How I Became a Famous Novelist (27 page)

People have asked me if I went crazy, or if something Tinsley did made me snap, or if I was just angry that day. But it was the opposite. Suddenly I felt a kind of dreary, resigned calm.

No one noticed at first. Skee got his footage, and Tinsley and the crew moved out, and Michelle led me out to the sugar-woods, and stood me by one of the maple trees that we’d picked out earlier. We’d had Aunt Evelyn set it up with the tubes and the pipes and all. It was a good metaphor, we’d all agreed at the time. I stood there waiting while they checked the light and Tinsley had her face touched up.

And then the camera was on.

“Speed.”

“Okay, on Tinsley.”

She leaned in close to keep her hair in the shot. I could feel Skee, just over my shoulder, breathing through his yellow teeth.

“Does writing flow from you, Pete, like the sap from these trees?” Tinsley asked.

“What?”

“Is creating a novel really a matter of tapping in, and drawing the words out?”

I didn’t say anything at first. Tinsley tried again.

“When you’re writing, do you feel it flow, like maple sap?”

I looked at Tinsley. Maybe she really did want to know if writing flowed like tree sap. Maybe she didn’t. It didn’t matter. Whatever it was, I decided not to lie to her.

“No. I mean, look.”

My posture relaxed. My muscles eased. Relief washed over me.

“Look, I wanted to write a book that would be popular. And, you know, I made kind of a study of these things, and I’d read one of Preston Brooks’s books, the one with the cancer kid and that guy wandering all over Ireland and all that, and I just decided,
Okay, fine. If that’s what they want, great. I’m gonna fill it with mushy prose, and, you know, promises, and faintly heard songs, and lost loves.
All that stuff.

“And, yeah, I mean, once I decided that, that I was gonna write, you know, the baldest, most sentimental book ever, yeah, I guess it did come pretty easily. If I was stuck, you know, I’d just put in a dying Frenchman or an immigrant carrying a baby in a shopping bag, whatever. A dying dog on the road. It’s easy enough to come up with that kind of crap, once you’ve decided to do it.

“So, yeah, I guess it did flow like syrup. It’s not like I was James Joyce up here, slaving over every word. Give people
what they want. If they want this crap, fine. You got it. It’s a bunch of bullshit anyway. So, yes. Syrup, or whatever you said.”

The only reason I know that’s exactly what I said is because I saw it on TV a week later.

19

TINSLEY HONIG:
Was it challenging, writing a novel?

PETE TARSLAW:
Challenging? Not really. I mean, it’s a titanic pain in the ass to actually type out all the words. And it has to more or less make sense, which is tricky. But the big part is just figuring out what readers want to hear. And that’s easy; you just look at the best-seller list. Readers—or people who buy books, anyway—are really straightforward. Kind of dumb, even, in what they like. They like World War II, disasters, lost love. It’s not hard to come up with stuff. Shooting fish in a barrel, really.

TINSLEY HONIG:
Shooting fish in a barrel?

PETE TARSLAW:
Well, I mean, not that easy. I did have to write the whole thing.

TINSLEY HONIG:
So the actual writing was the most challenging part.

PETE TARSLAW:
Well . . . yeah. Sitting there and doing it.

TINSLEY HONIG:
How did you keep yourself sitting there?

PETE TARSLAW:
Uh, well, you know, I thought about the money I was gonna make. The prestige.

TINSLEY HONIG:
Mmm.

PETE TARSLAW:
I wish somebody had told me how little money there was in books!

TINSLEY HONIG:
[light laughter]

TINSLEY HONIG:
Who would you say are your biggest literary inspirations?

PETE TARSLAW:
Preston Brooks. You know that guy? Right, you interviewed him. Yeah—I mean that guy is such an obvious charlatan, his books are so cheesy in such stupid ways. Reading that guy,
seeing him, I figured, yeah, I can definitely pull this off. I guess that’s not so much ‘inspiration.’ But—you get it. He’s just so terrible, I was like, if that guy can do it, I can do it.

TINSLEY HONIG:
[indicating maple trees] The countryside here is so beautiful. Did you try and include this place in your work?

