If you’ll indulge me, I’ll explain by spinning a yarn. Professional hazard.
A few years ago, when a personal tragedy befell me, my physician advised me to take up martial arts. It would improve my flexibility, my physical and emotional balance. Initially, I rejected this suggestion. At the time, I was considered an athlete—not Olympian, but I could run a six-minute mile, throw aTKO in any boxing ring, outrace the whippersnappers on the black diamond slopes. I’d still be doing all of those things if a tree hadn’t rudely shredded my knee on an off-trail ski course near Breckenridge—but again, I digress.
When I took my doctor’s advice, it was because of the sudden dawn not of wisdom but of vanity. Middle age and a convalescent lifestyle had expanded my waistline, and one morning while shaving I saw more than the suggestion of a double chin. I will spare you the description of the contortions I went through trying to see whether I’d developed the corresponding rearview condition, Old Man Butt. (If my ass ever looks lapped by wrinkles like the riverbed of time, take me out behind the barn and shoot me. But a third time, I digress.)
Off to tae kwon do I went. To my pleasant surprise, I wasn’t the oldest person there. To my chagrin, I was easily the most graceless. For several classes, I was a miserable, dangerous failure, toppling over unexpectedly (I’m well over six feet tall, so TIMMMBEERRRRR!). I was shocked that I was unable to balance. Every minute in that studio was an exercise in humility.
From the first moment, I loved it.That is how I feel about your writing.
Samantha, I hope that in addition to forgiving my writing out of the blue, you’ll give me a pass for being a latecomer to your work. I’d heard of you, of course. Your first novel,The Sharecropper’s Daughter, is a household name, and we share a publisher. My editor’s office is next door to yours at Hercules. (And is there anything more exhilarating than entering that building, that four-story lobby with its backlit glass-shelved rows of first editions? The temple of books. Whatisit about you that makes me digress... and digress and digress?)
For years I told myself I wasn’t reading your novels because I’m a cultural Luddite. I never owned a Beatles album in the ’60s nor a Saab in the ’80s. The laptop I use for writing is an ancient beast I purchased in the last century. Therefore when everyone else was exulting, “Sam Vetiver—have you read her? You HAVE to!” I smiled and said, Thanks, I will. Someday. With zero intention of doing it.
I’ll now admit the real reason I didn’t. Sheer pig envy. And so well merited.
Because from the moment my editor thrust your latest bookThe Sodbuster’s Wifeat me in her office and said, “You MUST read this,” and I forgot my book in my hotel room and found myself on a train north without reading material, and I cracked your spine—I was enraptured.
This passage from page 173:
Once it grew light again in the shed, Anja lifted her face from the straw to find the chickens had tucked their heads under their wings; thinking it was night, they had gone to sleep. They stirred and clucked as she passed among them, and she thought everything might come right after all, of the bread and goat’s milk she might set out for supper. She opened the door and smelled green destruction, the grass scoured from the earth by the twister and trees snapped so their sap bled, the land ravaged to the horizon, the goat dangling tangled from the branches.
Willa Cather, step aside. This is but one of a Whitmanian multitude of passages I could cite, but then this letter would be even more frighteningly long than it is. To select a few: I loved your bravery in depicting the pioneers’ slaughter of the Sioux. I wept. The white man’s subsequent vengeful hanging. I raged. And the lovemaking by the wagon, the farmer mounting his wife from behind as she clung to the wheel to keep from falling in the mud. Unforgettable.
Your meticulously crafted syntax, your ability to time travel: every paragraph lulls us into a stealthy, hypnotic pleasure—and then those last sentences, BAM! They deliver an emotional roundhouse kick to the throat. Hence I call you a ninja.
As I venture out on the road with my own latest novel,All the Lambent Souls(and is there any greater pleasure in the world than connecting with readers? OK, I will stop apologizing for digressing, since I am helpless before you), I’ll bring your book with me as a reminder of what’s possible. I know you’re in Boston, and I wonder if there’s any way you might consider dinner with me while I’m there? Or at least grace one of my New England readings?
Regardless, I thank you for your book. It’s so rare that a novel has changed me forever in some invisible but indelible way. And you’ve done that. Isn’t that what we all hope for?
Ever your admirer,
~ William.
Chapter 5
The Virtuoso
A week later, Sam found herself driving across Boston in a nor’easter to one of her favorite indie booksellers. This wasn’t something she’d normally do so soon after finishing her tour; Sam loved bookstores, naturally, but having been in so many the past month, she needed a break. However, she also needed a respite from Ole Nielsen. Sam had tried that damned opening chapter every way she could think of: first-person, third, omniscient, even from the one-legged prostitute’s POV. She’d started with Ole’s steerage experience on the emigrant ship. She’d chosen a scene from the novel’s middle. Nothing. It was like taking a run at a mountain of ice, getting a few feet up, sliding back down every time.
And Sam might have had an ulterior motive for going to the bookstore: curiosity. William Corwyn was in town, reading his latest instantNew York Times#1 bestsellerAll the Lambent Souls, and Sam needed to know, as William himself had predicted she might ask: Whowasthis guy? Nobody wrote missives like the one he’d written to her, nobody. Most writers received fan mail; Sam was the grateful recipient of reader praise about once a week. These messages were a paragraph or two tops. Nothing like the epistle William had fired across the bow, complete with page-referenced quotations. No writer took valuable time and energy from his own work for that.
