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

chickory in that coffee?” she bellowed down, in a tired voice that still shook like a thunderclap, a calling-hounds voice.
“No, ma’am,” Gabriel hollered back, steadying himself against the buckboard of the Tidecraft Firebird, swaying in the swamp water that swelled and fell like the breast of a mother asleep. “No chickory, but you sure a Cajun woman, asking for chickory coffee when you stuck on a patch-tar roof and more water coming up, they sayin. Now reach out your hand, Mez Deveroux.”
And slowly her fingers, rich in texture as a knitted throw rug, fitted into Gabriel’s palm, stained by motor oiland bacon grease. And they looked at each other, and felt that touch, the one from the other, until each helped the other and soothed the other and where the one began and the other ended was lost to both of them.
    One could spend hours parsing that intricate latticework of literary sewage: the cartoon bayou dialect, the touches of “realist” detail, the labored folksy imagery, the vague notes of spirituality and transcendence muddied enough to make it palatable to anyone. I didn’t bother. Instead I focused on Preston’s audience.
    Maybe you’d have to see this audience to understand my epiphany. And weird issues with Polly were in play—I’m not going to psychoanalyze myself. I’ll just tell you what I saw.
    In the rows of the lecture hall, listening to Preston, their backs arched forward and their eyes expectant, were rows of college girls. Young women in little sweaters and tight jeans, pliant and needy. Girls with names like Sara and Katie and Chrissy, no doubt, who had read Chronicles of Esteban and Kindness to Birds while curved on couches in their bras and pajama bottoms, giving themselves over to this magician of words. Corn-fed girls from small towns, where girls were still graceful and feminine. Pageant winners and soccer players and swoony pseudopoets. Girls who were smart-cute and wildly passionate, who’d traveled from Connecticut and California to Shenandoah College to submit themselves to Preston Brooks. Their faces yearned with nameless desire, pleading with Preston to guide them and fill them with hard truths.
    That was when it all came together. That’s why I always tell people Preston Brooks was my inspiration. Because right then, I figured him out. I realized what a magnificent, ridiculous bastard he was.
    Down in the uranium mine, or at the fish-gutting plant, he’d realized that work is for chumps. And one day he got his hands on Of Mice and Men . He’d realized, “Hey, I could pull this off!”
    He’d had a vision. He saw that life as a famous novelist would mean sitting around in a country mansion, playing with horses. So he strung together some mushy novels and pawned them off on thousands of book-buying saps. He’d moved out to West Virginia. This was a perfect defense, because what publisher in Manhattan would dare say a guy from West Virginia was inauthentic? In the publishing houses and news-show conference rooms they took him to be a backcountry sage. They bought him as a wise old uncle who could give something authentic. He spoke in platitudes dripping with writerly juices, and Tinsley Honig came out to pay homage at his feet as he churned out “realist” detail from a beat-up typewriter in exchange for fortune.
    And, best of all, college women, women at their most nubile and desperate, would pay to come fawn over him. In late-afternoon office hours, they’d hold some crappy story in their trembling hands and he’d start issuing platitudes in his tissue-paper voice.
    “In an age when zealots would blow us all to bits, I parry with something more explosive than a bomb,” Preston declared to the hall. “Words. Words alone can mend the heart,” Preston told them as he folded up his text. Katie’s and Sara’s lips quivered with ecstasy as he spoke.
    The screen cut back to Preston and Tinsley walking again, now with the sun going down.
    “Let me tell you a story.