PETE TARSLAW:
No. I mean—

TINSLEY HONIG:
The trees, the streams—

PETE TARSLAW:
No. I mean—I could’ve, I guess. But I figured, Vermont has so few people in it, not that many people buying books. And the countryside up here, it’s kind of complicated, you know? There’s rocks and stuff everywhere. But like a plain, or a field, that’s much easier to describe. You just say, you know, “It’s lush and golden and sweeping” and people get it. It seems like a bigger deal.

—excerpts from the transcript of episode 217 of
Dispatch,
aired 05/06/08 on ABC

How these things snowball is an interesting puzzle—Internet phenomena? Cultural controversies?—requiring a better sociologist than me, because not only am I not impartial, I observed the whole thing unfolding at the local FedEx/Kinko’s.

To read the blog posts, the articles in Slate and Salon and the
Weekly Standard
—even the
Huffington Post,
where the fucking guy from
Wings
had an opinion—at my local FedEx/Kinko’s, I’d have to put my credit card in that little machine, and get issued a Kinko’s AccessKey or whatever it’s called, and sit in a comfortless chair and watch my 25-cent minutes tick away as I tracked the rhetorical combat about whether I was evil or just misunderstood.

I couldn’t use my own computer because some state police guys had come to my apartment door for it on the very morning before my
Dispatch
segment aired.

I hadn’t even been there; I’d been so nervous that morning I’d woken up early and gone for pancakes. They’d dealt with Hobart. The agents had flashed a warrant and explained to him that I was a “person of interest” in the “ongoing Jonathan Sturges investigation.” Then they seized my computer and took it away.

He was panicking when I got back. He kept choking on his own spit as he tried to explain it to me. But I shut him up and told him to calm down. He didn’t know Sturges so the whole thing shocked him more than it did me.

When state police guys seizing your computer is only the second-worst thing to happen to you in a given week, that’s a bad week. But I didn’t have any spare mental energy to devote to possible criminal charges because I was about to become a full-fledged pop-culture controversy.

In retrospect it all makes sense: a young author goes on TV and issues sweeping derisions of literature. Of course it was a big deal. The only reason it wasn’t a bigger deal is that I wasn’t more famous. But it caught me by surprise.

Like all controversies, it evolved in clear stages.

1. The Inciting Incident

My interview on
Dispatch
aired. Tinsley introduced me thus:

“
The Tornado Ashes Club,
a best-selling novel about a grandmother, an unlikely fugitive, and a long-lost love, has touched the hearts of readers across the country. It’s a tale full of tenderness and well-turned phrases.”

Good so far.

“But the book’s author, a young man named Peter Tarslaw, has some views on writing that are . . . far from traditional. I visited Peter at his family’s maple sugar farm in Vermont, where he spoke about truth, fiction . . . and his literary rivals.”

If you watched the segment on the oft-linked YouTube clips, then you know what followed: the opening bit of me lacing into Preston Brooks, the shots of Tinsley nodding, the series of set pieces as I spout out my various theories.

My quibbles, when I first watched the piece, were mainly aesthetic: my voice sounded much whinier than I believe it to be, my pants looked much too short even though they’re not.

Hobart had been watching with me.

“What’d you think?”

“You were great, definitely,” he said. He sounded nervous, which made me believe I really had been great. “Listen, about those state police guys—”

“Hobart, seriously, don’t worry about that. It’s my stupid boss. It’s fine. I just got interviewed by Tinsley Honig!”

“Yeah, yeah. That’s . . . it’s incredible,” he said.

Then my phone rang. It was Mom, as purely and naïvely proud as any mom, and I soaked it up and assumed that was how the rest of the world would take it as well.

If TV was still a one-shot deal, where you either saw something when it aired or you missed it forever, the signals zooming off unrecoverable into distant galaxies, then that would’ve been the end of it.

2. Outrage

Tracing it back in retrospect is like following the origins of some ghastly tropical disease—there are early cases, and threads and connection, and patches where it flares up especially strongly, but the very start is lost.

