Scribblers (20 page)

Spending years on a manuscript and then quitting after only two submissions has to constitute a record for raising the white flag, I know. Lately, however, I've been considering a couple other projects that would be easier, less personally embarrassing, and more likely to find a home—though they'd also hold no possibility of being special.

To help me decide, I approach my coworkers individually and ask them for a reading.

I pull into the parking lot at a nail salon, where I get out and drop to one knee to check my bad tire.

From my ground-level perspective, the car's defects reveal themselves one by one—the copious rust in the wheel well, the loose molding along the top of the back window where rain seeps in, the long scratch where I sideswiped a dumpster. With the taller tires in front and the car's natural
posture of squatting on its haunches, it gives the impression that it's traveling perpetually uphill. The new plug, which stuck from the tire like a worm from an apple when the mechanic installed it, now has the texture of gum with road pebbles embedded in it. A little of the tire inflater's latex, which has by now deteriorated to a viscous white liquid, still percolates around the puncture.

I've left the interstate a couple of exits early, and there doesn't seem to be an entrance ramp at this location. I find myself in an unfamiliar hard-luck neighborhood where broken glass glitters in the streets and toddlers run naked in the yards. Asking directions seems like a bad idea.

I select the likeliest-looking route as each choice presents itself, yet my course deteriorates from four lanes to two lanes with markings to an unmarked lane and a half of two-way traffic with illegal parking on both sides of the street.

Half a block ahead, a battered sedan backs out of a driveway and stalls with its trunk protruding beyond the row of parked cars. I slow to let it in ahead of me, but it stalls twice more, so I toot my horn and squeeze past. I'm running late, and I don't know exactly where I am.

A cat darts under my wheels at the same moment a bucket of water hits the side of my car. The cat escapes beyond the vehicles on the right while its tormentor, an obese woman in stretch pants, swears hotly from the left. My window is cracked, so I idle along while feeling under the seat for something to use to dry myself. In the mirror, I see the sedan emerging from a cloud of blue smoke some distance behind.

It catches me within a couple of blocks, follows me for another, and then pulls out to pass, only to begin misfiring on one of its cylinders when it's abreast of my rear bumper. There's no room to pass anyway. A car approaches head-on, and the sedan falls in behind me.

The next time I glance in the mirror, I see the driver motioning me off the road. I try to oblige, easing in between two parked cars, but the sedan has slowed, too, the driver ripping a packet of sugar with his teeth and adding it to a cup of coffee balanced precariously on the dashboard.

My magnanimity spurned, I reenter traffic. The sedan's driver motions me off the road again. I tap my brake and make as if to pull aside, then accelerate smartly when the sedan starts to swing around me. To hell with him. I'm in as much of a hurry as he is.

I continue straight at the next intersection, but the sedan turns right and greases the pavement in accelerating. I look right at the next two intersections in vain. By the third, the sedan has pulled even with me a block over, and there's a fraction of a second when the driver's eyes hatefully challenge my own.

The sedan must come upon some difficulty in the next block, as it's a full car length behind me at the fourth intersection. It then assumes the lead and is out of sight for the next two blocks, its blue smoke the only witness to its passing.

I glance right at the following corner and nearly foul myself when I see it bearing down on me from the perpendicular at a distance of thirty or forty feet. It turns and fishtails in behind, the driver pounding the dashboard in frustration. The coffee is nowhere to be seen; it's probably
in his lap, which would help account for his mood. I'm pleased that I'm still in the lead, though I find it hard to believe that the route we're traveling leads anywhere of importance.

That judgment proves premature when the street straightens and widens and a smattering of marginal businesses rear their shaggy heads—a martial-arts academy, a laundromat, a fish market.

I know the way to work now.

A narrow shoulder begins, and the sedan's driver motions me aside emphatically. When I fail to obey, he crosses the double yellow lines and pulls out to pass. The sedan is hitting on all cylinders now, but I punch the accelerator and maintain a slight lead through forty, forty-five, and fifty in a thirty-miles-per-hour zone.

