And how do you know when you’ve found the right one?

These questions come up occasionally in the creative writing classes I teach, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have any easy answers. The honest truth is I struggle with titles myself. On the one hand, they seem like the least important part of the writing process: Shouldn’t the story or novel speak for itself? On the other, they’re the first words anyone reads, and in some respect the most important words of all—what we sniff before ordering the bottle. I can’t tell you how many times students have thanked me for assigning a short story they wouldn’t have read on their own because they hated the title. “Sea Oak,” by George Saunders, seems to fall into this camp: a fine title, if you’ve read the story, but which in the uninitiated stirs up visions of 17th century frigates.

I once desperately wanted to call a story “Frozen Dog.” I had only the vaguest idea of the plot, based on an anecdote a friend had told me about someone who kept their dead spaniel in the freezer, but I thought the title would catapult me (and the story) to greatness. How could you see a title like that and not put down everything you were doing—ordering a latte, scoring some drugs, operating an air traffic control tower—to read it? Months later, the finished story was accepted by a respected literary magazine, but they demanded I change the title. Since a frozen dog was a central image in the story, both literally and figuratively, they felt it was heavy-handed. I was incensed. The raison d’etre of the story!

They were right, of course, and I eventually came up with another title. The point is, though, when it comes to the writing process, sometimes a bad title can help you more than a good one. In their book Deepening Fiction, Sarah Stone and Ron Nyren talk about the idea of creative beginnings versus actual beginnings: Even if we end up cutting the original “creative beginning” of a novel or short story—the part of the novel or story, often, that we’re most attached to—this doesn’t mean it’s not an essential part of the writing process. In some ways, it’s the most essential. The same goes for titles, I think. I’ve heard students tell me they come up with their titles first, before they have the slightest notion of a plot. I see nothing wrong with this, so long as they’re willing to give up their “creative title” when it no longer serves the story.

Still, the fact remains that there are many more bad titles than good ones. I’ve seen some jaw-droppingly awful titles, often from very gifted writers. And I’m not just talking about my students: The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel. An early version of Portnoy’s Complaint was called A Jewish Patient Begins His Analysis. At various times, Catch-22 was called Catch-18, Catch-11, Catch-14, and Catch-17. And some classic novels have stood the test of time, despite having terrible titles. (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, for example, never fails to make me giggle.)

In short, there seems to be very little correlation between producing something brilliant and the ability to come up with a half-decent name for it. Perhaps it’s a different skill set entirely. I sometimes think there should be professional titlers: Just as we wouldn’t ask a carpenter to tar the roof of our house, we shouldn’t expect writers to work outside their métier. But even if the perfect title is destined to elude us, I do think it’s possible to identify a bad one—even, I think, to lay out some basic ground rules for what to steer clear of.

So, based on years of teaching, I’ve compiled the following list of Titles to Avoid. (Note: Some of the examples below are real titles, from good stories.)

The Faux Poetic but Authentically Meaningless (“Hunt the Mist Slowly”)

The Purely Descriptive (“One Early Morning in Topeka at Dawn”)

The Lofty Abstraction, a.k.a. the Bad Kundera (“The Lonely Shackles of Mortality”)

The Hardy Boys Special (“The Hike from Hell”)

The Grammatically Complete Sentence (“Gladys Pemberton Strikes It Rich”)

The Inspirational Cliché (“Dreams of Rebirth”)

The Uninspirational Cliché (“Losing My Marbles”)

The Alliterative Tongue Twister (“Peripatetic Papa”)

The Allusion to Another, Much More Famous Work of Literature (“The Story of Christ”)

The It-Doesn’t-Get-Any-Cuter-Than-This (“Runaway Grandma”)

The Melodramatic Image (“Blood Dries Brown”)

The My-Life-Changed-Unexpectedly-and-I’m-Going-to-Tell-You-About-It (“Epiphany in a Tattoo Parlor”)

The Bad McSweeney (“How We Lie to the Moon, and How the Moon Lies to Us”)

The Scratch ‘n Sniff, a.k.a. But-It-Will-Make-Such-a-Lovely-Cover-Someday (“In the Valley of the Gardenia Blossoms”)

And a good title? Much harder to quantify, but I have some theories: It doesn’t make a spectacle of itself. It doesn’t try too hard, but is original nonetheless. It makes sense on a literal level but deepens metaphorically as we read—deepens, in the finest cases, our understanding of the story or novel itself. The Remains of the Day, “Good Country People,” Disgrace, “Friend of My Youth.”

A tall order, I know, and I don’t claim to be any better at titles than my students. My novel, for instance, about a downwardly mobile family in Southern California, went through various identities: It was The Cost of Living for a while, and enjoyed a brief stint as This World Is Not Your Home (yes, I know, rule #5). It was a friend who finally suggested its current title, Model Home. It’s not flashy—I would even say it’s humble, the shy title at the dance —but in ways both literal and figurative, it’s perfect.

And yet I didn’t take to it at first. I had a different title in mind, one that seemed to make people either burst out laughing or (worse) gasp over its poetic splendor. The title I had in mind makes no sense whatsoever if you haven’t read the book. It’s trying too hard and probably a bit pretentious. But I’m still attached to it. I’m not quite ready to march it over to the title graveyard, to join the Trimalchios and their Dreams of Rebirth. So I gave it to this essay instead.

**

Also by Eric Puchner: I Married a Novelist

I’ve been trying to write a book review of Ron Currie’s Everything Matters! for the last few weeks. I’ve been trying and failing splendidly.

In fact, more than writing anything, I’ve been doing a sort of literary circuit training—pacing around my apartment and slugging absurd quantities of coffee and snarling to myself about slinging postmodern bullshit all over the page when all I was trying to do was talk about Everything Matters! which, by the way, no matter how far I stray off topic, is a really good book and you should read it. Phew, at least that’s on the record.

Guess what I’m saying is this: Why does peer review suddenly feel like a total violation?

Ever since my first novel came out a couple months back, I’ve been having a hard time seeing why I’d want to publish something that might impede another writer’s ability to find the biggest audience that she/he can. So that leaves me only a couple options:

1. Only review books I love and will therefore write glowing things about (seems sort of boring).

2. Don’t review books.

Problem is, I like book reviews. I like the dialogue they have the potential to incite; I like the idea that they help people weed through the glut of material that exists in the marketplace. We need responsible sources—publications that have proven themselves over time to be thoughtful, forthright, and fair—to inform the public about new books.

Since this all started with an attempt to discuss Currie’s Everything Matters! I decided to contact him directly, despite the fact we don’t know each other, and ask what he thought constituted a good book review.

“A review should discuss whether or not a book succeeds at what it set out to accomplish,” he said, “and then explain why it did or did not.”

I like Currie’s idea that a review should be an organic response to the narrative itself, the reviewer attempts to decode the book’s conceits, its subtext and “message.” In doing so, she/he might hopefully use direct evidence from the text to bolster an argument on the successes and failures of the author’s execution.

This was a helpful point, but because I agreed with him, my confusion morphed a bit. It isn’t that I’m against deconstructing the tactics a writer has chosen to use; my concern is more about the legacies of publishing such a discourse. I’d hate to think that my words might dissuade a potential reader from engaging with a writer’s work herself/himself.

So that was my next question to Currie: Why would one writer want to openly criticize another writer’s book?

Currie: “Often I think it manifests as professional jealousy… Writers tend also to be sophisticated and, by definition, good with words, and so are able to wrap this jealousy in the sheep’s clothing of protecting the language or standing guard at the gates of the canon.”