So what did Williamwant? Did he have some ulterior writer motive? Unlikely, since he was in a more powerful publishing position than Sam, but possible. Was he nuts? Or did he aspire to get into Sam’s pants? Having done some cursory research on William, Sam had to admit she wasn’t entirely averse to that prospect. William was older than Sam by ten years. He was also unmarried with no kids, a red flag; if a man was a lifelong bachelor, there was usually a reason. But it certainly was not that William was gay, according to theWriter’s Digestcover story proclaiming him “The Most Lit Bachelor” and his borderline flirtatious responses to his raving female fans online. He seemed to be that rarest of all things: a straight, solvent, creative professional man.
Sam was a little worried about how much she wanted him to be real.
She arrived at the bookstore late and dashed through the rain to the vestibule, where she was greeted by William Corwyn—a life-size cardboard cutout of him, anyway. He was propped in the vestibule, arms crossed, glowering soulfully. Around his neck he wore a sign that readMega # 1New York TimesBestselling Author William Corwyn Here Tonight, 7 PM!!!and was decorated with lipstick kisses. “Well,” said Sam. Their publisher had never made her into a cardboard avatar, though Sam had once, for a brief and glittering week, been a subway ad.
She went into the bookstore, which was empty—everyone was in the reading room in the back, where Sam’sSodbustereventhad beena month before. Late as she was, Sam detoured to the New Releases table, seeking her novel among its bright and glossy brethren, shining beneath artfully placed track lighting. She found it with sad placement on a corner. Sam waited until the bookseller on register was scrolling her phone, then movedSodbusterto prime position: propped up facing the store entrance, replacing a summer romance whose author, Sam felt, would not miss a few sales. Sam patted her book and headed into the back room.
Where she ran smack into a human wall. “Okay,” Sam muttered. Unlike her own recent tour with its half-empty seats, William Corwyn’s attendance was not soft. There had to be a hundred readers here,squeezed into a space meant for forty. There was standing room only. Sam pushed her way through as gently as possible, murmuring, “ ’Scuse me, sorry . . . ,” to a spot against the rear shelves, next to a woman with coils of gray hair who was clutching William Corwyn’s latest novel to her breast as though it were an infant.
Thanks, Sam mouthed. The woman gave her the most cursory of smiles, then returned her attention to the podium. The man of the hour was speaking.
As she got her bearings, Sam tried to collate her online William Corwyn knowledge with the actual man. There were just so many ways these days to get to know a person. He was a big guy, tall and solid, like he’d grown up eating only hamburgers—Sam’s type. She loved men big enough to flip her like a flapjack or toss her up on a countertop. He also still had the hair featured in his author photo, dark and only slightly receding, with the showy silver streaks at the temples Sam always thought looked dyed. He also, sadly, had a goatee, which Sam disdained as the facial hair of indecision—either grow a beard or don’t—but maybe he thought it made him look Shakespearean? His voice was low and sonorous, reminding Sam of an article she’d read about how women love men with deep voices because it indicated the presence of testosterone. And he had horn-rimmed glasses, over which he was now glancing meaningfully this way and that as he read. Sam recognized this move, targeting friendly faces in every quadrant of the audience so no reader felt left out. William Corwyn was the real deal.
Or was he, though? Unlike most male authors Sam knew, who showed up for readings in garage-band wear, William Corwyn was wearing a seersucker suit. Who wore a seersucker suit on tour? Then there was what William actually wrote.The New Yorkerhad dubbed him The Virtuoso because every one of William’s novels was different. His debut,The Girl on the Mountain, published when he was still in grad school, had been a Gothic coming-of-agestory about a young woman trapped in a family hell, likeFlowers in the Atticset in the New Hampshire Whites. Some trades had slammed it as melodramatic and derivative, but it had been a Book of the Month selection, and William’s sophomore effort, a contemporary romance calledYou Never Said Goodbye, stayed on theNew York TimesBestsellers list for over a year—in hardcover. His third novel,The Space Between Worlds, was a sci-fi fantasy about a lost tribe of fierce intergalactic women fighting for a planet to call home, and his fourth,Medusa, a retelling of the classic myth, was so successful that it inspired a whole line of au naturelhair-care products that Sam remembered seeing at Target, and that was clearly responsible for all the wild manes in the room. Now he was on tour with his fifth,All the Lambent Souls, a poetic family saga set in the land of Joyce and narrated by the dead matriarch. There was already talk of the Booker Prize.
“Oh,thatguy,” Mireille had snorted, when Sam called to debrief and mentioned William’s name. Mireille sounded like a sexy villainess from a Judith Krantz novel at the best of times, and now she spoke in almost a growl. “He is a virtuoso like I am a trapeze artist. You know what he really is? A dilettante. He cannot choose one lane and stick to it. And you know what really gets under my skin,” Mireille continued. “It is this wholewomanthing. This privileged white male, this...man, he has to writeeverybook from the female point of view? Come on. He is perceived as so sensitive, soevolved, whereas you know what I think it is? I think it is pure commercialism. He knows, this fuckingguy, that ninety-nine percent of fiction readers in this country are women. So what does he do? It is notappropriation, exactly, more like... faux sycophancy, thisingratiation, as if he is telling us, Iunderstandyou. But really he is just printing money. And another thing,” Mireille added, really on a roll now. “Whenever I read his books, and okay, so I have read only one of his books, that ridiculous what was it,Aphrodite, no,Medusa, I get the feeling that he does not actuallylikewomen. Not that he’s gay, it is more like the writing is... how do you say, ersatz, like he has a bouquet in one hand and a hammer behind his back. Do you know what I really think?” Mireille was winding up for the finale. “I think this Monsieur Corwyn does not like women at all, thatMamanCorwynwas very mean tobébéWilliam, and he now spends his entire adult life trying to win positive female attention. Voilà!”
