In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TWO HOW, AND HOW NOT, TO BE A PUBLISHED NOVELIST The Case of Raymond Federman Ted Pelton But there are contemporary reasons for the triumph of the thriller as well. One is the transformation of the book business. Once hailed as a “gentleman’s profession,” publishing today is more like a barroom brawl as corporate takeovers have intensified bottom-line pressures on editors. And the bottom line is that thrillers sell, which means there is a continuing scramble to find the writers who can produce books that translate into corporate profits. There are other social and cultural factors, of course. Decades of war, recession, and political and corporate corruption have made Americans more cynical—or realistic—and thus more open to novels that examine the dark side of our society. And yet most thrillers manage some sort of happy ending. They have it both ways, reminding us how ugly and dangerous our society can be and yet offering hope in the end. Thrillers provide the illusion of order and justice in a world that often seems to have none. —Patrick Anderson, “Triumph of the Thriller” They have a pre-conceived notion of what the novel is. Smiles on Washington Square was rejected by a dozen publishers. . . . It kept getting nice letters—“it’s a tour de force, but . . .” I get a letter from St. Martin’s Press: “We love your book—we know you have certain notions, we 39 40 FEDERMAN’S FICTIONS have ours, why don’t we fly you to New York and we’ll discuss it.” So we have dinner, a senior editor and two young editors, a good looking man and woman, at a fancy restaurant in New York City. “We love your book,” they say. “It’s a beautiful story. But”—and the but. “Don’t you think maybe they should meet at the end? . . . And, you know, the book is in the present tense, we’d prefer it if it were in the past tense.” I’m listening to this and I cannot believe it. And finally I say, “Look, you people don’t know what you’re doing. You are reading a different book. You are rewriting a book I don’t want to write. Let me ask you this, if I were to make the changes you suggest, would it improve the book?” “Oh no, the book is really good the way it is.” I got up in the middle of the meal and said, “You know, you guys are bankrupt. If you were to offer me ten thousand dollars, I wouldn’t give you my book!” And I walk out. . . . I couldn’t believe that they were rewriting my book to fit their notion of what a love story should be. This [Smiles on Washington Square] is a love story that demolishes the love story! —Raymond Federman, personal interview In a recent article in The Writer’s Chronicle, the bimonthly members magazine for creative writing faculty and students enrolled in the Associated Writing Programs, author Xu Xi describes how her first reaction to a student who writes metafiction in her classes is, as a “writing teacher and editor,” to instruct “cease, desist, rethink” (Xi 2007, 58): the marketplace is not interested in such products. And yet, as Xi goes on to point out, a high percentage of the greatest novels she knows—“books by an international cast of writers I admire,” including John Berger, J. M. Coetzee, Elfriede Jelinek, Vladimir Nabokov, and José Saramago, books “which inspired and tantalized, books I couldn’t stop reading”—are “metafiction.”1 So-called metafiction does not fit the category of “good fiction” which Xi encourages her students to write. Concisely formulated, this is the impasse we have reached as contemporary American fiction writers and editors: if we are true to the demands, possibilities, urgencies, traditions, and legacies of the art of fiction, we are most frequently led toward a type of writing which is nearly impossible to publish today in the United States except through underground, underfunded presses which, lacking distribution through national channels, generally amount to a type of career suicide. The marketplace—by which I mean the network of publishers who are almost entirely subsidiaries of multinational entertainment corporations,2 whose publications are handled by major distributors and appear, often with preferred product placement, in the chain bookstores which yearly increase their domination over how books reach readers in the United States—wants thrillers that “provide the illusion of order and justice...

Share