3. New York Times Bestselling Great American Novelist

The triumphant savior of the abducted bottle opener might want to be Jonathan Franzen, in other words, or he might want to be James Patterson, but from a practical standpoint it made no difference. Ripley did not divide the literary pretentious from the journeyman storyteller, which meant that one way or another this legend in his own mind was very likely going to walk into Jake’s own seminar the following morning. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

CHAPTER THREE

Evan Parker/Parker Evan

And lo: there he was, swaggering into Peng-101 (the lobby-level conference room) with the others the following morning at ten, glancing idly at the end of the seminar table where Jake was sitting, showing not the slightest recognition of the person (Jacob Finch Bonner!) who was the obvious authority figure in the room, and taking a seat. He reached for the stack of photocopies at the center of the table and Jake watched him impassively flip through the pages, give them a preemptive sneer, and set them down beside his own notebook and pen and water bottle. (The Ripley Symposia gave the bottles out at registration, the program’s first and final freebie.) Then he fell into loud conversation with his neighbor, a rotund gentleman from the Cape who’d at least introduced himself to Jake the night before.

At five past the appointed time, the class commenced.

It had been another moist morning and the students—nine of them in all—began to shed layers of outerwear as the workshop got underway. Jake did much of this on autopilot: introducing himself, sketching his own autobiography (he didn’t dwell on his publications; if they didn’t care, or if they declined to hold his accomplishments in high esteem, he preferred not to see it on their faces), and talking a bit about what could and could not be accomplished in a creative writing workshop. He set some optimistic parameters for best practices (Positivity was the rule! Personal comments and political ideologies were to be avoided!) and then invited them each to say a bit about themselves: who they were, what they wrote, and how they hoped the Ripley Symposia might help them to grow as writers. (This had always been a reliable way to use up most of the inaugural class. If it didn’t, they would move on to the three writing samples he’d had photocopied for their first meeting.)

Ripley cast a big net when it came to attracting students—in recent years the glossy brochure and website had been joined by targeted Facebook ads—but though the applicant pool had certainly swelled, there hadn’t yet been a session for which the number of applicants had been greater than the number of spots. In short, anyone who wanted to attend Ripley, and could afford to attend Ripley, was welcome at Ripley. (On the other hand, it wasn’t impossible to get thrown out once you were in; this distinction had been achieved by more than a few students since the Symposia began, most commonly due to extreme obnoxiousness in class, carrying a firearm, or just generally acting batshit crazy.) As predicted, the group broke down more or less evenly between students who dreamed of winning National Book Awards and students who dreamed of seeing their books in a spinning rack of paperbacks at the airport, and as neither of these were goals Jake himself had accomplished he knew he had certain challenges to overcome as their teacher. His workshop contained not one but two women who cited Elizabeth Gilbert as their inspiration, another who hoped to write a series of mysteries organized around “numerological principles,” a man who already had six hundred pages of a novel based on his own life (he was only up to his adolescence) and a gentleman from Montana who seemed to be writing a new version of Les Misérables, albeit with Victor Hugo’s “mistakes” corrected. By the time they reached the savior of the bottle opener, Jake was fairly sure the group had coalesced around the absurdity of the numerologist and the post–Victor Hugo guy, mainly because of the blond dude’s barely hidden smirking, but he wasn’t sure. Much would depend on what happened next.

The guy crossed his arms. He was leaning back in his chair, and somehow made that position look comfortable. “Evan Parker,” the guy said without preamble. “But I’m thinking about reversing it, professionally.”

Jake frowned. “You mean, as a pen name?”

“For privacy, yeah. Parker Evan.”

It was all he could do not to laugh, the lives of the vast majority of authors being far more private than they likely wished. Maybe Stephen King or John Grisham got approached in the supermarket by a quavering person extending pen and paper, but for most writers, even reliably published and actually self-supporting writers, the privacy was thunderous.

“And what kind of fiction?”

“I’m not so much about the labels,” said Evan Parker/Parker Evan, sweeping that lock of thick hair off his forehead and back. It fell immediately over his face again, but perhaps that was the point. “I just care about the story. Either it’s a good plot or it isn’t. And if it’s not a good plot, the best writing isn’t going to help. And if it is, the worst writing isn’t going to hurt it.”

This rather remarkable sentence was met with silence.

“Are you writing short stories? Or are you planning on a novel?”

“Novel,” he said curtly, as if Jake doubted him somehow. Which, to be fair, Jake absolutely did.

“It’s a big undertaking.”

“I’m aware of that,” Evan Parker said caustically.

“Well, can you tell us something about the novel you’d like to write?”

He looked instantly suspicious. “What kind of ‘something’?”

“Well, the setting, for instance. The characters? Or a general sense of the plot. Do you have a plot in mind?”

“I do,” said Parker, with now overflowing hostility. “I prefer not to discuss it.” He looked around. “In this setting.”

Even without looking at any of them directly, Jake could feel the reaction. Everyone seemed to be at the same impasse, but only he was expected to respond to it.

“I suppose,” Jake said, “that what we’d need to know, then, is how I—how this class—can best help you improve as a writer.”

“Oh,” said Evan Parker/Parker Evan, “I’m not really looking to improve. I’m a very good writer, and my novel is well on track. And actually, if I’m being honest about it, I’m not even sure writing can even be taught. I mean, even by the best teacher.”

Jake noted the wave of dismay circling the seminar table. More than one of his new students, more likely than not, were considering his wasted tuition money.

“Well, I’d obviously disagree with that,” he said, trying for a laugh.

“I certainly hope so!” said the man from Cape Cod.

“I’m curious,” said the woman to Jake’s right, who was writing a “fictionalized memoir” about her childhood in suburban Cleveland, “why would you come to an MFA program if you don’t think writing can be taught? Like, why not just go and write your book on your own?”

“Well”—Evan Parker/Parker Evan shrugged—“I’m not against this kind of thing, obviously. The jury’s out on whether it works, that’s all. I’m already writing my book, and I know how good it is. But I figured, even if the program itself doesn’t actually help me, I wouldn’t say no to the degree. More letters after your name, that never hurts, right? And there’s a chance I could get an agent out of it.”