The obvious caveat here is that I’m asking Ron Currie, a total stranger, to comment on an abstraction, the motivation for peer review, an issue that of course has a multiplicity of answers. There are hordes of reviewers, all with different reasons and values and rules for doing what we do. So I recognize I’m asking him to comment on something he really can’t comment upon: my very personal crisis regarding peer criticism.

Currie mentions jealousy—but for me, that isn’t quite it. Certainly, I come across phrases or sentences, scenes and chapters that others have so beautifully written that I wish I’d penned. But I don’t want to “punish” the writer by lambasting her/him in a review. If anything, I want to make sure more people find out about these accomplishments by helping in any way that I can. I want there to be camaraderie among authors, peer support, not peer dissension.

Thus, my problem comes from the other side of the spectrum (I think). I’m not worried about envy, I’m worried about putting obstacles between an author and an audience. The old adage feels true to me: If I don’t have anything nice to say, I should probably just shut up. At the end of the day, what’s the point of hurtling epithets at another writer’s book?

Yes, I like to read book reviews, and in the past I’ve enjoyed writing them. Right now, though—and who knows if it will change—it feels like a violation, a petty way to throw a wrench into someone else’s artistic career. A publishing career is hard enough without people who should be on the same team wielding criticism like a weapon.

Joshua Mohr

Other writers and reviewers will disagree with me—and, obviously, that’s fine. I just think it’s interesting that only since my novel has come out I do feel intimidated and ashamed and malicious at the prospect of peer review. The best reviews are neither hatchet jobs nor blow jobs—the best ones talk about a book’s strengths and weaknesses (every book has both). And after a thoughtful analysis, the readers of a review can make an informed decision about whether they want to spend the money to experience the ride for themselves. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that.

Currie gets the last word: He says that reviewers are “contributing to what should be a serious conversation about a particular book’s importance, its place, if any, in American literature. No mean task, and one that should be approached with care and fellow-feeling.”

**

A few days ago, my colleague D. A. Powell’s book, Chronic, landed on Publishers Weekly’s list of the Best 100 Books of 2009, and though I don’t generally look at the “best of” lists, can’t even wrap my mind around the notion of “best” as a valid category in the arts, I was happy because my colleague kicks total ass, and his book kicks total ass.

I went to the Publishers Weekly website so I could forward the link to our other colleagues, but I couldn’t at first find their Best 100 list and found, instead, their Best 10 list (a new PW feature)—and then I was depressed, because the Best 10 list was comprised entirely of books written by men.

One could argue (and several have) that perhaps the editors just liked these books best. Or that, perhaps, one could argue (and too many have), it was yet another “bad year” for women writers. Though perhaps it was something else entirely. The PW editor explains in her short accompanying text that the deciders of the Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things—like how I sometimes try to ignore the homeless guy who blocks my path when I’m walking to work, because it’s just too much to deal with in the morning—you can maybe make those things go away. But the problem is it only works for a second, because there I am again the next morning walking to work, and there’s the homeless guy saying good morning, and there I am ignoring him again, and how long before I have to face him and say good morning back?

Which is to say, the real problem may be more about why we ignore what we ignore. And really. Did the PW editors ignore gender? Or did they ignore female? (And did they ignore genre? Or was it poetry? And how exactly does one choose “best” between a volume of poetry and a biography, anyway?)

Best Writers of 2009?

The editor goes on to say, a few lines later, “It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.” Now, “disturbed” is a strong word. For me, it’s one notch stronger than “ignore.” When I’m disturbed by something it usually means I can no longer ignore it. When I’m disturbed by something, I know I have to make a change. I’m disturbed, for instance, by the Black Sabbath cover band that practices every Thursday night in the garage behind my building. I’m disturbed because the cover band is relentless and because it won’t let me ignore it. I bought earplugs, but earplugs, as it turns out, will not effectively block out a shit cover band. The only thing I can do now is make a real change. Either embrace Black Sabbath. Or sleep out on Thursday nights. Or have a talk with the band. Or a drink. But I don’t have to sit there being disturbed.

When the PW committee realized they were collectively disturbed that their Best 10 list was comprised entirely of male writers, instead of accepting the list, they could have reconsidered hundreds of books by women writers. Why would they choose to put out a list that disturbs them? Wouldn’t it also disturb others? Were they trying to send a message? I’m just saying a remedy for the disturbance may have been to call their list into question. A next step may have been to call their criteria into question. A next step may have been to stop consciously “ignoring gender” if an all male list was disturbing. “Ignoring gender,” after all, often results in the all-male list. We’ve seen how this works, and it’s certainly not limited to the literary world. And they did select women writers—like Jayne Anne Phillips and Heather McHugh, to name two of only twenty-nine—for the Best 11-through-100. Would it have upset the winnowing process to revisit the books by women which they already agreed were among the “best”? Besides, the editor says their committee’s process had already provoked “kicking and screaming.” Was not one scream or kick in defense of a book by a woman?

Jayne Anne Phillips

At turns out, it was not a bad year for women writers. Because—speaking of quality only (certainly not of quantity, certainly not of treatment, certainly not of exposure)—was there ever a bad year for women writers? If so, what year was that? Perhaps women writers haven’t always gotten the same attention as male writers, and perhaps one has to dig a little to find the books, and perhaps a lot of other shit that tends to happen when one stops ignoring. But the writing is right there. It’s always been there. Even good writing. Even in 2009. I decided to bring the issue to WILLA (Women in Letters and Literary Arts), a new organization for and about women writers, co-founded by poets Erin Belieu and Cate Marvin. And after a lengthy discussion about the market, the tedium, the predictability, we evenly, with no kicking nor screaming, decided to generate a list of books by women writers, published in 2009, which were possibly ignored by PW. We list a range of books. We don’t agree on them all. We’re not ranking them. We’re not calling anything the best. We’re open to additions. It’s a growing list. It’s a reminder. And if PW’s Best 10 is an annual thing, we hope they, too, will be a bit more inclusive. It could result in a list that’s a bit less disturbing.

**

painting by Roger W. Carlson

That letter led me to consider a paradox: Why do so many of us, as readers or maybe as a society, assume that originality springs forth out of nothing, although at the same time we understand that every idea, every story, has a precedent? In the acknowledgments of The Hakawati, I wrote:

By nature, a storyteller is a plagiarist. Everything one comes across—each incident, book, novel, life episode, story, person, news clip—is a coffee bean that will be crushed, ground up, mixed with a touch of cardamom, sometimes a tiny pinch of salt, boiled thrice with sugar, and served as a piping-hot tale.

Rodin's The Thinker

Every story in the novel is influenced by another—maybe not by an episode of The Twilight Zone, but by a tale from elsewhere. Every story anywhere is inspired by a coffee bean of some sort. A plant sprouts from a seed.

Rodin said: I invent nothing. I rediscover.

The Greek playwrights used tales that their audience knew quite well. Shakespeare’s audience had heard the stories of his tragedies, his comedies, and of course his histories, long before they entered the theater.

An original writer brings a pair of fresh eyes and a new pen. She makes us think that the story we’re reading has never been told before. While reading a great book, a reader rarely thinks about the story’s influences; he is taken in, swallowed by a new universe. The reader’s eye is directed to what the writer wishes it to see.

Critics and literature professors insist that a good novel opens your eyes. Rarely do they remind us that it also blinds you.

Influenced by his predecessors, Rodin might have been rediscovering, but what we see is originality, something we’ve never encountered before.

