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glance to your left. I have a new novel out. The generous and public-spirited
editors of National Review Online, ever anxious to promote the cause
of literature, and knowing how hungry my children are, have permitted
me to give over today's column to promoting this new book, whose
title is Fire
from the Sun. And which, of course, comes with some explanations
and apologies attached, as follows.
One of the
Roman authors observed that writing is neither an art nor a science,
but an illness. He was not wrong, and I am a chronic sufferer. It's
been scribble, scribble, scribble since I was old enough to hold
a pencil. In the fullness of time I advanced from Letters to the
Editor and ponderous pieces about the Fate of Civilization in college
magazines, to entire books, which of course nobody wanted to publish.
Until, one day, somebody did want to publish one of them,
and I became an author. That book was a jokey little novel called
Seeing
Calvin Coolidge in a Dream, which was lucky enough to get
some good reviews. (That word "lucky" is no false modesty.
Fiction writing, as anyone involved in it will confirm, is an ocean
of injustice, in which gold frequently sinks and poop even more
frequently floats.)
Seeing this,
my publisher and agent started calling me up to say: "What
else you got?" Were they kidding? I had a shelf full of stuff.
Most of it, however, had been comprehensively rejected on two continents.
(If rejection bothers you, do NOT go into fiction writing.) The
only one that hadn't was Fire from the Sun, which I was just
finishing up after fiddling with it for a couple of years. I shipped
it in.
There was a
long silence. I called up my agent to ask what the matter was. "Well,"
he said, a bit nervously, "this manuscript you sent in..."
Derb: "Yes? Yes?" He: "Well... it's a bit... long,
isn't it?" Derb: "Is it? I don't know. Three hundred thousand
words... is that long? It'd only be 1,100 pages printed up. Vikram
Seth just published a novel 1,400 pages long. Got reviewed in the
Times." He: "Vikram Seth, yes. See, the trouble
is, John, you're not him."
And there we
got stuck, with my manuscript being too long and me not being Vikram
Seth (who, by the way, I admire tremendously). Sure, I did everything
you would think of doing in such a situation. I tried to trim the
thing down: By some odd, and I think hitherto unknown, physical
effect no doubt rooted in the unfathomable paradoxes of quantum
electrodynamics, the more I tried to make it smaller, the bigger
it got. I tried breaking it into three normal-size books: but a
book, at any rate to its doting author, is a living thing, and will
not survive dismemberment. My agent, God bless him (Hi, Andrew)
did his honest best for me, reporting back at intervals that nobody
in his circle of contacts even wanted to read a 300,000-word
manuscript from a very-nearly-unknown writer. For his efforts (unpaid),
I dumped him, and got another agent, who did no better. At last
I gave up and got on with other things.
Then P.O.D.
came up. P.O.D. is still a new thing — so new that when I got talking
about it recently in the offices of a certain leading conservative
magazine whose name is an anagram of "I WANT RENO ALIVE,"
one editor (whose name is an anagram of "O, RANDY JINGLER!")
confessed that up to that point he had taken "P.O.D."
to stand for "post-orgasmic depression." P.O.D. actually
means "print on demand." It's a new technology that lets
you order a book and have one copy printed off just for you. Publishers
no longer have to order print runs of 10,000 copies and try to sell
them (though, publishers being conservative folk, they still do).
Once the technology was worked out, firms came up offering to take
any manuscript you had and turn it into a P.O.D. book that people
could buy. I started getting fliers from these firms.
For a long
time I filed those flyers with the others that promised me a foolproof
new way to pick stocks, get rid of crab grass, or improve my sex
life. Being an old hand at the unsolicited-manuscript game, I knew
the rules, and the first rule — printed in boldface on page 1 of
every how-to-get-published handbook — is: NEVER USE A VANITY PRESS.
Vanity presses are firms that will turn your manuscript into a very
nice book ... if you pay them to do so. That's how your Aunt Millie
got that little book of poems published. The names of the vanity
presses are very well known to literary editors, book reviewers
and the like, and anything that comes into a newspaper or magazine
office from a vanity press gets filed with the crabgrass flyers.