No oncoming traffic is in sight. The sedan draws even crossing an overpass. The driver yells something through his open passenger window that's obscured by the bridge noise. I crank my window and angle my ear into the wind, trying to catch the insult. He's leaning as far toward me as he can, steering with his left hand.

I'm anticipating something I'd be hesitant to put in print. He's driving with two fingers now, yelling his lungs out. The coffee indeed shows on his shirt.

He digs deeply into some untapped vocal reserve. This time, the message is hoarse but clear: “If you can't drive, get off the road!”

The sentiment may be simple, but I have to admire how he's crystallized twenty-some years of bad driving under such a tidy umbrella.

The sedan accelerates past. I finally let it go.

In the parking lot at work, I sit for a minute listening to the metal tick as the car begins to cool. I catch a stale, sweet whiff of antifreeze.

The first of my coworkers to read my manuscript spent ten minutes in my office laughing with me over what he judged to be the funny parts.

Another employee shared her copy with two additional people barely known to me, who enjoyed it as much as she had.

A third read it and also gave it to her husband, who was so generous as to write me a critique.

There were suggestions and criticisms, to be sure. And I'm well aware of the perils of sharing a manuscript with one's friends.

But why look far afield?

It was my intention to beat my boss to the office this morning, but she's already talking with someone. I linger near her doorway until she's off the phone.

“Say, does that offer to publish my book still stand?”

C
HAPTER
10

Girl Power

I have doubts about Father Tim Kavanagh, the hero of Jan Karon's Mitford novels.

Father Tim plants flowers. He likes to plan menus and host small dinner parties. He quotes scripture to calm his dog. He's all atwitter at the prospect of kissing a woman; he's sixty and virginal. He's flaccid and nurturing. He's cuddly; he'd make a good plush toy.

I try to think of a way to frame my opinion. “This guy Father Tim,” I say to my wife, who's read all the books, “seems like sort of a pantywaist.”

I mean that in the best sense of the word, but her look tells me I've missed the point again.

“Not at all,” she says. “He's the ideal man.”

If Father Tim is a woman in man's clothing, then it's
past time for some payback. Female readers have certainly suffered male authors' perspectives plenty long.

“I've talked to male writers who are feeling some pressure to try to address the female portion of their audience,” I remark to Ann B. Ross, author of the Miss Julia novels.

“Right, but I wish they wouldn't do it,” she says. “I'll tell you, the worst thing in the world to me is a male writer trying to write from a woman's viewpoint. Those characters are the most aggressively sexual. It's dream fulfillment, wish fulfillment, I think they're doing.”

Anyone who's made even a casual observation can tell you that women buy most of the books sold. Women rival men on the bestseller lists. They're prominent among editors, agents, and reviewers. And their gentling influence has extended across the gender line. The prototype for a male author today is a family-man writing professor with a mortgage, not a dissolute cocksman in the mold of Wolfe or Fitzgerald.

Jan Karon was born Janice Meredith Wilson, named for the title character of the Paul Leicester Ford bestseller written partly at Biltmore House. It proved an uncanny choice. In the opening scene of
Janice Meredith,
the fifteen-year-old heroine is caught reading on the Sabbath. “Oh, mommy,” Janice implores, “punish me as much as you please,—I know 't was very, very wicked,—but please don't take the book away!”

“Not another sight shalt thou have of it, miss,” her mother replies. “My daughter reading novels, indeed!”

Karon grew up on a farm in the North Carolina foothills town of Lenoir. She completed her first novel at age
ten and sought to keep it hidden from her sister, who of course found it and focused her entire critical attention on the single dirty word buried in the manuscript:
damn.
A lecture and whipping followed for Jan. She has kept it clean ever since.

Life intervened before she could pursue her dream of being a novelist. Karon doesn't like to reveal much about her private life, but it is known that her father left home when she was three and that her grandparents raised her. She quit school following the eighth grade. Before she was out of her teens, she had a daughter and a broken marriage.