In the notes for one of my earlier books, The Perv, I wrote, “A writer is as original as the obscurity of his sources.” I cannot recall whether I had heard this or something similar before, or whether I had come up with it myself. I searched online and found a Benjamin Franklin quote: “Originality is the art of concealing your sources.” I knew this quote hadn’t directly influenced mine, since I’ve never read Franklin. It could have indirectly, of course—like a story, a saying will move from mouth to ear, getting distorted and rediscovered along the way, until a day comes when we think it’s a new saying, and ever so original.

I am intrigued by the idea of influences, the obvious and the not so, the visible and the hidden, and the transformation of those influences into something new. V.S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas may have descended directly from Balzac to Tolstoy to Forster, but by turning his eye to immigrants, by writing about a family of third-worlders, the author created a new way of telling the story. Fresh eyes.

V.S. Naipaul

Writer influences writer; sometimes the influence is glaringly apparent, sometimes not. Story influences story.

Yet, what arouses my interest most are the influences of real life. Naipaul’s childhood in Trinidad, his escape to Oxford, his relationship with his father, are subjects that are repeated in his novels. How do real-life stories affect originality? If a writer uses real experience as a springboard, as a seed, is he as original as someone who doesn’t? Which is more original: Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, a novel that isn’t based on any discernible real experience; A House for Mr. Biswas, a novel based on the author’s experience (Nabokov calls this auto-plagiarism! ), or Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a non-fiction novel based on actual events?

Fresh eyes, all three.

None of these authors concealed their sources. Benjamin Franklin is probably wrong. Probably I am as well. But then, maybe not.

Henry James once wrote, “Everything about Florence seems to be coloured with a mild violet, like diluted wine.” It’s a most lovely description. But imagine this, only as a possibility, mind you: James walks the streets of Florence. Rain had kept him cooped up inside for a while. A man, slightly drunk and having finished lunch, exits a tavern carrying his glass of wine (he’d refused to give it up). The slick pavement makes him slip and spill the wine, which mixes with the still rainwater on the ground. Diluted wine, James thinks, and it is the same color as the stone it is covering, the same color as Florence, this mild violet.

Would the description still seem as original as it did when we didn’t know how James came up with it?

In Microcosms, Claudio Magris described Mitteleuropa as the “grand, morose laboratory of civilization’s discontents.” Utterly brilliant.

Imagine Magris as a young boy, maybe eight years old, at home. His father says, “They treat us like animals. These great powers from the east and from the west try out their wars on us, experiment on us.” His mother sits at the dinner table looking grand, but so morose. Imagine.

When Benjamin Franklin wrote, “Originality is the art of concealing your sources,” he was being funny, but he was wrong. A writer doesn’t have to conceal his sources. Often he does not know what his sources are. No story is created out of a vacuum. Originality is not Immaculate Conception. A writer’s work is the stew of numerous plants that have sprung forth from many a seed.

I don’t know whether the seed of my story was an episode of The Twilight Zone or something else. Either way, I’d hope I, and the reader, would see it with a fresh eye.

If you suspect, perhaps from a particularly well-phrased passage in a cover letter, or a rhymed couplet tucked into a résumé, that you have a writer on your short-list, you can turn to Google for confirmation. Many writers in the workplace have published a poem, a story, or even a book—maybe two or even three books—but are still unable to earn a living from their writing.

Wise employers have learned that in order to maximize results in today’s fast-paced work environment, they must tailor their managerial skills to the dispositions of their employees. Books, articles, and on-line seminars are now available to help human-resources personnel understand how best to work with individual staff members, taking into consideration such variables as level of ambition, optimism, and ability to be a team player.

Until now, one segment of the population has been entirely overlooked in these analyses: the thousands of writers who have been driven against their wills into the workforce. This group includes poets, dramatists, and creators of literary fiction and non-fiction who have, for one reason or another, eschewed careers in academe, and whose parents and/or spouses and/or children are no longer willing to support them. Unable to make a living from creative enterprise, they have been forced to conceal their true calling and seek employment among the rank and file.

Managers who customize their strategies to writers’ peculiar strengths and weaknesses can maximize their contribution to the workforce and overcome their significant challenges. Here’s how.

Identification Pre-Employment

Over time, many writers have built entire careers as fallback positions for their art. They can be found in fields that range from railway maintenance to health care; some even specialize in such esoteric areas as astrophysics or early-Victorian stage design. No matter what their area of camouflage, however, they have learned through trial and error that it is not wise to explain to interviewers that they intend to support a highly time-consuming writing habit on the proceeds of employment. As a result, they can be difficult to identify.

If you suspect, perhaps from a particularly well-phrased passage in a cover letter, or a rhymed couplet tucked into a résumé, that you have a writer on your short-list, you can turn to Google for confirmation. Many writers in the workplace have published a poem, a story, or even a book—maybe two or even three books—but are still unable to earn a living from their writing. They are probably still trying to flog these books somewhere on the Internet.

If you discover you have short-listed a writer, should you share that information with your colleagues and run the risk of predisposing the job search in favor of the writer? Despite overwhelming evidence that no one reads literature any more, there is still some cachet to having a literary writer on one’s staff. The potential opportunity to discuss their own secret literary aspirations with a published author has swayed more than one hiring committee away from more qualified, and possibly more stable, candidates. At the pre-employment stage, some managers have found it is better not to know.

Identification of Writers Already in Your Midst

Although poets are very different from fiction writers, and playwrights from nonfiction writers, literary artists of all genres share certain basic characteristics that become obvious in employment settings.

1. Writers are excessively grateful—for a while. Particularly in the first few weeks and months after being hired, a writer will be almost inordinately appreciative to have a job. This is partly because after what has typically been an extended period of futile full-time writing, they really do believe (albeit temporarily) that they want to hang out with other people and do the kind of work that supervisors can assign them rather than that which mysteriously burbles up out of their nightmares. Primarily, however, this gratitude relates to having an income once again, at last—not to mention a dental plan, vision insurance, and the opportunity to buy orthotics.

2. Writers appear to have no fashion sense. After the first enthusiasm of being in the world wears off, most writers forget about their appearances. This is not intentional; it is an inevitable consequence of limited human interaction. For the most part writers are not dirty, or smelly, just perennially disheveled.

3. Writers suffer from attacks of inspiration. The first hint that a writer is present in a workplace frequently comes when an individual leaps to his feet in the middle of a meeting, wearing an expression that suggests that he’s been raptured, and rushes off to the washroom. These symptoms may be confused with alcohol abuse or drug dependency (which may also be present, though that is not the subject of this article); however, follow-up investigations often reveal these that this individual has absconded to a toilet stall not to tipple or shoot up, but to scribble messages to himself about some developing story or sonnet.

4. Writers are subject to mood swings. Varying from mild to intense, these episodes are similar to clinical descriptions of bipolar disorder or other pathological conditions. (Again, these conditions may also obtain, but are not covered here.) Writer-related mood swings can normally be distinguished from more treatable syndromes by the brevity of the highs (usually occasioned by finally finishing the abovementioned story or sonnet) and the protracted duration of the lows (due to the interminable wait for the work to be accepted for publication by some obscure literary journal, and usually made worse by that journal’s eventual rejection).

5. Writers lack corporate ambition. All real writers prefer the less-responsible position to the corporate climb, the part-time position to the full-time job. Their inability to be persuaded or influenced by—or punished through the withholding of—the kinds of economic rewards that are highly effective with other employees, can help to identify a writer, and also presents additional administrative challenges.

Managing The Species

Once a writer has been positively identified, he or she can be most easily managed if further classified by genre.

