The Sequel (The Book Series, #2)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

The way they went on, all those writers, so incessantly, so dramatically, they might have been going down the mines on all fours with a plastic spoon clenched between their teeth to loosen the diamonds, or wading in raw sewage to find the leak in the septic line, or running into burning buildings with forty-five pounds of equipment on their backs. But this degree of whining over the mere act of sitting down at a desk, or even reclining on a sofa, and … typing? Not so hard. Not hard at all, actually.

She considered them absurd people who prioritized absurd things, like whether a review had a box around it or a star next to it, or who’d been invited to some festival to read their pages to the empty seats in the tent, or whether they’d been deemed a twenty-under-twenty or a thirty-under-thirty, or, for all she knew, a ninety-under-ninety. What did it matter? More to the point, what difference did any of it make to how good the books they wrote actually were, or whether a normal person—herself, for example—would even want to read them?

And she thought: If these idiots can do it, how fucking hard can it be?

In general, the level of literary approbation tends to decline with the presence of an actual plot.

“People are unsure of their own critical standards. There’s always a tiny doubt—Yeah, I thought that book was awful, but what if I’m too dense to see the genius? So when someone they respect tells them that a book is good, they’re predisposed to agree.”

I just woke up one morning with this idea that I could take some things that had happened in my life and make them into somebody else’s story, and then see what happened to that person.

But I think one of the things people who commit suicide take with them is the possibility of resolution for their loved ones. We can howl into the wind for the rest of our lives, and there’s never going to be anyone there to answer us. But maybe that’s where the impulse to make fiction can come from. Where there’s a void of information, we can always form a narrative and make that the information, the truth. Or at least … our truth. Does that make sense?”

The accusation didn’t have to be factual in order for it to be harmful.

We used to celebrate an author’s imagination when they wrote about characters very unlike themselves. Now we get upset because they’re somehow not supposed to. It does not bode well for fiction.”

A typist was a wrangler of the keyboard. A contortionist was a wrangler of the human body. A novelist was a wrangler of that exotic beast, the novel, presumably into submission. She imagined this person in a singlet, revealing undistinguished musculature, skinny arms braced to hold a wriggling volume against a filthy surface, until no one could be in doubt as to who had bested whom.

I’d always been satisfied with the experience of a book as a book, something that just existed. I didn’t spend any time thinking about who had written it, or what had gone into the writing. I either enjoyed a novel or I didn’t, then I just went on to the next reading experience and hoped for the best.”

If only she, too, had had that option, of having had nothing to do with them, so much unpleasantness might have been avoided.

“Just for the record, and just because we’re here, was it all your idea? Or something the two of you cooked up together? And also, I’ve always wondered. Did you watch?”

They ought to have been grateful, both of them. They ought to have tended their own gardens and left her alone. But they hadn’t, and here the three of them were. Again.

A man from Montana named Richard Rosen, who’d given off a strong odor of crazy on the phone, said he was—and she wasn’t entirely sure she understood this—somehow rewriting Les Misérables but with Victor Hugo’s “mistakes corrected.”

Because what they said about this drug was true, which was why people who wanted to do bad things—and not have those things be remembered by the people they did them to—used it all the time. But this was not a case like that. This was a special case, requiring a special outcome.

People seem to have a special hatred for anyone who accomplishes anything, and we have a culture now where it’s just too easy to tear someone down. Readers should know about the kind of harassment creative people can be targeted with.

She was alone with a profoundly untrustworthy man, who was armed, in the dark, at the edge of a cemetery deep in the north Georgia woods. She was, in other words, on her own. Which was all she had ever been.

Here she was, for the first time revealed as the right girl born into the wrong family, her gifts negated, her wishes—clearly—disdained, her physical body all but imprisoned, made use of and discarded, the girl who nonetheless had made a long-term and good faith effort to do what was right.

She was self-reliant right now, as the heavy blade sank deeper and deeper into the dirt, her palms ragged with blisters, her ankle aching. She believed in herself, right now. She believed in her ability to do what she needed to do.

And I have to say, it strikes me as odd that so many people out there just tell the story of their own lives and call it fiction. It speaks to a certain poverty of imagination, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

Never once had she allowed an injustice against herself to stand, and that was a policy that continued to serve her.

He was the perfect literary helpmeet: gifted, successful, and deceased.

Most people slid through life. They allowed others to take from them, steal from them, repurpose their labor and creativity, and they capitulated without so much as a peep of objection. That was pathetic. That was not in her nature.