How I Became a Famous Novelist Read Online Free PDF Page A

guest judge. But the unbelievably unsettling and creepy “twist” was that each team consisted of half adults and half six- to eight-year-old children.
    Now, obviously, if I start writing about how weird this program is, how it’s a sign of the complete post-postmodern collapse of Western civilization, I could fill a whole book, so I’ll just point out one crazy thing, which is that the kids—because they were all screwed-up precocious showbiz kids whose brains are so warped they know how to smile on cue and so forth, are always much smarter than the actual adults.
    Hobart watched this show every Friday, without fail. What dark recess of his brain compelled him to do this, I don’t know, but I didn’t complain. Tonight a six-year-old named Brooke was in a screaming match with a divorced accountant over this berry-picking challenge they’d been teamed up on.
    This took my mind off Polly’s wedding.
    The show went to commercials, and Hobart clicked around from police videos to European soccer.
    In a way, I guess all the events that followed were the result of a channel flip. Because Hobart clicked again and paused, because he saw the comforting figure of Tinsley Honig.
    Hobart and I agreed that Tinsley was our favorite television-news-magazine journalist. Several times Hobart and I had watched her auburn tresses float about her porcelain-doll face as she interviewed a nun who makes prizewinning saltwater taffy, or an autistic kid who’s an expert on the Founding Fathers, or teacher who turned an inner-city classroom around by teaching the kids Scrabble.
    On this night, Tinsley was sitting on a country porch, on a hand-crafted wooden bench next to an older man, stout as a beer keg, with a thin beard like an evil count. The camera shot from a distance, so as to take in the gables of the enormous house and the piney mountains in the distance. The house was the kind of glorious country house that people in catalogs live in, where the woman modeling the Sea Pine Rangely Knit pullover brings iced tea to the man modeling the Cropped Linen Washables.
    Tinsley had on her trademark Listening Face, cocked fifteen degrees to the left, one slender finger on her chin. The stout man was talking. He spoke as though for medical reasonshe had to keep his lips as tightly sealed as possible. His voice sounded like crinkling tissue paper.
    “Some say the novel is dead. Well, some say the Devil is dead. I don’t think so,” he said. “Writing is a cudgel I wield to chase away the brigands who would burn down the precious things of the human heart. Today we have too much of the image, video screens everywhere. Girls barely off the playground gyrating about like trollops at a Turkish bordello. But words still count. They still break hearts, and heal them.”
    “Don’t change this!” I cried, with difficulty because at that moment I’d been seeing how long I could hold eight Upstream Ale bottle caps in my mouth. I recognized the man with the thin beard and the tissue-paper voice. It was terrible novelist Preston Brooks.
    The screen cut to Tinsley and Preston walking by the reeds along the edge of a brook. Over the footage, Tinsley’s voice-over was saying, “There are no teenage wizards, or codes hidden in paintings. But Kindness to Birds, a quiet story of love, family, and the power to believe, has touched readers across the country on its way to the best-seller list. I traveled to Preston Brooks’s horse farm in West Virginia, to talk to a writer who says he’s an old dog”—here her voice lilted upward—“who’s learned a few new tricks.”
    Cobralike I shot out my arm and snatched the remote from Hobart.
    “I was a foolish kid, a dumb kid, so I dropped out of school and joined the Air Force,” Preston was saying. “There’s a lot wrong with the military, more now than there was then. But they know what to do with a dumb kid. They sent me up to a radar post on the DEW line in Alaska. That was my job, forthree years—