Poets

Poets can generally be identified in the workplace, as in the coffee shops where they are most at home, by their supercilious and standoffish attitude. In most cases, what looks like hauteur is actually shyness, combined with a dollop of fear that they have forgotten your name and/or are about to do something stupid that everyone will notice. Poets tend to sympathize with underdogs: they are strong in union-related activities, and will suddenly and unexpectedly rise to the defense of even the most incompetent colleague.

Poets’ temperaments range across a narrow spectrum from despair to resignation, but they can often be cajoled into getting on with a responsible career because, unlike writers in other genres, they have not even the faintest hope of ever earning a living from their art. They may occasionally dream of a substantial grant, but they know deep-down that they are employees for life.

The greatest challenge of managing poets is keeping other staff from the contagion of their depression and hopelessness. Banning alcohol helps.

Fiction Writers

A fiction writer in the grip of a creative project can often seem absentminded or downright demented. She will come into the office after a productive weekend uncertain of the month, or time of day, having forgotten the names of the people with whom she works (and possibly those to whom she is married or has given birth). She may be unclear as to what city or country she is in—or even, in the case of speculative-fiction writers, what planet she is on.

It is important for managers to realize that fiction writers usually do know the difference between an imaginary world and the real one. Given a little nudge or a mystified look, the writer will quickly return from an icy December day in 18th-century Croatia, take off her several sweaters, and add her two cents to the afternoon’s budget meeting.

Due to the nature of her work, the fiction writer will sometimes suffer from lack of sleep or a hangover. This should be seen as positive: lack of sleep means she is getting some writing done; the hangover means she has been fantasizing about her future on the bestseller list, which will improve her spirits (once she recovers from the hangover).

Playwrights

Playwrights are generally more flamboyant and sociable than are other types of writers, and can be great fun to have around the office (unless they write Bleak Plays, in which case, c.f. Poets, above). There is a downside to playwrights’ joie de vivre, of course: inspired by the excitement they so cherish in the theater, playwrights have been known to leap to their feet in the middle of meetings and suggest resolving corporate issues with a rousing chorus, a stake through some villain’s heart, or the introduction to the scene (upstage) of a pair of Bactrian camels. The playwright needs occasionally to be settled down, and reminded that all the world is not a stage—particularly not the conference room.

Non-Fiction Writers

The nonfiction writer is the closest one can be to a “normal human being” while still being a writer. Such an individual can be hard to detect, which creates distinctive workplace problems.

Many nonfiction writers are former journalists. They are likely to be able to turn out an attention-grabbing media release (or, at the very least, a blog post), and probably still have their noses set to smell the kind of corporate rot that can bring down dynasties and presidents. If you suspect there’s a nonfiction writer in the office, it is wise to avoid indulging in insider trading, mismanagement of biohazardous materials, or sexual harassment—except on the writer’s day off.

Aside from these muckraking tendencies, nonfiction writer employees are fairly easy to deal with. Their writing normally has a structure, which means they probably have schedules to follow—and may even be able to adhere to them, thus partly inuring them against the systemic angst that plagues other writers.

Corporate Benefits

Since writers tend to be counterproductively intelligent and come from highly dysfunctional backgrounds, businesses can make an enormous contribution to society by keeping them employed. Employment can temporarily protect a writer from family breakdowns and the self-abuse that occurs when he has too much idle time in which to write—as idle time can lead to Writer’s Block and, thus, to Crisis. As writers are generally most inspired when they have no time to write, employment also keeps them writing, if only minimally—thereby suppressing all kinds of maladaptive passions and impulses which most of us are all too happy to read about but do not ever want to actually see.

Despite the extended periods of moroseness and bursts of disproportionate good cheer, writers are essentially harmless, and with good management they can become dedicated, hardworking, and productive employees. Drawn forward by the ever-present conviction that they are on the verge of a literary breakthrough that will allow them to quit their jobs—when, in fact, the odds of that happening are roughly equivalent to other employees’ odds of winning the lottery—writers are likely to keep right on working until it’s time to collect their watches and retire.

The managers who deal most successfully with writers in the workplace are those who recognize that 1) the writer does not want to be there, and is convinced that she will be leaving at any moment, and 2) the writer is not going anywhere. Careful containment of managerial aspirations in regard to writer/employee advancement, combined with tactful accommodation of writerly fantasies of imminent fame and fortune, can lead to healthy symbiotic relationships of benefit to all.

In the meantime, employees who are writers will invite you to their book launches and even thank you publicly when they win awards, since by then you are likely to be the only member of their inner circle who has not abandoned them. Best of all, they might even put you into a story, a poem, or a play, thus conferring upon you the unexpected benefit of a form of eternal life.
**

Read more Blurbs here

Related posts:

1. What Writers Do
2. The Blurb #12: On Disturbance
3. The Blurb #11: A Fresh Eye

I recently finished Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, which clocked in at almost 600 pages and came in the unglamorous package of a frayed hardcover library book. There was no book jacket, no graphic design, and no testimonials from other writers. I took it out in mid-February and I finished it in late June. I read the book at the stately pace of a Victorian lady, reading a chapter in bed in the morning while my husband made breakfast. As a college professor, I’m allowed to check books out for an entire year. Otherwise I would have racked up a small fortune in library fines once I had exhausted all the legitimate renewals.

All novels involve entering another life, but this is particularly true of Angle of Repose, in which the narrator attempts to capture the entirety of his Victorian grandmother’s life, or at least the entirety of his grandparents’ marriage. Susan Burns Ward, a Hudson Valley debutante, writer and illustrator, is exiled to the West when she chooses, in her late twenties, to marry one of the last available men in her circle, a mining engineer. The book begins with the girlish hopes of its protagonist, moves on to womanly disappointments, and ends with an unexpectedly tragic final turn. The reader travels with the couple to Colorado, Idaho, Mexico, and, finally, Northern California.

Wallace Stegner

While Susan pines for her childhood friend Augusta, who remains in New York City, we marvel at the implicit real estate opportunities. What must it have been like to be in California before Hollywood and Silicon Valley? It crosses our 21st century minds that Susan is in love with Augusta, but it doesn’t seem to cross hers. We are convincingly plunked into another era where people don’t give voice to such things. Young children are left with East Coast relatives for yearlong stretches. Older sons are shipped off to East Coast boarding schools. I only learned that there was an extramarital affair percolating when I looked up the opaque title in an on-line literary encyclopedia. The emotions are so repressed that it’s even possible for the reader to miss them.

The narrator himself, whom one suspects of being a stand-in for the writer, wrestles with the length of the book. By page 440 he realizes that he’s only gotten as far as his grandmother’s 42nd year when she’d lived to 91. But that was the year in which the defining act of Susan Ward’s life took place, when she made a fatal choice that led to a tragic accident which doomed her to marital purgatory.

I did occasionally pick up other books during those four months, which involved a sort of literary infidelity. The books would sometimes be so different it felt as if I were married to a man but cheating on him with a leopard. I was so excited to find Wells Tower’s much-touted Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned at the public library that I brought it home and read it quickly, entering its largely male universe in the evenings, while still reading a ladylike chapter from Angle of Repose in the mornings.

As I neared the end of Angle of Repose, I was later and later to breakfast. For the first time I took the cumbersome book out of the house, although it added considerable heft to my beach bag. I expected to feel a great sense of accomplishment when I finished the book, but instead I felt lost, grief-stricken. It was a mixture of sadness for Susan Ward and a prickle of fear that I might yet ruin my own life—but mostly I wanted to be back in the middle of that book.

