The Essence of Attraction

CROSS RIVER, N.Y. – Literary fiction is the gnarliest kind of writing to pull off and the hardiest kind of writing to read and the farthest kind of writing from anything that's commercial or popular or superficial.
So the easiest sale for a literary novel is to readers who already love classics or to readers who already have advanced educations or to readers who already have at least one positive experience reading serious fiction.
But the New Q mission is not to preach to people who love to read. The New Q mission is to reach people who don't see the need.
The New Q principle is not to promote lasting fiction to people who are likely to buy it, but to attract people to literature who habitually deny it.

New Q is interested in people who haven't picked up novel since high school and people who have never finished a novel and people who are otherwise restlessly resigned to the idea that serious reading isn't for them.
This vision is not meant to cause confusion.
Yet people who are well meaning ask what New Quoin is up to.
And people who see no purpose where profit isn't pursued ask why New Q is in business.
The answer is better than 10 questions. And one story is better than the answer.
It was one of those Monday nights at a medium-sized liberal arts college in New York City in one of those undergraduate literature composition classes packed with non-traditional students who have kids and full-time jobs and English as a second language.
And from a corner desk where student in his early 20s had been sleeping because he worked two jobs, the student blurted out to the professor who was writing something on the board "What's your book about?"
This was one of those professors who encourages students to speak out to get them engaged in conversations and to push them to come with answers in their own words when all they really want to do is sit there and not be bothered.

And although the professor didn't remember telling this class he had written a novel, the professor figured he must have dropped something about it – otherwise how would this highly erratic student in the corner know?
"You don't want to know," the professor told him.
"Yes I do."
So the professor told him in three sentences.
"I want to read it," he said.
"No you don't."
"Yes I do," he said. "It would be the only book I ever read."
To this day, the professor cannot say what he was talking about that woke the student in the corner out of sleep.
What wakes anyone out of sleep?
Nobody knows whether the student would have taken the professor's novel and read it and been moved by it had the professor had a copy there to give him that night. Nobody knows because that was the student's last night. He stopped showing up to class. The professor had to fail him.
This at least is clear: whatever was awakened in the student that night was something more profound than anything the professor could have been saying.
The student was turned on by something that had always turned him off.
When that happened, the professor should have been ready with encouragement and nourishment for the student instead of thinking of the welfare of everyone else in the class and letting the golden moment go to rot.
The point of the story – and the answer to why New Q is in business as an indigent independent – is that an artist is happier over one non-reader who picks a novel and gets something out of it than the artist is over sales to 99 readers who need no conversion to literature.

This can only be the case where the artist is more interested in a masterpiece than in millions.
This can only make sense if serious reading can reveal the life of meaning.
The good news is that it can.
Literature is sustaining and transforming because it is enduring. It endures suffering. It endures death. And it brings new life into people's worlds.
This fact may not keep commercial publishers from rolling their eyes at literary fiction. It may not keep non-readers from rolling their eyes at it.
But the fact remains that a man who does not read seriously is man who is out of range. And a man who is out of range is a weightless creature in a universe of gravity.
On the other hand, a reading man has chance. He may not be able to square the big questions of life well enough to corner his curiosity, but he can confidently look up to the orbit of essential ideas lit like planets on a bright night and know that he is part of his own mystery.
He can accept who he is and understand where he came from and have a chance to find out where he is going in time to fulfill his purpose.
He may not get all of this meaning at once from picking up a literary novel, but he sure won't get any of this if he never picks one up.