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Henry Baffler said, “You should try the snowflake method.” His dingy shirt, washed so many times that Amanda couldn’t discern its original colors, hung from his rectangle of a torso

“Henry, do get something to eat and sit down. You’re so skinny you make me nervous.” Amanda handed him a napkin.

Eyes on the floor, streaks of red climbing his neck, Henry accepted the napkin and helped himself to some food. “I saw it online. Some guy who writes Christian sci-fi or some such. He tells you exactly how many plot turns and character reversals you need and on what pages to put them. Claims you can draft a book in a month.”

“That jackass Whelpdale wishes he’d thought of it first, no doubt,” Jackson said.

Now Henry looked directly at Amanda. “It’s everything that New Realism opposes. It’s plot over character, the fake over the real.”

Enjoying the opportunity to play hostess and amused by her effect on Henry Baffler, Amanda waved everyone to bring their drinks into the living room.

“I feel quite guilty,” she said, “for pushing Eddie toward a more plotted novel. I think it’s what he needs, but, well, I hate to think of him rushing through something just because I chided him for writing too fastidiously. It would be fatal to his career, I think, for him to hurry through something and have it be weaker than his last book.”

“Do you mean
Vapor
or
Sea Miss
?” Jackson asked.

Unsure whether the absent-minded tone in which he murmured this question was real or feigned, Amanda backtracked: “I only meant that
Sea Miss
will be hard to top with a stronger book. He’s such a great talent and all.” She reached for her drink and sipped it, barely opening her lips.

“By the way,” Jackson asked, “did you all read Quarmbey’s review of Fadge in
The Times
?”

Though he’d spaced out the words ‘you’ and ‘all’, Amanda could still hear the accent that Jackson had carried to and all but abandoned in Iowa.

“Harshest review I ever read,” said Eddie.

“Delicious, wasn’t it?” Amanda spun out. “When I heard about it, I thought it was too good to be true until I read it myself.”

“Still,” Jackson said, “I suspect that Fadge is more of the future than Quarmbey and his ilk. I met him recently—Fadge, I mean—at a party, and we had a pretty decent chat. But he’s the funniest-looking guy you can imagine. Huge head on a short body. He asked me to send him something for
The Monthly
—preferably an essay on some aspect of the writing life or a profile of a writer, that sort of thing.”

Amanda looked at Eddie to see if he was bothering to look interested. A profile in
The Monthly
could generate a little interest in his work, but he just didn’t think that way. Eddie popped a roll into his mouth and ate it whole. In his ballooning cheeks, she could see what he might look like if he really let himself go to rubber.

“I sent him a piece ten months ago and am still waiting to hear,” Henry said quietly. “On the New Realism.”

“He only reads the solicited stuff. It’s a waste of time to submit over the transom there.”

“Then it hardly seems fair, does it,” Henry mumbled, “to say that they accept unsolicited manuscripts and to forbid simultaneous submissions. They’ve tied up my essay for almost a year.”

“I certainly hope you don’t abide by that simultaneous-submission thing,” Jackson said, sounding truly alarmed. “You should have every story and essay you’ve ever written out to twenty places at once. You can even hire someone to do it for you so you don’t have to face all the rejection slips.” He drained his glass and allowed Amanda to take it for a refill. “Oh, get this. I was checking out the publication, and who do you think had an ad in the back? He’s selling ‘services for writers’, including submissions like I was just saying and of course manuscript triage. Any guesses?”

“Don’t tell me it’s Whelpdale!” Amanda handed Jackson the new drink.

“None other. He’ll even be your ‘nag’. For a fee, he’ll phone you weekly or monthly—or daily if you pay enough—and scold you into writing. You have to pay extra for the ‘overbearing mother’ version of the service.”

“And to think,” Amanda said, “that I could have been charging Eddie for my services all along.”

“But what would that make you?” Eddie said quickly, not meeting her eyes and instead turning to Jackson. “I suppose you’re right about Whelpdale. He sounds shameless.”

“It’s the ‘manuscript doctor’ that gets me. A man who didn’t get a penny for his book and hasn’t written another one, trying to make a living by telling other people what to write. He claims that he recommends the books he likes, post-improvement no doubt, to agents.”

“I suppose anyone can recommend anything to anyone—whether he knows him or not.” Amanda smiled at Henry, whose neck blushed again.

“It’s a swindle,” Eddie said. “I suppose that’s what it’s coming to. Soon we’ll need an agent to get an agent.”

The men finished the food quickly, leaving only a green smear of wasabi paste and a few pieces of pickled ginger on the plate.

