointed about. Her own mother was home less and less; Dan Weybridge—in the goodness of his heart or perhaps some festering sense of paternal responsibility—had upped her hours at the Family-owned-for-three-generations! College Inn, and she’d also joined a group at her church that traveled to women’s health clinics to harass the patients and staff. Samantha spent most of her time in the sole company of her daughter, and the care of an infant, then a toddler, then a young child expanded to fill every corner and moment of her days. She tended Maria like an automaton: feeding, bathing, dressing and undressing, losing ground with every passing day.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Another Day’s Lies

There were days when he could manage an hour or two of work on the new novel, but many more when he could not. Generally, after Anna left the apartment in the morning, Jake remained on the new kilim-covered couch Anna had chosen to replace its ratty predecessor, bouncing back and forth between his phone (Twitter, Instagram) and his laptop (Google, Facebook), checking and rechecking for new posts and tracking the malevolent ricochets of those posts he’d already seen, trapped and tortured and utterly incapable of finding his way out.

When the Macmillan group reconvened a couple of weeks later, this time via conference call, there was a certain amount of chagrin at TalentedTom’s response to the cease and desist, and a general dearth of other ideas to try. On the other hand, Roland the publicist reported that the book websites and bloggers seemed to have let the story pass, mainly because there wasn’t much for them to write without any details at all, and also, frankly, because the anonymous poster did sound like just the kind of person who comes out of the woodwork when someone writes a massively bestselling book. (Jake’s circumstances were also helped by a gloriously well-timed war between two novel-writing exes in Williamsburg, whose books—her first, his third—had been published within weeks of each other, and together formed a mutually punitive indictment of their failed marriage, albeit with different villains.)

“Of course I wish we’d had a better outcome,” said the attorney, “but there’s always the possibility that this was his last hurrah. He knows he’s being watched now. He didn’t have to be all that careful before. Maybe he’ll decide it’s just not worth it.”