WHY IS THIS IN THE FILE?
Nobody took responsibility quickly enough.
Malcolm knew something was wrong when Celia asked him about the dog.
They were at the launch of his second novel, In the Rooms Where We Were, in a bookstore that had agreed to host him on condition that he bring at least twenty people. He had brought eighteen. The other two chairs were occupied by his boxes of unsold copies, so from the back of the room it looked like a success.
People were saying the usual lovely things. They admired the cover. They admired the title. One woman said the book looked substantial, which it did: four hundred and six pages of family secrets, inherited weather, and a man looking out of windows. His mother called it the best thing he had ever done and asked whether he had considered writing something happier.
Then Celia said, “I was sorry about the dog. But why did you send him back to the brother?”
Malcolm felt the peculiar sensation of being recognized in a disguise he had designed himself.
“You’ve read it?” he asked.
“Of course. You sent it to me.”
He had sent it to forty-three people. Six had posted photographs of it beside coffee. Nine had promised to read it on vacation. One had described it as ferocious, a word Malcolm could not remember putting anything inside the book to justify. Celia was the first to refer to an event that occurred after page eleven.
He asked her to lower her voice.
That was how the Reciprocal Readers Recovery Circle began.
The group met on Wednesday nights in the basement of the municipal library, where a notice above the thermostat asked patrons not to adjust it because the setting was being monitored. Six published novelists came to the first session. All six had finished books written by the other five, or at least enough of them to have developed complicated feelings. They sat in a circle beneath a poster that said Reading Opens Doors. Someone had written Please close them when you leave underneath.
The facilitator, a former book publicist named Irene, explained that reading a colleague’s entire book could be isolating. Professional literary friendship had developed protective customs. It was possible to maintain a warm relationship for years using the ambition of this project, what you’re doing with time, and an astonishing voice. These expressions had been tested at launch parties and could be deployed without specific knowledge of plot, character, or whether a dog survived.
Finishing the book endangered the arrangement. Now you knew which character disappeared for fifty pages. Now you understood that the historical research about slate roofing had occupied more of the author’s emotional attention than the marriage supposedly at the center of the novel. Worse, you might have liked something the author considered a failure.
“My problem,” said Dana, who had published a novel about a woman assembling furniture during her divorce, “is that I remember the endings.”
“That isn’t your fault,” Irene said.
“It feels like a kind of trespass.”
Everyone nodded. Malcolm privately wondered whether Celia had remembered his ending, which involved an inherited key and a brief outbreak of weather.
Arthur, whose fourth novel concerned a fishing village, said he had finished thirteen friends’ books in a year. This had created an expectation of reciprocity so severe that his dining table was now covered in advance copies. His wife ate standing up. Their daughter had begun calling the unopened pile the guests.
“I’m asked for a blurb every other week,” Arthur said. “I used to think the request meant somebody admired me. Then I found out it meant my email address had been discovered.”
He had once written an endorsement on a train using the first forty pages and an author’s note. He still remembered the shame. The book had later won a regional prize, which made the shame more difficult to categorize.
Irene reminded them that no one was obligated to endorse anything. She had spent fifteen years in publicity and knew how little such reassurances were worth. “People always write, ‘Absolutely no pressure,’” she said. “Then they put the date when the jacket goes to the printer in bold.”
At the second meeting, the group tried a new exercise. Each writer would say one thing about somebody else’s book that could not be placed on a jacket.
Celia went first. She told Malcolm that the scene in the hospital, where the brother rinsed a coffee cup because he could not bring himself to speak to his father, was good. Not urgent or luminous or formally daring. Good. She had believed in it completely.
Malcolm had spent three years working on the novel. He had shown it to a workshop, two agents, an editor, his editor’s assistant, a publicity manager, and a man who designed the cover. Every one of them had opinions about its positioning. No one had ever mentioned the cup.
“Thank you,” he said, with an embarrassment he had not experienced at his own wedding.
Then Arthur said that Dana’s divorce novel had made him want to call his sister. Dana became so alarmed that she asked whether anything was wrong with the sister. There wasn’t. He had simply read the chapter where a woman decides not to throw away a cracked plate, and it reminded him of how his sister saved things.
The exercise deteriorated when one member asked why a character who had been injured in the first act was climbing a ladder in the third. Nobody had an answer. The author took the bus home rather than share a ride.
Nevertheless, they returned. They began making room in their days for the strange, unpaid, unpromotable act of reading. They continued to post congratulations online, but some of the congratulations contained information. Friends complained that the comments were too specific and spoiled the surprise.
At the fourth meeting a woman nobody knew appeared at the door. She was fiftyish, wearing a raincoat, holding an ordinary paperback with a price sticker from a used bookstore.
“Is this the reading group?” she asked.
Irene explained that it was for writers.
“I’m not a writer,” the woman said. “I saw the sign upstairs. I thought you discussed books.”
They looked at one another. There had been no procedure for this.
“What have you read lately?” Irene asked, as gently as she could.
The woman held up Malcolm’s novel. It cost her four dollars. He recognized the cover before he recognized the condition: the spine had been bent, some pages turned down, and a grocery receipt marked chapter twenty-two. No one had photographed it. A library sticker was still pasted inside the front cover, evidence that it had already lived at least one other life before reaching her.
“I liked the brother,” she said. “He reminded me of my husband. My husband doesn’t talk when he’s frightened either.”
Malcolm waited. She had no social account to tag, no blurb to write, no manuscript to exchange. She had read his book, paid less for it than a parking meter demanded outside the bookstore, and walked into a basement because she wanted to talk about it.
“I didn’t believe the ending,” she added.
For the first time since publication, Malcolm did not try to defend it.
They found her a chair. The next week she brought another reader, who asked Arthur whether the fishermen in his novel were ever allowed to catch anything. Arthur said he had not considered that. The man said he had, for two hundred pages.
By December, the group had stopped calling itself a recovery circle. Irene crossed out Reciprocal on the notice and then Writers. She left the word Readers. It looked almost suspicious by itself.
Malcolm still received requests for blurbs. He still agreed to some, and some books remained on his dining table. But when a new novelist sent him a manuscript and asked whether he could read it before the jacket deadline, he asked for three months. The novelist said the jacket would be printed by then.
“That’s all right,” Malcolm said. “I wasn’t offering to read the jacket.”
Story photograph: Debby Hudson / Unsplash.