“I would have made more if I’d known there’d be four of us,” Amanda said. She returned to the kitchen, where she fanned crackers and cheese onto a white serving platter. Slicing an apple, she said over her shoulder, “Seems as though we all have new prospects of one sort or another. I did some writing myself today. I’m thinking of a whole book now.”

“That’s capital!” Jackson said. “Though I might add that this news is long overdue. You should have three books out by now. You were probably the best writer in workshop.”

Eddie grabbed a cracker as soon as Amanda set the plate on the coffee table. Through bites, he said, “Now I have to defend Amanda’s right to not-write. Should we be writing just to be writing? I always thought Amanda’s decision not to write until she had something to say was an honorable position.”

Measuring her words and looking at Jackson and Henry but not her husband, she said, “Maybe I have something to say now.”

Jackson rose to pour himself more of the whiskey he’d brought. “Hell, I’d defend her right to write about nothing at all. We would all do well to write about nothing whatsoever.”

“Besides,” Eddie said tentatively, “Amanda has all the makings of a great editor.”

Amanda felt her temper quake but kept it underground and still spoke quietly. “Quit talking about me in the third person. You need a Harvard degree or a daddy on a Fortune 500 board to get hired as anything better than a sub-editor these days. I have all the editorial smarts in the world, but I could sit on my lovely derriere in that office for another year and I’ll still be working for people who aren’t as smart as I am.”

“Lovely indeed,” Jackson whispered loud enough for Eddie to hear.

Eddie stared at Jackson before turning to Henry. “So tell us what you think about writing about nothing. What are you working on these days—a new article for
(A)Musing Aloud
?”

“No, they’ve totally sold out to the mainstream. Actually, I’m onto a novel as well.” Henry looked out the window, then around the room, while the others waited for him to expand.

Finally, Jackson said, “What’s it about? Something more than nothing?”

“An objectionable question. Better to ask the writer: ‘What’s the reality?’”

Jackson grinned at Amanda, then said, “Very well then, what is the reality?”

“The reality is that I’ve started observing a bailiff who eats lunch in the park where I sometimes sit, down from that bookstore that’s closing down. He’s a talkative guy who loves to go on and on about the people who come into court. He’s developed a typology, one that works for both the people he encounters and, he claims, the pigeons he feeds his sandwich crusts to.”

“A courtroom novel. Capital.” Jackson slid a slice of apple between his white teeth.

“No, no. Anyway, it’s small-claims court. My book is simply going to tell the bailiff’s true story. He’s dating now, and you should see the woman. Large and squinty, about ten years older than him,” Henry said, sounding nearly in awe. “So the book will follow his lunch hours and theories and courtship. It will be plotted not by me but by the choices my real-life character makes.”

“The ultimate in character-driven fiction,” Amanda said dramatically, imitating the voice-over on so many movie trailers.

“It will be the prime example of New Realism. Everyone will finally understand what I’m advocating. It’ll be a great book.” So excited that he forgot his shyness, Henry stood and paced the apartment. “It will encompass the decently ignoble—nothing bestial, mind you. I figure it will take me at least a year. I want the writing to be loving, slow, careful, but also blunt and true to the quotidian world.”

Amanda and Eddie exchanged a stare.

“And don’t you think this is a great title?
Bailiff
. Simple, clear, not deceptive.”

Now it was Amanda and Jackson who traded looks.

“I envy you,” Eddie said after an extended silence. “You have real enthusiasm in your voice.”

“I can’t imagine a man with a wife like yours envying the likes of me. Even my bailiff is luckier in love than I am.”

“Well, Henry, maybe someday soon you’ll find your own large, squinty woman. Better yet, steal the bailiff’s and spice up your novel.”

“That would be authorial interference,” Henry said, serious as stone.

Jackson cocked his head at their peculiar friend. “Speaking of courtship, I need to take off. I have a date tomorrow.”

“Good for you!” Amanda and Eddie said at once, Eddie’s voice given volume by what Amanda interpreted as relief.

“I’m worried, though. I’ve been thinking altogether too much about this girl, and I’m not sure that’s good. I suspect she’s close to flat broke, which is the last thing I need. She’s got family publishing connections, but I doubt they’d be available to me. A foot-in-mouth error I’m trying not to repeat. Anyway, even if her family did welcome me, her father’s connections are a bit obsolete. It’s not the same scene as it was even five years ago. Fadge’ll tell you that.”

“Then why her?” Amanda asked. “Surely there’s other talent afoot.”

“Of course, and I haven’t closed my eyes to the world of attractive women.” He paused. “She’s an odd girl, for sure. She reads enough for six people, I suspect. I don’t know how to explain it except to say that she’s the kind of girl that gets into your head. She makes me want to be a better person.”

