Mentor: A Memoir Read Online Free PDF

behind his chair, its fine print visible from where he’d told me to take a seat. He didn’t ask about me at all. To him, I was a novel incarnate. All he saw was literary promise. But being in that room with him altered my perception and I experienced a type of vertigo. I believe he said, “I’ll tell you. Your manuscript. Jesus Christ.” I’m certain that, an instant later, he said, “If you want, you can have the best agent in America tomorrow. I’ll call her in the morning, if you want me to.” Her being Candida Donadio, who had sold Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus , as well as Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (which was originally entitled Catch 18 , but another writer, Leon Uris, had published a novel called Mila 18 , so, to avoid confusion and possibly lose sales, Candida changed 18 to 22, for October 22, her birthday. Heller received a $750 advance, and $750 on publication.) Candida had also represented Thomas Pynchon (who later married her assistant, Melanie Jackson, and became her client). And she peddled the work of William Gaddis, Robert Stone, Mario Puzo (an obscure literary novelist until he wrote The Godfather ), and, of course, Frank.
     
    Surprising myself, I hesitated. In retrospect, I believe I declined Frank’s offer because I was superstitious and somewhat overwhelmed. So I said, “Thanks.” Then I added, “Is it okay if I don’t commit right now?”
     
    Within an instant he raised his hands, don’t-shoot-me style, and said, “Absolutely! Absolutely!” He’d made an offer I didn’t seem comfortable with, and he wanted me to know that whatever I chose to do was okay with him. No reasons needed. No guilt.
     
    I said, “I’d rather write the book without that pressure.”
     
    “I understand. Don’t worry about it. You know, if I rushed you—”
     
    “No, no, I appreciate it. I mean, thanks. But it doesn’t feel, well, somehow it doesn’t feel right.”
     
    “Hey, I understand. Do what you need to do. When you want me, I’m here.” He checked his watch. “I guess we should get started.”
     
    Two doors led into 457. Knowing enough not to trail the program’s director into class on the first day, I made sure that Frank entered through one, and I, lagging behind, entered through the other. Frank didn’t take attendance. Instead, he went directly to the blackboard and picked up a piece of chalk. He wrote: meaning , sense , clarity .
     
    Then he faced us. “If you don’t have these, you don’t have a reader.” He moved sideways and drew an arc. At its two bases, he wrote: writer , reader . At the top of the arc he wrote: zone .
     
    “The writer cocreates the text with the reader. If a writer gives the reader too much information, the reader feels forced to accept whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading. If a writer gives the reader too little information, the reader feels compelled to search for whatever the writer says and eventually stops reading. So, you want to meet the reader halfway.” He circled the word zone. “That’s where you want to be.” He turned to the board again and sketched a rectangle. Inside it he wrote: voice, tone, mood .
     
    Above that, he drew a smaller rectangle, then a smaller one, and one smaller still, as they climbed the board in the shape of a ziggurat. Beginning with the lowest of the three rectangles and then continuing upward, he wrote a word inside each of them: subtext , metaphor , symbol .
     
    He waved a hand at them and said, “That’s the fancy stuff. For now, worry about the basics.” Then he took a seat at the square that had been formed by placing several desks adjacent to one another.
     
    He said, “We do two stories a week. Who’ll go up first?” Two of my classmates each raised a hand. “Okay,” Frank said. “And the week after?” Two more. “Okay.”
     
    I surveyed the other thirteen students in the class. Those in their second year were noticeably at ease. The rest were diffident and looked a bit