The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,41
the Blom shouldn’t be a hooligan, maybe he should be a fussy and fastidious bookworm who wears bow ties, high-waters, and wingtips, and maybe Iola Jaffe shouldn’t swear so much when she appraises book manuscripts—maybe she should smack the hero with a purse instead of face him down with a gun, and maybe a better story would be of a young man who sits in a library fantasizing about meeting a girl admiring The Tale of Genji but never speaking to her. Or, maybe an even more realistic story would be one about a young man working at a coffee shop, dreaming of publishing a book but never actually writing one, watching his Ukrainian girlfriend do it while he serves java to punters; maybe that would be the most realistic story of all.
By the time I figured out that Roth was mocking me, he was just about done. What the hell had we been doing here all this time? he demanded. What the hell was the point of all this, Ian, what did I think we were doing? Writing something realistic? Hadn’t I learned anything? Hadn’t he said that the way to write was to ask What If, then lay on the gas? I was writing like a guy who had run a red light but kept looking back to see if the cops were catching up.
Well, shouldn’t we just leave out the patently ridiculous parts? I asked. Wouldn’t that make the book easier to sell?
Did I know anything about selling books? Roth wanted to know.
No, I said, but still, there was no way anybody would believe this book.
“No, there isn’t,” he said, “and that’s because you’re not writing like you trust the story. Because part of you is still a small-town Midwestern boy who doesn’t know how to tell a lie. You’ll never succeed in telling one if you don’t act like you trust it yourself.”
Yes, he said, I could make his story more “believable,” but did I know what would happen then?
No one would publish it? I asked.
Maybe they would, maybe they wouldn’t, Roth said, but the point was that no one would care if my story was true or not. And if no one gave a damn about whether something was true, then they certainly wouldn’t give a damn when it turned out to be false. Had I missed the entire point of the plan? The point was not to tell fewer lies, but to tell bigger and better ones, to tell bestseller lies, not mid-list lies, to state those lies boldly, clearly, without apology. He wanted to see fewer safe-deposit boxes and more golden crosses in empty fields; he wanted to see more hooligans, hunchbacks, wizards, and dwarves.
“Don’t worry about anyone thinking your story’s false,” he said. “Try writing a story they’ll want to believe is true.”
Then Roth apologized for raising his voice. In fact, he said, he felt bad for me.
“Why bad?” I asked.
“Because now you’ll have to start over from the very beginning.”
THE HAPPY COUPLE
And so I began again, typing all through the winter. Roth made corrections, encouraged me to expand my ideas and eliminate everything that felt too quiet. Our workdays lasted twelve hours at a minimum, and by the end of them I was exhausted. Everything became an argument—I agreed to keep his desolate field and his golden cross, and he grudgingly allowed me to get rid of the gratuitous reference to its longitude and latitude; he insisted on keeping the improbable names of Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels but assented to lishing some of the former’s monologues and eliminating some of the latter’s tattoos; I argued that the end of the book, in which “Roth” and his Girl reunited, was too hokey and romantic, but Roth convinced me to leave it as it was—readers liked happy endings, he said, stories where heroes got what they wanted.
When it came to developing biographies for the characters of Iola and Norbert, we rejected almost all of each other’s suggestions, so that when we finally arrived at stories both of us could live with, I had no idea who had come up with the ideas. We decided that Iola Jaffe had not always been a crooked manuscript appraiser; she had once been an academic, who turned to crime when she’d failed to find a publisher for her research into the origins of the novel and had been rejected for tenure by her university. And Norbert was no mere hooligan—he’d been one of Iola’s most promising