I know there are other books, maybe even better books, out there. I started Mary Gaitskill’s new collection of stories but it only made me miss Susan Ward’s discretion. In Angle of Repose, marital infidelity was something to be staved off, whereas Gaitskill’s heroines are all too eager to cede their sexual booty. Susan Ward gives over to passion once in her life (maybe, we’re not sure) and is punished swiftly, and in the worst possible way.

I know there are other Wallace Stegner books to read, but that’s like somebody suggesting you get a new puppy when your dog of fifteen years has just died. It might be the same breed—but it’s not your dog. Or, to honor the metaphor we began with, it’s like people suggesting that you “get back out there” the day after you’ve ended a long-term relationship.

I’ve lately begun a backwards process of buying books after I’ve read the library copies. It helps me through the grieving process to know that it’s still there on the shelf if I need it. In this way, important books stay with me, literally and figuratively. Like the people who pass through our lives, the books become part of who we are.

**

Check out more from The Blurb here.

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1. Jesmyn Ward Tells It Like It Is

When I was in high school I, like many teens, believed myself to be a misfit, the only alienated person in the room. I found respite in Frank McCourt’s English classes at Stuyvesant High.We knew him as Frank, among the circle of protégés of which I was proud to consider myself a part. English class with Frank involved him sitting on his desk telling us stories about his Irish childhood; then, he passed out purple mimeograph sheets and led us in Irish drinking songs: Nancy Nancy, Nancy whiskey, Whiskey whiskey, Nancy-o.

Everything about Frank was a snub of the establishment. It was not just his voluminous charms and wisdom, but this insouciant, even reckless, posture against authority that made us embrace him as ally and advocate—no matter he sometimes snubbed us as well. He was a fierce mentor, complicated, loveable, moody, and occasionally mean. It can’t be fun interacting for seven hours a day, year upon year, with self-important, brash sixteen year olds convinced that they are destined for Harvard or M.I.T. and are therefore smarter than anyone with a station so lowly as teacher.

My senior year, on the last day of Frank’s Irish literature course, he came in and held up a stack of our papers, our “senior theses.” Mine was on Edna O’Brien, and I recall having labored on it heartily. Even today I find this author’s work difficult, so it’s plausible I’d made no sense at all in my attempt to say something pithy or intelligent about her. As I did not save my own copy, however, I never got the chance to have a second look. Frank waved the stack in the air while abusing us all as callow and short-sighted. Then, with dramatic flourish, he tore our papers into tiny bits and deposited the whole mess in the trash can. It was unclear he’d actually read them, and he certainly hadn’t bothered to grade them. That was that. How he arrived at our final grades for the course remained a mystery—though I recall he was an easy grader. This, no doubt, contributed to his popularity.

Another time, he sat on his desk and opened the class, as usual, with a comforting phrase we’d grown accustomed to hearing, that always came as a relief during schooldays punctuated with threats and taunts from other teachers who felt it their duty to work us dry. “Sit back. I’m going to tell you a story,” Frank said in his brogue, dangling his feet and looking off into a middle distance, as if transitioning into the special mind space of the Homerian, oral epic-tellers. This day, he went on to deliver a finely crafted short story, with a neat arc rising between a polished beginning and ending. This was unlike his usual tales, more often freewheeling episodes from the grand narrative that we would later read in print in 1996, as Angela’s Ashes; I don’t remember ever reading this story among his published work. In this tale, an old man is living parasitically with his grown daughter and son-in-law. One day he falls asleep on the couch, only to leave a kettle boiling on the stove. The daughter comes home and discovers it poker-hot and gleaming, setting off an argument that results in the father’s getting booted from the apartment. When Frank finished, he got quiet and stared at us for a long time. “That is my story,” he finally hissed. “Don’t you ever dare steal it.” I felt the red hot burn of that kettle in his gaze.

That didn’t faze me, or his other defenders. I started waiting for the appearance of that story. Instead, a classmate of mine published a short story in The New Yorker that fall of our graduation, which was soon chosen by Raymond Carver for the year’s Best American Short Stories, and subsequently for the best of the decade.

I nevertheless left Stuyvesant bragging to everyone I knew about my association with this legendary teacher, despite his utter lack of fame among anyone who hadn’t been his student or one of their parents. No one had the faintest idea what I was talking about. He hadn’t published a word as a writer; the public wouldn’t hear of Frank McCourt for another decade and a half, when he finally surprised none of us with the brilliant literary success of that first memoir.

His lessons, not to mention the inspirational tale of his life and career, remain important reminders to me about living an authentic life, pursuing what really matters. How odd it is for me today to have to admit I learned that lesson at Stuyvesant High School. The world of our school was competitive and cruel, at least as I saw it in adolescence. This was the mid-1980s, at the renowned prep school for the city’s working class. Not a day went by a teacher didn’t browbeat us about the responsibility inherent in our status as the city’s “intellectual elite”—bound for M.I.T., CalTech, Harvard, or Stanford. One time a less sympathetic teacher held up my physics exam in front of the class to announce I’d received the lowest grade in the room. “Eighty fi–” he bellowed, before looking it over a second time and realizing I’d mustered through with a 93—yes, still a bad grade at Stuy.

I believe grade grubbing was invented at my high school. Ninety-nine-and-a-half was never enough. Teachers often left time at the end of class sessions to barter with students over that extra quarter point. The one time my classmates got political—shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge after a staged walkout from school—it was over the issue of whether teachers should be compensated for time spent writing college recommendation letters (we won that battle). The other time my class made the news was for stealing (using a brilliant ruse, of course) the answers to the state Regents exams.

I liked to believe Frank’s sympathies those days resided with me in judging this atmosphere cruel and soulless.

Since Frank’s death July 19, readers by now are familiar with the lasting admiration among his former students at Stuy. The Times created a blog space for recollections, and some four hundred remote and close acquaintances replied—not all of them alumni, but many, like me, participants and bystanders in his fifteen-year stint as teacher at Stuy. Many of my classmates went on to elite schools, became top scientists, won Nobels in physics and math, or, if not that, succeeded at least as lawyers. Ours was a class of immigrants and children of immigrants, strivers, people for whom the 80s’ promise of wild wealth felt real, and necessary, and just far enough from reach to make it worth the gambit.

Some of us pursued different paths—writers and artists who felt our passions squelched in that grim factory of math formulas memorized by rote and public taunting for grades below ninety-five. We hung out smoking pot in the tenement vestibules across from school, on East 15th Street, an old immigrant neighborhood around the corner from where I live today.

Reading those recollections from Frank’s former students has been an eye-opening and startling experience. It appears I was not alone in my youthful disaffection. Of course everyone wants to claim Frank McCourt today, and perhaps I am no different. It is nonetheless fascinating to see high school refracted through the disparate memories of students from every social set—the nerds, the soc’s, the stoners. Frank, I see now, provided that kind of welcoming reassurance to all kinds of people surviving the miseries of teenhood, as ally and advocate. Perhaps it was simply an Irish warmth that lay behind the genius and grace of his ambivalent mentoring.

The Brothers McCourt

Frank broke down the wall between teacher and student, and that, too, explained the fierce loyalty among his followers. He never told us to call him Frank; it somehow became inevitable after he invited us to hear him perform at the annual Bloomsday celebration at the Symphony Space auditorium, where Irish actors and writers from across the city spent twenty-four hours reciting every word of Joyce’s Ulysses. In the 1980s, Frank’s brother Malachy, his co-host at this event, was the greater celebrity, and Frank sometimes seemed to visibly bristle in his shadow. Malachy was a big, booming stage actor. He was more American, more loud and charismatic, bigger in every sense than Frank. He filled up that stage. The first time I attended Bloomsday, I learned that even with one’s mentors there can be a give-and-take, and this seemed an important lesson, too—about how to be human and kind in spite of the seeming configurations of power. When we sat in the audience, our approval seemed as important to Frank, and as hard won, as his was for us.