I
n his house on the hill overlooking one of the widest stretches of the Hudson River, Andrew Yarborough toiled on his critical overview of fiction. On his strongest days, he could admit to himself that, as a fiction writer, he would never shake the detested designation of “mid-list writer.” It was a phrase his editor and his agent liked to toss about, sometimes aiming to cajole him into writing something different. “If you can’t be Philip Roth, think younger,” his agent had said as he began his last novel. At other times, the blasted term was used to prepare him for a lower-than-expected advance. “Think Martin Bland,” his editor had said when making the weak offer on his last novel.

More painful, though, were the signs—increasingly hard to shrug away—that he wasn’t as important an arbiter of taste as he had been. Evidence was mounting that the literary world was trying to sidestep him. Two years earlier, the Lannan Foundation had called him, as usual, for names of promising young writers. But the Foundation had given its award to someone not on his list, to a writer he hadn’t even read. Last year, the call from the Foundation hadn’t come at all. The real blow, of course, had been the coup that led to his replacement, by the odious and unctuous Chuck Fadge, as the editor of
The Monthly
. His mutinous subordinates and the treacherous publisher agreed, they claimed, that the magazine needed a new look and a new vision. They accused Andrew of fossilized literary tastes, said he was stuck in some muddy past. Now, under Fadge,
The Monthly
reviewed every goddamn book that called itself a collage and included extended masturbation scenes.

Andrew was willing to admit that he was quarrelsome, prone to bad moods, and more likely to reach for anger than any other emotion. It was, after all, the emotion that had best served him, that had driven his best work. He could even admit that the failure of the world to give his talent its full due frustrated him, and he cringed a little whenever he read a letter to the editor written by some old crank wanting to be recognized for some accomplishment that no one cared about. Braggarts, he’d noticed, are people whose talents aren’t trumpeted by others. Perhaps there was even some merit in his agent’s admonitions that he stop making enemies, stop alienating editors, stop running down popular writers in reviews—at least while they retained their popularity.

He could hardly stand to talk to her anymore, though. She’d begged him to come with her when she left the large agency where he’d started his career, pilfering an impressive roster of talented authors. It had been over antipasti, at the outdoor café across from Lincoln Center, where the waiters sing almost as well as the performers on the stages across the street. “Almost,” Andrew had told her, “is a crucial word in the sorting of talents.” She’d said she had what it took to make him really rich and really famous.

It had been a mistake, of course, to sleep with her—all the more so because she wasn’t his type: absurd leather pants, limp carrot-colored hair and ironic glasses that made her look like a cub reporter out of DC Comics. He would never have made a pass at her, but he wasn’t a man to turn down an offer. She’d spent an eternity calculating the tip, over-tipping the attractive waiter by about as much as she generally under-tipped good-looking young women. “I want you to screw me,” she’d said as she signed her name, looking up with an expression picked up from a movie.

He’d laughed and said, “You sure do have a way of asking that’s hard to turn down.”

What had followed were a handful of assignations at a Lexington Avenue boutique hotel, each a more disappointing version of the previous. The day Jonathan Warbury came over to her agency, Andrew knew she would end the affair she’d asked him to start. She still phoned him occasionally, pumping him for inside news, until he told her that sex was the price he charged for information. “I’ve already got a wife,” he said, “and at least she’ll cook for me.”

He should have found a new agent, but inertia—or something he couldn’t quite define—had taken hold of him. And truthfully, he hated the other agents he’d met, and he hated most of their loathsome clients. Chuck Fadge was the worst of them all. In Andrew’s mind, Chuck Fadge stood for them all.

In a horrible journal called
The Balance
—the name itself was a joke—Fadge had published two reviews of Andrew’s second most recent novel, one positive and one negative. The positive review had damned with faint praise, while the negative review had been biting, smart, funny, and vicious. Andrew suspected that Fadge himself had penned both reviews, which had been published under the ridiculously pseudonymous bylines Gabriel Schlipper and Cormandy Page. And a suspicion held long enough functions as certain knowledge.

Andrew was convinced that his new work, his critical overview of fiction, could raise his stature. At the least, it should ensure sales of all his books on college campuses for the next decade. If he could get the editor to handle it right, the book could return him to prominence. It had been a misfortune that Fadge had published his similar book first, but surely at least college professors and old-school editors would prefer Andrew’s more learned offering. There was no chapter on Brett Easton Ellis; there were twelve pages devoted to Ralph Ellison. He’d omitted that snot-nosed Yalie who’d ripped off the finest literary ideas to have emerged from the shambles of postwar Germany, but he was including thoughtful analyses of Günter Grass and the exquisite W. G. Sebald. Now Quarmbey’s review of Fadge offered the possibility that even the hoi polloi might half understand why these choices mattered.

