Stephen Hely
The opening epigraph reads like either the winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest (the worst opening sentence of the "It was a dark and stormy night" variety that you can conjure) or, equally plausibly, the beginning of a shlocky bestseller:
In strewn banners that lay like streamers from a longago parade the sun's fading seraphim rays gleamed onto the hood of the old Ford and ribboned the steel with the meek orange of a June tomato straining at the vine. From the back seat, door open, her nimble fingers moved along the guitar like a weaver's on a loom. Stitching a song. The cloth she made was a cry of aching American chords, dreamlike warbles built to travel miles of lonesome road. They faded into the twilight, and Silas leaned back on the asphalt, as if to watch them drift into the Arkansas mist.
Away from them, across the field of low-cut Durum wheat, they saw Evangeline's frame, outlined pale in shadow against the highway sky, as it trembled.
That's the way it is with a song, isn't it? she said. The way it quivers in your heart. Quivers like the wing of a little bird.
In a story too. He spoke it softly in a voice that let her hear how close they were. That's the way it is with a story. Turns your heart into a bird.
That story, which I found a hilariously apt pastiche of our Oprah-fied fictional world, is from the meta-fictional (assumed fiction within a fiction) The Tornado Ashes Club (Potato Peels, anyone?), by Pete Tarslaw.
Now this Pete Tarslaw is the nominal hero (if that's the word I want) of How I Became a Famous Novelist, by the hitherto unknown to me Steve Hely. And a very funny and satirically pointy meta-novel (novel about novels, among other things) it is.
When we first meet Pete, he is working, in usual laggardly fashion, at EssayAides, writing letters of application and essays for universities from the English-poor and cash-rich. And he's living in his own chaos, drinking five or six beers before bed and, too lazy to get up for bathroom duties, employing the empties as nocturnal urinals.
Soon, after offering the reader compelling evidence of his habitual slackerdom, Pete drifts into the idea that informs this novel. Cynical and bone-lazy - his relationship with his college girlfriend consists largely of napping together - Pete soon learns that the bestseller lists are inhabited largely by self-promoting opportunists of meagre talent. So he decides to join them by writing the best-sellingest bestseller ever. It's a simple boys' dream. All Pete wants is to acquire, with minimum possible effort, fame - enough to ensure ample sexual opportunity - and fortune - never to have to work again, with a personal assistant to attend to all his needs and the leisure to pursue his desultory hobbies.
Oh yes, and to revenge himself on former girlfriend Polly (not the co-slacker she pretended to be) at her wedding.
It gives nothing away to say that, of course, Pete succeeds: The "pile of garbage" that is The Tornado Ashes Club - which reminded me of the screamingly awful (at least, I suppose so; I only got a few pages into it) The Bridges of Madison County - becomes the most important, most talked-about book in the country. Along the way, with whatever is the cyber-equivalent of a pen dipped in acid (equal parts Prussic and LSD), Hely gleefully decapitates not just an entire industry (publishing) but an entire culture.
What's best about How I Became a Famous Novelist is that Hely is a superb mimic, changing (fictional) fictional styles at a page's notice: He can do pastoral, he can do old-fashioned nostalgia, he can do pseudo-lit, he can do broken English. But most of all, he can do sharp and funny. All through the book, I kept imagining him writing a note-perfect parody and, as he did so, laughing convulsively. I certainly did.
Take this bit (the urge to quote him is powerful, but the context is missing) from an application essay for the Wharton school from one Hoshi Tanaka:
Warren Buffet has this word: 'partnership.' This is realistic. The many cases of blemishing companies were cases when this did not partnership.
Or this one, from a discarded attempt at what seems like a Tom Clancyish novel:
This was where it had all led, from Little League games in Ohio, through the naval academy and combat missions in an F-16 over Kuwait, the lonely campaigning in shopping malls and on street corners, and the ugly haggling of eight years in Congress. And then the campaign, the nights of bad coffee and bad jokes, throat sore from speeches, stomach stuffed with a thousand chicken dinners, face burning with the heat of television lights.
Talk about stomach stuffed!
Not only that, Hely's antic range extends to concocting fake blurbs for the book ("America's Cervantes has appeared," says MSNBC's Sarah Bidgood), and fake New York Times bestseller lists. For instance, No. 1 is Mindset, by Pamela McLaughlin (seemingly modelled on Patricia Cornwell), in which "Trang Martinez suspects her Pilates instructor may also be a vicious serial killer."
Many novels claim to be very funny, though few genuinely are. How I Became a Famous Novelist is. Genuinely. Funny. I'd have said that if Steve Hely doesn't make it as a novelist, he could have a career writing one-liners. Turns out he already has, as a former writer for David Letterman and for the animated comedy American Dad.
Martin Levin is Books editor of The Globe and Mail and a critical fan of the publishing business.