Early in this decade, I had the opportunity to see another side of Frank’s humanity. I was back in New York, now an author myself; I bumped into Frank from time to time at literary events, where he would squint at me and utter phrases reminiscent of what he wrote in my high school yearbook: “How delightful it was (is) knowing you. I will miss your warmth, charm and beauty. Come back and see me and bring tales of the outside world. Adios and love, Frank McCourt.”

“Ye don’t look a day older than seventeen now yee-self,” he teased me at an event at the National Arts Club in 2002. Around that time people used to whisper that Frank’s brogue was getting heavier, not lighter, the longer he lived in New York. He’d discovered the nameless power of his own exotic-ness. It made me sad to see this kind of sniping, de rigueur in the New York literary world, extended even to someone so willing to be seen as flawed.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

One day recently, I saw him in Central Park walking his dog. He looked thinner, his skin whiter and more papery than ever before. He was shrunken, but he still had his rapscallion’s bemused grin, still seemed delighted to pass the time wryly making fun of himself and all the passersby and me. I hadn’t seen him out of the way of his celebrity in a long time, and it brought back the younger, less self-possessed Frank I remembered from the 80s. There was a humility that he somehow communicated in his desire to linger that day, chatting on about nothing, about his dog, the irony that he was famous. Now, I think that humility had something to do with his own sense of impending death. Yet just a month or two later, when I heard the news he was ill—just two months before his death, at a too-young 78—it came as a complete surprise.

This week I am re-reading Angela’s Ashes and trying to recall the lessons I took from Frank McCourt as my first teacher of creative writing. But oddly, I don’t think his important lessons to me reside in his work, which seems the exemplar of the spoken form, the kind of writing you want to burst out and read aloud when you sit in your easy chair reading it to your lonely self. Now that I’ve studied John Gardner and E.M. Forster on what comprise the elements of great plot, now that I teach this stuff for a living myself, I understand technically what Frank was doing those days in the structuring of his tales. But I don’t think he made me understand these fine points then, nor was that ever his intention. I would never have stolen his story of the teapot, even if I’d had the pluck. It wasn’t my kind of story—it was his kind of story, an organic emanation of his particular, epic voice. Frank helped me become a writer because he taught me about the humilities, the grim, dark moments, of a writer’s life, and also about the paradoxical glory one feels believing, deeply, in the value of that life.

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3. Frank Zappa Plays a Bicycle

by Terese Svoboda

Nurse Ratched faced us—okay, let her remain nameless, this American CARE official with the power to educate the quarter million Somalian refugees trapped in Dadaab, the largest and oldest camp in the world. In her early thirties, she had been on the job for a year. Whether she was burned out or involved in some NGO power struggle we could not fathom did not matter—she would not accept the free server containing 60,000 books we had in our bags. It required only a plug. She wasn’t interested.

Her face immobile, she said, as if in her defense, that they had already tried a bookmobile.

Chris Merrill, head of the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, his assistant Kelly Bedeian, poet Tom Sleigh, translator/essayist Eliot Weinberger, and I had just spent a week in Nairobi on behalf of the U.S. State Department discussing writing with Kenyans. Editors of literary magazines, university professors from a school closed by student violence, writers-in-exile working in the Somalian section of Nairobi, librarians, and one ebullient group of thirty-somethings reimagining education for the Agha Khan University, a branch of which was opening in the middle of nowhere in ten years with unimaginable funding. All discussions ended in the same place: What could we do for them. We told them the publishing industry in America is collapsing. We suggested that, like their adoption of the cell phone in lieu of landlines, they might consider skipping our flawed model and explore what technology offers, for example, publication on iPods and downloads.

They complained about copyright, their markets overflowed with pirated CDs. We told them we did not make a living from writing, that very few did in America, that we too were watching what happened with the music industry’s copyright battles. They said it was hard to get audiences—their children were watching videos. We sympathized. The Agha Khan group wanted good editors—like the editors of The New Yorker. We told them few editors worked like that, even when they had jobs. Most of the time we have to hone our work ourselves—and read, read, read. They said it was hard to get books, that customs charged far too much. We handed over the few boxes we had with us.

But when we flew to Dadaab, the administrative center for the three camps that make up the refugee settlement, a more desperate story unfolded. Founded nearly twenty years ago, Dadaab takes in another five thousand refugees a month. It is not an oasis in the middle of the Kenyan desert. There is no water, no food except what is rationed by the NGOs. In July, food rations are expected to be cut back to 1000 calories a day. Since Kenyans refuse to allot any more resources or space beyond the initial arrangements for 90,000 refugees two decades ago, housing has become unbearably overcrowded. The camps are short 38,000 latrines. If the refugees leave, they risk deportation. With over fifty percent of the population under eighteen, Dadaab is full of restless youths who are susceptible to al-Qaeda infiltrators who also cross the Somalian border sixty miles away.

But in the three days we spent talking to the students, we found that their hunger for education surpassed even their hunger for food. I sat across from a teenager whose hair was going grey from malnutrition who was admitted to the camp writing club only after submitting pieces in three categories: feature, sport, and politics. His command of English was better than my private-schooled teenager’s. And his motivation was acute: Every year only twenty students from the entire camp escape to university, the only legitimate way out.

In 1854 the British explorer Sir Richard Burton declared Somalia “a nation of poets.” Oral poetry, promulgated now by CD, cassette, and radio, has traditionally been a powerful literary form with political implications. In 1992, Somalian women recited their poems before two warring sub-clans in Burao and ultimately brokered a ceasefire. When it was clear that we didn’t want five-point essays, the students instantly composed poems about female genital mutilation, politics, love, and—over and over again—the importance of education.

On our last day in Dadaab, we took an armed convoy to the settlement area for new arrivals. They had been given saplings at admissions and told to hoop them into domes, then cover the structure with scavenged plastic bags or flattened tins. Not everyone managed. Out of the hundreds of makeshift, unfinished houses rowed far into the distance, fifty bedraggled refugees and their children confronted us. Although we were visiting during the most pleasant time of the year, the noon heat was considerable, the blowing red sand stung. Immediately one of the women insisted we tell the world about their plight, that we do something for them.

A student translated for us. He had just come from our class where, after hearing that the NGOs had discontinued the student journalism program, we had suggested the students hand-write broadsides and post them at a central area in the camp. We had told them stories from the gulag, about how prisoners had written masterpieces on cigarette paper. The poetry and prose the Somali students produced showed they had the skill and the drive, they only lacked practice and books to emulate, not unlike many neophyte writers in America. After class, students gave us their email addresses—clandestine cybercafés flourished deep in the refugee settlements, despite Nurse Ratched’s refusal to commit to anything electronic. Now, our student translator faced the woman who wanted us to do something, who was demanding an answer from us. He told her—and then us—that he would do something for her, he would tell the world.

Love Out of Hand

The apple of my eyes,
I love you as a Masaii man
loves cattle and believes they are his.

I saved you in my computer.
My love for you is as sweet
as chicken my mother cooks
for our guests. Trust me
as I trust in you.

Bear in your mind that true love
will be fruitful in the future.
Love knows no colour, no religion,
no beautiness or ugliness.

