“Evan, I love that you believe in what you’re doing. It’s how I hope all of your classmates feel, or will eventually feel, about their work. And even if a lot of the … the brass rings you’ve mentioned just now are very, very unlikely to happen, because there are a lot of great stories out there and they’re being published all the time, and there’s a lot of competition. But there are so many other ways to measure the success of a work of art, ways that aren’t connected to Oprah or movie directors. I’d like to see lots of good things happen to your novel, but before any of that you need to write the best possible version of it. I do have some thoughts about that, based on the little you’ve submitted, but I have to be honest: what I’m seeing in the actual pages I’ve read is a quieter kind of book, I mean, not one that screams A-list directors and bestseller, necessarily, but a potentially very good novel! The mother and the daughter, living together, maybe not getting along so well. I’m rooting for the daughter already. I want her to succeed. I want her to get away if that’s what she wants. I want to find out what’s at the root of it all, why her mother seems to hate her, if in fact her mother does hate her—teenagers are maybe not the most reliable guides on the subject of their parents. But these are all very exciting foundations for a novel, and I guess what I don’t understand is why you’re holding out for such extreme benchmarks of validation. Won’t it be enough to write a good first novel, and—I mean, let’s throw in a couple of goals we have less control over—find an agent who believes in you and your future, and even a publisher willing to take a chance on your work? That’s going to be a lot! Why put yourself in a position where, I don’t know, it will have failed if the director for the movie is B-list instead of A-list.”

For another long moment, maddeningly long, Evan did not respond. Jake was on the point of saying something else, just to cut the sheer discomfort, even if it meant ending the conference early, because what progress were they actually making, the two of them? They hadn’t even begun to look at the actual writing, let alone to talk about some of the more macro issues going forward. And also the dude was a narcissistic jerkoff of the first degree, this was now undeniable. Probably, even if he did manage to finish his tale of a smart girl growing up in an old house with her mother, the best it could likely aspire to was the same degree of literary notice Jake himself had too briefly enjoyed, and he was completely available to describe, if asked to do so, how profoundly painful that experience, or at least its aftermath, had been. So if Evan Parker/Parker Evan wanted to be the author of the next The Invention of Wonder, he was welcome to it. Jake himself would fashion a garland of laurels for him and throw him a party, and pass along the sad, sad advice his own MFA advisor had once tried to give him: You’re only as successful as the last book you published, and you’re only as good as the next book you’re writing. So shut up and write.

“It’s not going to fail,” Jake heard Evan say. Then he said: “Listen.”

And then he spoke. He spoke and spoke, or more precisely, he told and told. And as he told it Jake felt both of those indelible women enter the room and stand bleakly on either side of the doorway, as if daring the two men to try to escape them. Jake had no thought of escape. He had no thought of anything but this story, which was none of the great plots—Rags to Riches, Quest, Voyage and Return, Rebirth (not really Rebirth), Overcoming the Monster (not really Overcoming the Monster). It was something new to him, as it would be new to every single person who read it, and that was going to be a lot of people. That was going to be, as his terrible student had so recently said, every book group, every blogger, every person out there in the vast archipelago of publishing and book reviewing, every celebrity with a bespoke book club of her own, every reader, everywhere. The breadth of it, the wallop of it, this out-of-nowhere and outrageous story. When his student finished talking, Jake wanted to hang his head, but he couldn’t show what he felt, the horror of what he felt, to the justly arrogant asshole who would one day, he now felt certain, become Parker Evan, the pseudonymous author of this stunning first novel, catapulted onto the top of the New York Times bestseller list via viral word of mouth. He couldn’t. So he nodded and made some suggestions about how to gradually bring the mother’s character into the foreground, and a couple of ways to consider developing and adapting the narrative perspective and the voice—all pointless, all thoroughly irrelevant. Evan Parker had been entirely correct: the worst writer on the planet could not mess up a plot like this. And Evan Parker could write.

After he’d gone, Jake went to the window and watched his student walk away in the direction of the dining hall, which was on the far side of a small grove of pine trees. Those trees, he’d never noticed, formed a kind of opaque obstacle through which the lights of the campus buildings on the far side could barely be seen, and yet everyone went through them instead of around, every single time. Midway upon the journey of our life, he heard himself think, I found myself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost. Words he had known forever, but never, until this moment, truly understood.

His own pathway had been lost a long time ago, and there was no chance, no chance at all, of finding it again. The novel-in-progress on his laptop was not a novel, and it was hardly in progress. And any ideas he might have had for another story would, from this afternoon on, suffer the fatal impact of not being the story he had just been told, in his temporary cinder-block office in a third-rate MFA program that nobody—not even its own faculty—took seriously. The story he had just been told, that was the only story. And Jake knew that everything the future Parker Evan had bragged about his novel’s future was absolutely going to happen. Absolutely. There would be a battle to publish it, and then more battles to publish it all around the world, and another battle to option it for film. Oprah Winfrey would hold it up to the cameras, and you would see it on the table closest to the front door of every bookstore you walked into, likely for years to come. Everyone he knew was going to read it. Every writer he’d competed with in college and envied in graduate school, every woman he’d slept with (admittedly not many), every student he’d ever taught, every Ripley colleague and every one of his former teachers, and his own mother and father who never even read books, who’d had to force themselves to read The Invention of Wonder (if, indeed, they actually had read it—he’d never made them prove it), not to mention those two jokers at Fantastic Fictions who had missed a chance to represent a novel that became a Sandra Bullock movie. Not to mention Sandra Bullock herself. Every last one of them would buy it and borrow it and download it and lend it and listen to it and gift it and receive it, the book this arrogant, piece of shit, undeserving, son of a bitch Parker Evan was writing. That fucking asshole, Jake thought, and immediately he was assailed by the fact that “fucking asshole” was a pathetic choice for someone of his supposed ability when it came to wielding words. But it was all he could come up with at that particular moment.

PART TWO

CHAPTER FIVE

Exile

Two and a half years later, Jacob Finch Bonner—author of The Invention of Wonder and former faculty member at the at least respectable low-residency Ripley Symposia—edged his elderly Prius into the icy lot behind the Adlon Center for the Creative Arts in Sharon Springs, New York. The Prius, never particularly robust, was trudging through its third January in this area west of Albany (known, somewhat whimsically, as “The Leatherstocking Region”) and its ability to climb even gentle inclines in snow—the hill leading to the Adlon was anything but gentle—had diminished with each 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.