The Thieves of Manhattan - By Adam Langer Page 0,48

when I first came to New York, the tickets I’d bought to book fairs. I fought the desire to walk out of Michael’s, to say that any triumph that might come at the end of my ordeal was not worth this humiliation. I kept telling myself that I was only playing a role and reciting lines, that Ian Minot wasn’t sitting here, ordering a trio of sorbets, that Geoff Olden was lunching instead with the author of A Thief in Manhattan.

Over coffee, Olden offered his criticisms of Thief—too long, he said, book groups rarely chose books longer than 250 pages anymore; the opening was slow, it really needed to grab people; the conclusion was too abrupt, let us savor it more; there were too many swearwords—most readers were women and they didn’t like characters who swore; the title needed work too. As he criticized both Ian Minot and the author of A Thief in Manhattan, I wasn’t sure which of us felt more resentful.

When the check came, Olden eyed it, raised his eyebrows, and whistled. He put down his platinum card, then handed me three pages of typewritten notes. As I scanned them, I kept thinking about how each of us should and would react—Ian versus the author of Thief. The author, the one whose glasses I was wearing, was a hustler, a rogue, a bit of a romantic, too—a man who believed in love and art and didn’t care how much something was worth or what some agent thought about his story as long as it could get him back to the woman he loved. Then there was Ian, the schlep in the wrinkled shirt and scuffed boots; he wouldn’t have been granted entrance to this lunch in the first place. The only person remaining was me, the man who was not yet done being Ian Minot but who was not quite ready to be the author of A Thief in Manhattan. So I just thanked Geoff for his notes and didn’t say anything else; I figured I’d let him decide who I was supposed to be, and get back to work.

REVISING THE DRAFT

Geoff asked if I could return Thief to him in two weeks. But the day after our lunch, when I went back to Roth’s place, I couldn’t summon the motivation. Isabelle DuPom called me at Olden’s behest to ask how I was doing, and I told the truth—that I was working to return the manuscript to her boss at the appointed time and that making the changes was harder than I’d anticipated. Isabelle asked if I needed more time, and though I said no, I’d meet the deadline, I continued to fritter away days. After a week passed, I began to panic when I realized that half my time had elapsed, and I had not come close to cutting A Thief in Manhattan down to the size Olden had requested.

I spent the following week cutting and rewriting, chopping this paragraph and that, lishing entire chapters. But when the next Monday arrived and I reread my work, I realized that I had made the book worse. The shorter manuscript took longer to read; it lurched from incident to incident; Iola Jaffe and Norbert Piels were as shallow and cartoonish as Roth had initially written them—their actions were not only improbable but also dull. The book was becoming one that Roth had warned me about—no reader would care whether it was true or not, and so wouldn’t feel betrayed when I revealed it to be false. I considered calling Olden to ask for more time, but because I knew that I had to become the sure-of-himself author of A Thief in Manhattan, because I knew that I had to be an actor and not a reactor, had to act like something big was at stake, I vowed that I would send in the revised manuscript to Olden the following morning as promised, no matter how much work was left.

I must have spent hours pacing in front of Roth’s window, watching the wind blow the bright green leaves of the London plane trees, watching the ripples in the Hudson River, watching traffic zooming south but getting backed up in the northbound lanes on the Henry Hudson Parkway, watching the sky brighten as the sun rose behind Roth’s building. Cut about fifty pages, Olden had told me; lose the swearwords; change the beginning, the ending, the title. I watched the sun dip into the river, watched the sky grow dark