Be my shirt and
I will be your skirt too.

by Abraham Abdullahi Aden, from Dagahaley, one of the three Dadaab refugee camps

**

Dadaab, Kenya. Somali refugee camp. June 17, 2009.

**

Terese Svoboda’s fifth collection of poetry, Weapons Grade, and the paperback of her third book of prose, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, will be published this fall.

by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

in a manner a larger house might not be willing to do (e.g. my book dies on the vine while they hype their latest cookbook or tell-all memoir by a fallen debutante who smoked crystal meth and wrecked her Bentley but lived to tell the tale…).”

When people ask me about my “decision,” I want to say something that makes me sound too enlightened to peddle my subversive and cerebral material to the fatcats who run the major publishing houses. But I’m not that enlightened person at all. I am the very guy who tried desperately to peddle his subversive (Really?) and cerebral (Didn’t you go to a state college?) material to the fatcats. They shunned me, not vice versa.

I finished my first novel and got a swanky agent in New York. She did her very best to sell the book (I have no idea if she did her very best, though I assume so), but the fatcats told her, “This book is too grim. It’s not viable in the market place.” They weren’t looking for cerebral and subversive—they were looking for the Next Bestselling Voice!, someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. (I’m sure he’s a nice guy.)

This is by no means a criticism of authors who have published with major houses. I’m not insinuating that they’ve sacrificed their integrity. Far from it—some of my favorite books have had the stamp of the fatcat. This is an indictment of the major publishing houses’ attempts to superimpose templates of success onto literary fiction, judging the marketability of next year’s titles on the successes and failures of last year’s.

As my novel made its way around Manhattan, more than one editor said she liked the book, but had to “pitch it to the marketing people.” These pitches never seemed to go my way. Eighteen houses shot the book down. The swanky Manhattan agent basically fired me: “Why don’t you write a second book and we’ll try again?” she said.

I was back in square one, except now square one had the stink of failure. And I had no idea what to do.

Good times (not good times)…

I got a new agent, and she sent the book to Two Dollar Radio, an independent publishing house that saw promise and merit in the story I was trying to tell. They are the subversive and cerebral ones, the brave souls who publish literary fiction and only literary fiction. There are no cookbooks or debutante tell-alls on their list. It’s literature for the love of language and story, rather than commercial viability.

My experience finding a publisher was horrible and gut-wrenching. (Whiskey helped.) It was also incredibly confusing because I didn’t know whose opinion to trust. I began referring to it as my “faithful grope in the dark.” I knew I needed a publisher. I knew an agent acted as a liaison between writer and publisher. What I didn’t know was what editors were looking for. Only later did it occur to me that maybe agents and editors are faithfully groping themselves.

I talked with an agent and an editor to hear whether my suspicion was right: Is the whole shebang run on hunches, “informed” inferences, projections based on ambiguous past experiences?

“How do you know what will sell?” I asked one prominent agent.

“You find a book you believe in, make an educated guess, and hope for the best.”

I tried to sound calm, professional, but I think my voice cracked: “Hope for the best?”

“There are too many variables to predict with any kind of accuracy,” she said. “There are editors, acquisition boards, marketing and sales teams, the art department, then the buyers. And that isn’t even factoring in trends or positive reviews or competition. Anyone who thinks they have an answer is lying.”

I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell.

“It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.

Turns out, chance is a brutal part of the publishing trade. Good books sometimes vanish without a trace, and obvious, dumbed-down books with clever marketing tricks often become successful. It’s a savage reality of the business, one writers need to be aware of.

What I heard from these publishing insiders confirms my suspicion that writers and agents and editors are all faithfully groping in the dark. There’s no such thing as a template of success. It’s impossible. There are too many stodgy people in publishing who look to replicate past successes rather than find new and unexpected ones, to capitalize on trends rather than create them. There’s an almost singular reliance on authors who have already sold well, shoving their new work down consumers’ throats regardless of its quality. What’s left for first-time or mid-list writers with better books but no reputation?

Again, I asked the swanky agent and editor.

“There’s a diaspora of emerging writers to the smaller houses,” the agent said. “The money just isn’t there for unknowns in the current market. There are exceptions, of course. But overall…”

My ulcer tapped-dance as I phoned the editor.

She said independent houses might be better for first-time or mid-list authors, because in a smaller catalog their book will get more attention. Indie houses may have better guerilla marketing strategies for 21^st century technologies. Maybe most importantly, the sales projections at smaller houses are more modest, and a book won’t be considered a failure if it sells 6,000 copies.

“Will this be good for literature?” the editor asked. “It’s too soon to tell.”

Joshua Mohr - the Faithful Groper

Fair enough. It probably is too soon. But for me, this information is all I need to solidify a couple things, make a couple decisions. One, since they’ve corroborated that the publishing business is run on chance, I need only concern myself with one thing: the quality of my writing. That isn’t chance at all. I can’t control marketing trends or debutantes, but I can control the amount of energy I put into my revision process. I can take my time and make sure to write the best book I can.

Two, I’ve decided to publish my second novel, From a Fragile Galaxy, with Two Dollar Radio as well, next year. Assuming the “crapshoot” model is true, I see no reason to leave. I don’t want to be a free agent out to make as much money as I can, I want to publish my books somewhere that editors, not marketing people, make the decisions. 2DR has proven itself interested in my aesthetic. They’ve built me a website and booked a reading tour. They’re receptive to my ideas. They—not to sound sentimental—care. Books aren’t just commodities to them. Books are art.

At least I know that when my editors think a section of my writing needs tinkering, it isn’t because the marketers deem it “too grim.” I know that the problem is with me, the words I’ve chosen, the scenes I’ve constructed—and that’s a freedom every writer should enjoy, the freedom of knowing that their editor is more concerned with publishing the best possible novel than selling the most books. If you happen to sell a lot of books, that’s wonderful. We all want an audience. But for me the audience is only worth having if they’re reading the book I intended to write.

**

Joshua Mohr’s first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, comes out next week.

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Not long ago a writer friend emailed me in distress. She had gotten an Amazon customer review for her new novel, which I’d read in manuscript and admired. The one-star review panned the work as sentimental and derivative. What made the review so damning was that it was intelligent and well-written, therefore hard to dismiss. Worse, it was the only review she’d gotten so far.

Feeling terrible for my friend, I wrote my own review, in part to relieve my own distress. It worked—until a more disturbing thought crossed my mind. What might such unprofessional critics have to say about the novels that I’d loved as a younger man? I hesitated to find out, yet I couldn’t resist.

I started with The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren’s 1948 novel about a heroin junkie set in Chicago’s seedy, neon-lit Division Street. I discovered the book when I was thirteen, while alphabetizing the basement library of a parsimonious neighbor who lived alone in a modest shingled house. Mr. Boyd’s books were all cheap paperbacks. As I pulled them off the shelves their spines snapped and their brittle pages fluttered to the floor. The first page of Algren’s novel begins:

“The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query room desk.”

I took Algren’s novel home and, over the next week, gulped it down. It was the first novel that ever gripped me from beginning to end. Now, thirty years later, what would Amazon’s customers have to say about it?

There were fewer than a dozen customer reviews posted, with the average rating a respectable four-and-a-half out of five possible stars. Most were laudatory—no wonder: the book did win the first National Book Award. Still, as I scrolled through the reviews a sinking feeling came over me, a sense that the positive reviews were not representative of contemporary tastes, a suspicion reinforced when I came upon this review by “mojo navigator”:

“[The Man With The Golden Arm] is ponderous, turgid and lacks any sense of urgency and desperation that its central theme—heroin addiction—should necessitate. Situations and relationships are one-dimensional and cardboard-cutout-like rendering them thoroughly implausible. However, the real failure of this novel is in its dreadfully antiquated ‘hip speech,’ a failed attempt on the part of Algren to capture the street lingo of the time… Bottom Line: If you’re looking for an accurate depiction of drug addiction in ‘50s America, you won’t find it here.”