Then they put the author's name into a worldwide publishers' database
with the annotation: NEVER, NEVER HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH THIS
PERSON. (It was not always thus, by the way. There is a long and
honorable roll call of great novelists who published at their own
expense: Walt Whitman, James Joyce, Marcel Proust... Whitman, in
fact, not only published his own stuff, he reviewed it, too! But
that was then, and this is now.)
P.O.D. looked
to me like vanity publishing, so I turned my face away from it in
haughty disdain... Until, one day, in an idle moment, with one of
those flyers in front of me, I did the arithmetic. P.O.D. is awfully
cheap — some of the firms charge essentially nothing. With
a web link to the firm's bookstore, it's very easy for people to
buy your book. And I still had the manuscript on my hard disk, I
needed only to e-mail it to them... It was painless, and I calculated
I only had to sell 180 hardbacks to come out ahead, even after choosing
some of their pricier options. After that I'd be making money.
Why would I not do this? Because I would kill my name with "real"
publishers if I P.O.D.'ed? But the fliers said, and I was able to
confirm, that some very respectable, established authors are P.O.D.-ing.
It has that New-Economy glamour, you see, that even literary people
cannot resist. So... Why would I not do this? Reader, I did
it.
There were
a few wrinkles. Fire from the Sun was too long even for a
P.O.D. firm, so I had to do it as three volumes, listed as three
separate books in their catalogue. (I have just put the first here
on NRO; the others are in the same bookstore.) If you order it,
you have to wait a couple of weeks while they print it. Production
quality, with all due respect to the vendor, who I am sure do their
best, is less than terrific: like a 19th-century reader, I have
had to cut a few pages with a steak knife on my author copies. It's
a real book, though — three in fact, hardback, trade paperback,
and e-book. Best of all, I have got the damn thing off my chest
— which, according to Vladmir Nabokov, is one of the main reasons
people write books.
Is the book
any good? That I can't tell you. The two professionals and two friends
who read through it offered wildly different opinions (they always
do), so nothing can be deduced from their readings (nothing ever
can). You can read about Fire from the Sun on
my web site and also on the publisher's site. I will only say
this: It was not intended as a literary novel. I am not, to tell
the truth, a very literary person. I am not very well read, not
in the literature of the last hundred years anyway, a fact that
is brought crushingly home to me when I go partying with seriously
literary people. My attitude to fiction is close to Benjamin Disraeli's:
"When I want to read a novel, I write one." I do not read
much current Lit. Fic., except
when paid to. My impression is that not much of it is any good,
though since I read so little, that is no doubt an unfair judgment.
I rather frequently
have the experience of being told that such-and-such a newly published
novel is wonderful, only to pick it up and browse it in a
store and find myself thinking: Nah. (My speed record for rejections
of this sort happened a couple of years ago when someone gushed
to me about a novel dealing with the fate of aviatrix Amelia Earhart.
I picked it up in my local bookstore and read the first sentence,
which I still recall in all its gassy pretentiousness: "The
sky was flesh." I got out of that store faster — as a Texas
friend of mine would say — than a dose of salts through a widder-woman.)
My models for Fire from the Sun were the big Pop. Fic. page-turners
that I myself enjoy: the works of people like Jeffrey Archer, Sidney
Sheldon, Dick Francis, James Clavell. Don't get me wrong. Fire
doesn't talk down to the reader, and I wrote it all as well as I
know how to write fiction. But it's just a story.
It is possible,
of course, that I have written a literary novel without intending
to, like the poor guy in Henry James's story "The Next Time"
who longs for a big Pop. Fic. success but whose every effort comes
out as hopelessly Lit. Fic. I doubt this, though. I can't see much
that is Lit. Fic. about Fire from the Sun. The narrative
proceeds from the past to the future. There's a pretty equal balance
of dialogue and récit. None of the characters is an
angel, a space alien, or a coprophagic dwarf. Nobody lives to be
200, turns into a faun, or becomes intimately involved with a rutabaga.
(Magic realism? I shall die happy if I can believe I have got real
realism right.) Most to the point, nobody is me — not even approximately.
I made it all up. That's what fiction writers are supposed
to do.
So there you
are. Check it out. Then, if you think it's the kind of thing you
might like, buy volume 1 and give it a try. Heck, buy all three
volumes — nothing looks untidier than an incomplete set, you know.
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