But it went something like this. Some literary-blogger types saw my interview. In their garrets full of dog-eared copies of
Emerson’s Essays
and
Barthes on Barthes,
they cleaned their hands against their Powell’s Bookstore T-shirts and started weighing in on what I’d said to Tinsley.

Somehow a clip of the interview got posted on YouTube. Now the blogger types had something to link to. More of these self-righteous vultures sat down at their stained desks and weighed in on the “Tarslaw Controversy.”

What bothered most of them was how jarringly frank I’d
been—how I’d admitted baldly that I thought writing was just a con game.

But then other bloggers started suggesting that maybe everything I’d said was sarcastic. And then that argument kept the whole thing going.

The Controversy, really, was: What it did mean for fiction, what I’d said? Had I meant it? Did it matter? Very quickly people got lost in postmodern mazes of their own invention, and suddenly my simple frankness became a puzzle.

3. Response

Next time a Controversy arises, watch for this phase. It’s the easiest to identify: the stage at which enough people are arguing and making noise about something that self-important journalists decide they better stake out some ground on the issue.

This stage got going the next morning, while I was still asleep. At nine I heard my phone ring and saw it was David Borer, but I assumed he was calling to congratulate me and rolled over. He kept calling, and I figured,
Dude, I get it, you think I’m terrific.
It wasn’t until about two that I heard his message about “damage control strategies.”

By the time I got to Kinko’s, the Tarslaw Controversy had been kicking around long enough for distinct schools of thought to coalesce.

SCHOOLS OF THOUGHT ON MY TINSLEY INTERVIEW

•
The Tarslaw-Is-a-Total-Bastard School
, epitomized by a 2000-word rant on The Pathetic Fallacy:
During his interview on the “news” show
Dispatch
last night,
author Pete Tarslaw revealed the truth about publishing. Tarslaw’s comments showed him to be the epitome of snark, admitting to manipulating reader trust as casually as Dick Cheney manipulated prewar intelligence. Like the child molesters featured in the show’s first segment, Tarslaw coolly described his deplorable methods, as the manicured
(?)
hostess blithely nodded. It was the latest sign of how far we’ve fallen.

•
The It’s-All-Tinsley’s-Fault School,
which cropped up on the message boards at BetterReadThanDead .com:
Here we had a guy who was finally prepared to say what we’ve all been thinking about popular fiction, ready to blow the cover best-selling authors have been hiding under for years, and Tinzy
(sic)
starts asking him about how to make maple syrup!

This school didn’t let me off the hook, though. There was in fact a conspiracy-minded subset that suggested the only reason I was on TV instead of, say, Alice Munro, was that the corporate types knew I wouldn’t say anything too “smart” that would seem condescending to loyal TV viewers.

•
The Tarslaw-Is-a-Postmodern-Imp School,
expressed on Slate by “Book Girl” Meg Bierst:
Pete Tarslaw’s interview on last night’s episode of the ABC newsmagazine
Dispatch
is already becoming literary legend. Critics have leapt over themselves to denounce Tarslaw’s supposed “cynicism.”

They’re wrong. It’s true, Tarslaw’s honesty—about his writing methods, his disdain for readers, his fellow authors—was shocking. But that was exactly the point. Tarslaw
is what the literary world has been waiting for: a genuine prankster. His responses were exactly what inane questions deserve: subtle jokes that pierce the ludicrous bubble of hype that surrounds young authors. Tarslaw is nothing less than the Borat of popular fiction.

She had to undercut it at the end by saying
It’s a pity Tarslaw isn’t as interesting as a writer as he is as an interview subject.
But still.

Unfortunately the first school seemed to be winning. Controversy Stage Four commenced.

4. Press contact

Seven hours or so, that’s how long it must take for a reporter to have coffee, eat a bagel, cruise the Internet, come across a story, decide to pursue it, and get someone’s cell phone number, because around four I got the first of a barrage of calls.

Back home by then, cooling off, I answered, and a woman identified herself as a reporter for Fox News. That’s who was first, and they deserve the credit. The reporter was also smart enough to play it off like she was on my side.

“This whole thing is crazy, huh? How do you feel about all these writers attacking you?” She said
writers
like a fifteen-year-old says
parents
.