Ouch! The worst thing about “mojo’s” review is that he (or she?) is right: Algren’s novel has aged badly. It was as if I’d been shown a photo of my first heartthrob only to realize that she had crossed eyes, pimples, and big ears.

Okay, so The Man With the Golden Arm was a great book in its time, and remains a good one, but eccentric and hardly for the ages. I tried another favorite, one that, for my generation, certainly qualifies as a “classic.” I typed the title into the Amazon search field and then, with breath held, scrolled down to the reviews.

Of 562 reviews of On the Road, the first dozen or so aren’t all favorable, but they aren’t so bad. A Matt Martin of Fort Collins, CO damns Kerouac’s masterpiece with faint praise, then distills the book’s main problem down to its “fusillade style” which “preemptively fore[goes] . . . real character complexity or narrative development.” Matt dismisses On the Road as a “personal travelogue” and gives it a paltry two stars.

But Matt’s review is relatively generous. Having coughed up a single star for the book that sent me and thousands of others hitchhiking across America, “manwithnoname” of Melrose, California, opens his review with a typographic snooze, “ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……” Having proclaimed On the Road utterly plotless, he excuses himself and goes back to sleep. Richmond “Spider” of Florida, after casting his own “death star,” describes On the Road as a “disjointed story” about a “dude with no background being led around by a pseudo-intellectual jerk [Dean Moriarity, a.k.a. Neal Cassady] with no respect for anyone but himself.”

Even when first published, On the Road was a controversial book that got mixed reviews. So maybe it’s not the best example of an unassailable classic. How about that other monument to youthful rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye? Surely this classic coming-of-age novel would suffer a kinder fate among Amazon’s loyal customers.

Indeed, Salinger’s book still has its fans, as indicated by the four- star average. But the bad reviews come fast and furious, with Linda “Ayeldee” warning potential readers that, though funny in parts, Catcher will make you “want to kill yourself,” and pitying those forced, like her, to read it in school since “you can’t throw it out the window and get rid of it.” Two reviews down, another involuntary reader, “Cher630” of the Bronx, calls the novel’s protagonist a “whiney, immature, angst ridden teenager who need[s] a smack in the head.” Cher goes on to brand Salinger’s hero “a phony.” Holden Caulfield, a phony? Say it ain’t so!

If this is what contemporary readers thought of Kerouac and Salinger, I hesitated to imagine what they’d say about my other hero, Henry Miller.

“Sex belongs in the bedroom, NOT the library!!!!” writes Jon Deepcreek in his review of Tropic of Cancer, and goes on to say, “This book is filthy. I had to take a shower after I read it. Why doesn’t [Miller’s narrator] get a job? Why does he have to live in France? Why doesn’t he save his money instead of investing it in alcohol and hookers?”

These are practical questions to ask of Miller’s alterego, but also ones that fail to take into account the spirit of rebellion in which Miller’s book was written, and which, aside from its notorious (yet surprisingly infrequent) sex, is its chief virtue. Though the counterculture wholeheartedly embraced work like Miller’s, the next generation has apparently taken to wagging their fingers at their parents’ favorite authors, blaming them for the less-than-enlightened world they’ve been born into, explaining why vast majority of Tropic’s customer reviews boil down to three words: “Get a job.”

So much for rebellion.

By now I was all but convinced that there is no such thing as an unassailable classic. Two final tests remained. To perform them, I’d have to find books that had been both popular and critical successes, bestsellers beloved by millions—not just for a decade or two, but for at least, say, forty years.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s perennial bestseller about murder and racial injustice in the deep South, has its flaws, including Atticus Finch, that stick-in-the-mud emblem of paternal righteousness, and also its child narrator’s tendency to favor words like “assuaged.” Still, what’s to hate, right? Indeed, of a whopping 1,529 customer reviews, most gushed, with “AWESOME CLASSIC!!!” a typical response, down to its orgy of exclamation points.

I had to scroll through seven pages to find the first dissenter: “It seems like a book with no clear objective to convey,” Yoo Win writes. “It might be the greatest literature book as is claimed, it is just not my kind of book.”

Not a knockout punch, but no love-tap, either. But the decisive blows were yet to come. Like this one from “Kid,” whose staccato caption delivers its verdict like a judge pounding a gavel: “Worst. Book. Ever.” Kid continues: “Let me just say this: the book is boring. It starts out with Scout talking about how her brother once broke his arm. Who cares? The book’s most exciting part [the trial?] is extremely confusing, and don’t tell me I’m stupid; I have an IQ of 140.” But even this genius’ may be counted a fan compared with Nadia of Wisconsin, who writes, “This book is very nasty. It depicts scenes I would not care to see if I was being PAID. It’s just a sick book. Don’t read it, kids.”

So much for To Kill a Masterpiece—er, Mockingbird.

I’d try one more book, this one bringing with it critical adoration spanning more than a century. What nasty things would Amazon’s customers say about Jane Austen’s greatest novel?

This time I had to scroll through seventy out of 715 reviews to get to one even mildly excoriating. “Read this,” writes Ikaro Silva, “if the sole goal of your life is to get married.” Ikaro goes on to reduce Pride and Prejudice to “just a new version of Cinderella” and one that “portray[s] all women as conformists.” Take that, Jane!

But even Silva gave the book two stars. The single one-star review I found was by Juan Camarillo of San Antonio, who writes: “From a fan of IMMANUEL KANT, this was too boring.” Juan continues: “I had to study the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Job to get the vapid feeling out of my head.” Juan then quotes another reviewer who had written, “as Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, so did Austen see the world in a drawing room.” To which Jake appends, “There is a vast difference in seeing the world in a drawing room and thinking that the world IS a drawing room.”

What strikes me about even the most outrageous of these reviews is that they all hold some truth—if only the truth of one reader’s experience. Novels are meant to be experienced intimately, by individuals, not en masse, and just because the views expressed are those of a minority doesn’t make them less valid. Nor can they be written off as the opinions of amateurs, since novels are written for amateurs, not for professional critics. That said, there’s something deeply upsetting about having your favorite books flogged in public, even if the flogging is administered by a few cranky dissenters amid a mob of rabid devotees.

Still, ours is a democracy where, so far, people are still free to say what they think. Which leaves works of fiction not only open to interpretation, but subject to opinion. Then again, though a novel may be subject to opinion, its greatness isn’t. That masterpieces exist is all the evidence we have against the artistic relativism suggested by customer reviews, but it’s solid evidence. These books’ quality is no more a matter of opinion than the shape of a snowflake, or the smell of rotten eggs: it just is. Like those who so freely voice them, opinions come and go. But masterpieces endure. The only stars that matter in the end are those cast by time.

Meanwhile, since we have no choice, we should welcome the opinions of others, even if we must take them with a Taj Mahal-sized grain of salt. In so doing we might take comfort in the immortal words of G. C. Lichtenburg: “A book is a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

**

Peter Selgin’s first book of stories, Drowning Lessons, won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel, Life Goes to the Movies, has just been published by Dzanc Books. His work has appeared in Salon, The Sun, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, Colorado Review, and Best American Essays 2006. He is also the author of By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers, and the forthcoming Fiction Matters.

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