Andrew was man enough to acknowledge that Fadge had a style considered attractive by many, though it continued to shock him that glib and acrobatic were so often conflated with well-written these days. He’d once overheard Quarmbey calling his own prose bloodless, though certainly professional jealousy, the large snout-full of booze Quarmbey could be counted on to drink, and the fact that the confirmed old bachelor no longer had much success with young ladies were at least partially responsible for the nasty adjective slung at his friend. Though Andrew was certain that his prose was not at all bloodless, he was aware that some graceful editing of a kind once but no longer performed by an actual editor might be in order.

So he received the news of Margot’s imminent return home with even greater joy than parental affection alone might have accounted for. Her careful pen had improved more than one of her father’s reviews and articles. She’d joked the last time she lent him an edit that even a graduate-school professor would have to credit her as co-author for the amount of work she’d done—that’s how good-natured she was. She was a fine daughter, always helpful. She was humble and kind and naturally intelligent, in short, everything that her absurd mother was not.

Andrew held one worry about Margot’s return home: Janelle might infect the bright child with her worsening nonsense. He vowed to separate them as much as possible and to keep Margot so busy with the copyediting of his manuscript that she’d have no time for any of her mother’s mush-headed archetype workshops. He planned to complete the book draft before Margot returned home at the end of the month.

When the doorbell chimed one Wednesday morning, Andrew had long since put down his pen in order to indulge his usual forms of creative procrastination: de-alphabetizing his
CD
s to arrange them by genre and year; moving correspondence from pile to pile; sneaking quick looks at a mildly pornographic website before deleting his browsing history. “Goddamnit!” he shouted. “How am I expected to get any work done, ever, with these constant interruptions?!”

He waited for his wife to answer the door, but instead the doorbell rang again.

“See what I mean? I can’t win.” He shoved his chair back in a great drama of exasperation, as though he actually had an audience, and walked heavily through the house. He paused at the living room, where his wife stood before a dozen middle-aged, middle-weight, shockingly unattractive women, who apparently thought it was beneath their intellectual dignity to make any effort whatsoever to doll themselves up. The cloying smell of vanilla candles seeped from the room. Andrew was positive he’d have a headache inside five minutes.

“What I want you to think about next,” Janelle said in her false-honey voice, “is your inner warrioress. She is who I want to feel on the page.”

“I’m going to be ill,” Andrew said. “I’m actually going to vomit.” He swung open the door and was relieved to see a man standing there. “Quarmbey. Thank God. Come on in if you can manage to ignore that nauseating scene.” He gestured to the living room as they passed and led Quarmbey out to the back deck, stopping off in the kitchen for a bottle of vodka and two tumblers.

“What’s the redhead’s name?” his friend asked, awaiting his host’s pour.

“Trust me, you don’t want anything to do with any of them. Big underwear on all of them except Janelle, and, in her case, who the hell cares.”

After Quarmbey downed two quick shots, he said, “Andrew, I’ve been set up, and I need to hear it wasn’t you.”

“Of course it wasn’t me. What the hell are you talking about?”

While sipping his third and fourth shots of vodka, Quarmbey told Andrew the bad news. “Normally an aggrieved author’s only recourse is to write a letter to the editor, but those assholes, those traitors at
The Times
, are giving Fadge an entire page to respond to my review. Not in the letters section. A real page.”

“That’s an abomination.” Andrew refilled both their glasses. “Clearly Fadge used his connections, pulled some strings, made some calls. Believe me when I say that nothing is beneath him. He has no pride.”

“I thought
The Times
was the one paper left free of that sort of back-scratching, log-rolling crap. Apparently it’s fallen into the gutter with everyone else.”

“I wonder if they planned this all along—set us up—or whether Fadge marshaled his forces after the fact.” Andrew remembered that he’d been asked to write the review himself and was proud of himself for not snapping the bait. He searched his memory for everyone he knew who still worked at
The Times
. “I’m going to make some calls of my own,” he said.

His workday completely screwed, he allowed himself to get tipsy before calling his old friend a taxi.

“Really,” Quarmbey said, “ask Janelle if that redhead is single.”

“You drink too much.” Andrew slammed the door and waved on the car.

Back in his study, he pulled the novels he’d written from the shelf, stacked them on the floor, and stood next to them. “Knee high,” he said. “My career is knee high.” With a sudden panic, he realized that he couldn’t remember the title of his second novel.
High Sorghum
? He chewed the words. No, that was the title of his third novel.
High Sorghum
had been his weakest novel, but the second one—that was a great book. As he tried to recall the words of its title, he realized that he did not even remember where the book was set in place or time.

He stood for ten minutes before bending over, hands gripping his thighs for balance, to read from the spine,
Wintergreen: A Novel of the Frontier
.