It's not a mystery, but one of my favorite comic novels is Tepper Isn't Going Out, by Calvin Trillin. I think it's got the light comic touch of Laurie Colwin's Manhattan pastorale Happy All the Time combined with the political satire of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. However, at 213 pages (Random House: 2001), it's much more tightly written than the Wolfe book and thus does not overstay its welcome the way Bonfire did.
This isn't relevant to mysteries, but it is relevant to the way the industry works. Protagonist Murray Tepper finds himself at the center of a media frenzy for doing something quite ordinary, and as the vultures descend so do the literary agents. Sy Lambert is literary agent to the stars, sort of a mix of every name-dropping, self-impressed agent who ever breathed. The following passage occurs when Lambert is trying to convince Tepper that there's big money to be made in a book deal--something Tepper hadn't even considered.
"I've never really written anything," Tepper said.
"Who said anything about writing?" Lambert said. "Writers aren't big authors. They don't do the really huge books. Oh, maybe one or two of them--Stephen King, the Harry Potter gal. These are exceptions. Remember the days when writers would live in garrets and dream of writing a great book and becoming famous? They had it backwards, Murray. Most of them were just wasting their time. The point is to become famous and then write the book. Really big books are by-products of fame, Murray. Remember that: Really big books are by-products of fame. Publishers try to make books big by figuring out how to get noticed off the book page, but the biggest books are by people who are off the book page to start with. The big authors are big because they're famous--they're famous politicians or famous CEO's or famous adulterers. The point is, they're famous. That's what you're going to be." (p. 148)
This whole passage is ripe for a little further consideration, so let's deconstruct it a bit, shall we? Here we have Calvin Trillin--New York City literary columnist and insider, already the author of several well-received non-fiction titles--channeling himself into unprepossessing Murray Tepper, who runs a mailing list business. The joke is that of course Trillin himself, with all the right connections and a pre-existing level of stardom, got his fiction contract from Random House, with just as much ease as he walked into, let's say, the William Morris Agency and got himself an agent. (For the record, I don't know who Trillin's agent is...just throwing out a big agency name to make a point.) He's living proof of his own argument, though I must hasten to add that Trillin DESERVES a good agent and a good contract, because he's damn funny and a fabulous writer. But would equally good/funny writer Joe or Jane Schmoe, living in Topeka, Kansas, get such an agent and such a contract quite so easily--especially if Joe or Jane did not attend Harvard or Yale?
Elsewhere in the book, Tepper learns about what it means to be "post-modern." According to a writer for the fictional East Village Rag, which breaks the underwhelming story about Tepper to begin with, being post-modern means being both ironic and self-referential. By those standards, Tepper Isn't Going Out is certainly the most post-modern of books, as a self-aware-but-oh-so-modest literary star reflects on the state of the publishing industry and pretends through the character of likable but unremarkable Tepper that the little people, the unknowns, can indeed be found (and become best-sellers) through sheer good luck instead of connections or friends in high places.
Is the passage above knowingly or unknowingly disingenuous on Trillin's part? Is it an idealist, elitist fantasy, a Horatio Alger-type tale meant to inspire all those aspiring unknowns not to give up hope? Is it a rumination on the randomness of society, on how we are all affected by forces outside ourselves and beyond our control? Or is it all simply good fun in the name of post-modernism, that self-referential, ironic, Algonquinesque, faux modest New Yorker-type style that gets the best agents and the fastest contracts? It is up to you to decide.
Interesting food for thought. But there's one angle you haven't considered--which is how much more likely someone with that Yale or Harvard degree is likely to get reviewed in the NYT Book Review by fellow alums of that same school. Anyone who doesn't see that the NYT book review (well, most of them that claim to be "serious," anyway) is really just Ivy Leaguers reviewing books by other Ivy Leaguers isn't paying close enough attention.
Posted by: Brian | January 08, 2009 at 11:55 AM