The book was poorly organized, with its most original and compelling chapter buried in the middle, and like most academics, Everett wasn’t a gifted stylist. Still, it was smart in its curious fashion, and what was wrong with it struck Teddy as fixable.
“Tell me how,” Everett had pleaded when so informed. He was coming up for tenure that year at St. Joseph’s, their small Catholic college, and his case was hardly strong. By his own admission he was a mediocre teacher, though his students seemed to think he’d have to improve significantly to achieve mediocrity. He’d avoided serving on committees the past four years by claiming he was writing a book. If it didn’t get published…
But here was the problem: the book might be fixable, but Teddy doubted Everett was the man for the job. There were technical flaws, lots of them, and those could be addressed easily enough, but what was really wrong was deeply rooted in his colleague’s education and experience, the classes he’d taken and avoided, his natural aptitudes, his blind spots. In a word, his character. Teddy felt this was far more often the case than writers realized. Sure, he could point out the more glaring lapses in judgment and maybe give Everett a few tips, and if he followed Teddy’s advice and worked hard, by this time next year the book would be better, if probably still not good enough. And anyway, what difference did it make? The guy didn’t have a year. Nine months from now he’d be out on his ass.
“Give it to me for a month,” Teddy suggested. It was then the end of July and he had no plans for August. Worse, he’d noticed his personal barometric pressure dropping of late. He needed a task, something that would require his full attention for thirty days but no longer.
That, strangely enough, was the exact question Teddy had been asking himself most of his adult life and for which he’d found no compelling answer. The first person to ask it, though, had been his academic adviser at Minerva College, who’d wanted to know what Teddy intended to major in. Unable to decide, he opted for general studies, a curriculum designed not so much to answer the question as to postpone it. According to the registrar, by the time Teddy graduated he’d taken more courses in more academic disciplines than any student in Minerva College’s history. Tom Ford, his favorite professor there, had told him not to worry about that, but of course Tom had been cut from the same bolt of cloth. Referring to himself as “the last of the generalists,” he was the chair of the humanities program, where he taught a class in Great Books, but he also taught “special topics” classes in English, philosophy, history, art and even the sciences. Mostly he invented classes he wished had been offered when he’d been an undergraduate. Teddy had taken so many of them that Mickey joked that he was the only Minerva student who was majoring in Ford. Not until his senior year did Teddy catch wind of how poorly his mentor was regarded by his colleagues. He’d never advanced beyond the rank of associate professor, because he not only never published anything himself but also took a dim view of anyone who did. Their books, he claimed, were proof of how little they knew, how narrow the sphere of their knowledge was. More than anyone, it was Tom Ford who’d given Teddy permission to indulge his curiosity without expecting it to pay dividends in terms of professional success. Someday, he wrote at the bottom of one of Teddy’s essays, you might actually write something worth reading. My advice would be to put that day off as long as possible.
The idea that he might write a book worth reading had appealed to Teddy, and he imagined that if he followed Tom’s advice and example, then one day the right subject would present itself. Except somehow it never did. The problem was that no single interest felt more urgent than the next, and a good case could always be made for both. Maybe for him the right subject didn’t exist, or, conversely, they all were right, which ironically amounted to the same thing. Over time he came to suspect that what he