At eighteen, she took a job as a receptionist at an advertising agency, where she kept leaving writing samples on her boss's desk until he promoted her. She fashioned a highly successful career, taking assignments in New York and San Francisco, winning industry awards, handling accounts like Honda and British Airways, and ultimately rising to the position of creative vice president with a national agency.

“I was called to be a writer,” she said in a public-radio interview. “I didn't answer that call for many, many years. For one thing, I didn't know how to write a book. I had a daughter to raise. I waited until I was forty-eight. But I knew that if I didn't do something soon to act upon my calling, I'd be an old ad hack in the back room.”

So she sold her big house with the beautiful gardens, gave up her health insurance, traded her Mercedes for a rusty Toyota, and moved to a cottage in the mountain resort village of Blowing Rock, an hour and a half north of Asheville on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

She started with a title and an outline. “It just didn't
work” she said. “The characters just didn't come together. Finally, in despair, I just gave up. I thought, I've done a foolish and impetuous thing, and everyone will laugh at me. Then, one night, when I was in bed, I had a simple mental image of a priest walking down a village street, and he went to a dog named Barnabas, and they went to a boy named Dooley.”

She began writing about Father Tim and took some samples to Jerry Burns, the editor of the local weekly newspaper, the
Blowing Rocket.

“Jan wanted to test the waters, to see if she could write, to see if people were interested in her kind of story—no sex, no violence, no language,” Burns tells me.

She had a good concept. He, like all editors of small weeklies, had a need of material. He agreed to give her a chance.

Burns originally saw it as perhaps a three-month run, but subscriptions went up, and people kept asking when the next installment of “Father Tim—The Mitford Years” would be printed. He encouraged her to keep going. The series ultimately ran for a little over two years in the early 1990s.

It's easy to see that Blowing Rock was the model for friendly, comfortable Mitford. I've called Jerry Burns to ask if I can stop by the office and browse the original serial run, but my car overheats on the way up the mountain, so I don't arrive until eleven-thirty. Burns and the office manager—the only other person at the
Rocket
—have a lunch appointment at noon. Though he's never laid eyes on me before, Burns doesn't even hesitate: I'm welcome to stay alone in
the office while they're away. What's more, he'll give me a key to the place. If I decide to leave, I should lock up behind me and drop the key through the slot.

The April 6, 1990, issue of the
Rocket
ran sixteen pages and sold for ten cents; the yearly subscription rate was ten dollars in North Carolina and twelve outside the state. There are two pictures on the front page. One is of the Penderecki String Quartet, “one of Poland's finest chamber ensembles,” scheduled to perform at the Blowing Rock Arts Center ten days hence. The other shows the fledgling author holding her dog. “Jan Karon's ‘Father Tim—The Mitford Years' begins this week,” the caption says. “Scheduled to appear weekly in the
Blowing Rocket,
the feature will share the everyday trials and tribulations of Father Tim as he goes about his parish duties.”

Inside the paper, an illustration by Jan's own hand decorates the first installment. It's Father Tim's face viewed straight on. He's bald save for a single tuft in the middle and a dark fringe around the sides. He wears round glasses and a preacher's collar. It's a prototype for the drawings that will later appear in more than eight million copies of Jan's books.

An editor's note promises that the columns “will give readers an opportunity to enjoy a return to the writing style and content of newspapers of a previous era, when fictional serials were the dominant theme of major newspapers around the world.”

The principal difference between Jan's original serial and
At Home in Mitford,
the first of the novels, is that the opening several installments in the
Rocket
focus almost exclusively
on Father Tim's adoption of Barnabas the dog. By the time she reworked the columns in novel form, Jan had the good sense to get her several story lines up and running earlier, which makes the novel version quicker and tighter. I don't have the time to compare the two side by side at length, but she seems to have found the rhythm that would carry through the entire novel series by the eighth or ninth column.