short belletristic retrospective

Not (necessarily) a sales pitch

Feeling a bit burned out lately. I don’t do well in December. Instead of trying to make something do something new, I’d like to say a few words about a couple of items under the Books link at the top of the page. Long story short, I write novels sometimes.

---

The Zeroes

So I was one of those Millennials who graduated from college, moved back in with his folks, and took a while to reach escape velocity and leave town for good.

I thought I had a plan. It wasn’t a very good one, but it seemed reasonable enough. I’d leverage my English degree to get some sort of writing/editing gig in New York—acquiring some of that all-important Professional Writing Experience. After I had some money in the bank, I’d relocate to Brooklyn. In the meantime, I’d work on a novel and keep turning out comics and other online content.

After emailing some resumes and fumbling some interviews, I got offered an editorial assistant position at a Midtown firm that published listings of industrial supplies. I’d take a ninety-minute train ride to Manhattan and then spend eight sedentary hours in a dead-silent cubicle gallery poring over vendors’ websites to see what products and services of theirs fell under our index headings, and composing paraphrased descriptions of them. Afterwards I’d take a ninety-minute train ride back to Jersey.

The pay was $13.50 an hour. According to an inflation calculator, that’s a little over $20 in today’s dollars—but still.

I lasted four or five months. There was nothing about the work or the firm that I enjoyed.

A couple of months later, I got a café job at a Borders near the mall I’d periodically worked at since high school. Borders was a popular destination for college grads who’d returned to Jersey and moved back in with their parents, so at least I wasn’t alone in that regard. I made a lot of friends. I had fun. I was able to save some money, and I usually had energy left over after finishing a shift. It was a welcome change of pace.

In early 2009, I wasn’t doing so hot.

The novel I’d been working on since graduating was dead in the water. It wasn’t just a hot mess, it was a tedious and pretentious hot mess that couldn’t be salvaged without starting over from the very beginning.

I’d made the mistake of not quitting while I was ahead with the webcomic I’d launched as a college freshman. Despite knowing that its moment was over and its audience was irrevocably shrinking, I still sank time and energy into it out of stubbornness and perhaps out of fear. It wasn’t fun anymore.

I’d had a part-time gig I took up in the hope that it would become a comparatively lucrative full-time alternative to Borders (which was by then an obviously sinking ship and had implemented across-the-board wage freezes and revoked employee perks). Not only was the job a less comfortable fit that I’d imagined, not only was it clearly a dead-end, but in the end I found myself forced to pull an abrupt “you can’t fire me, I quit” maneuver after a committing a miserably embarrassing fuck-up. It was bad—the kind of unforced error that makes one question his overall competence as a human being.

I’d recently driven out to Wisconsin to meet up with a paramour I’d practically lived with with for a period during the previous summer. The plan was to stay for about a week. I drove back to Jersey after three days. Incidentally, mid-February is one hell of a depressing time for a road trip.

So: I was still living at home. My romantic life was fucked. My professional life, such as it was, was fucked. My creative endeavors were all failing—save for the video game essays, but if it was ever possible to parlay those into something professional, I had neither the knowhow to make that happen nor the desire to go about what I roughly figured it might entail. My outlook had grown bleak. When a university friend of mine who lived in Manhattan (with his parents) extended an invitation to get some therapeutic thinking done, I eagerly took him up on it.

The idea, as I understood it, was to go to an acquaintance’s apartment in Brooklyn. We were going to dim the lights, lay out yoga mats, and bring in a dude to conduct a guided meditation session—while we were all on LSD.

We showed up at the McKibbin Lofts, swallowed our tabs, and waited a while. After about forty minutes, we discovered the mediation guy couldn’t make it. Our host’s roommates turned up the lights, put on some music, and broke out the booze and cocaine. Party time!

Given how many hip Millennial Brooklyn kids were swarming about the place, hopping from loft to loft, party to party, I doubt the meditation exercise was ever feasible to begin with. Without going into detail, I remember being very self-conscious and very uncomfortable. At one point I managed to get locked in the stairwell, and sat by myself for a while.

I drove back to Jersey at like five in the morning. My mind felt like an ashtray.

A day or two later, I had a full-blown panic attack.

About a week after that, I finally scrapped the failed novel and started writing a new one. I had a clear objective in mind: to create a delivery mechanism in prose for what I felt during the panic attack.

The casual elevator pitch ran something like this: it’s a book about those kids you knew from your suburban hometown who worked at the mall and played in a punk band, convinced they could go pro, get signed, and play the Warped Tour—and then when you meet them again ten years later, they’re still working at the mall, but they’re not playing in any bands anymore. To be sure, the context was particular to Jersey. The state had an energetic music scene during the nineties and early aughts, producing some fairly big names like Catch 22, Thursday, Gaslight Anthem, Bigwig, Senses Fail, Saves the Day, and so on. I had multiple friends and acquaintances who played and toured in ska punk, emo, and hardcore bands at one point or another.

The novel’s narrator and protagonist is an aspiring comic book artist who graduates from high school in 2000. Scenester musicians make up his core friend group. Like them, he’s convinced he has what it takes to go pro: if Rob Liefeld could do it, why the hell can’t he? So he submits, reworks, and resubmits his portfolio while his friends play shows, tour, and record demos. His work is rejected; his best friend’s bands splits up. Neither of them give up or reconsider their aspirations—though perhaps they should have.

It’s a novel about stasis. I deliberately wrote a book where nothing really happens. Nine years pass, and in spite of their ambitions, the central characters don’t go anywhere, don’t learn much, and are left standing around at the end of the decade, coming to terms with failing and wondering if they ever had a chance to begin with. It’s pretty cringe-inducing, really, but that was by design. There’s no tragic grandeur here, and the passage of time divests the main cast of whatever endearing underdog scrappiness they might have possessed as teenagers. They take the ubiquitous encouragements to follow their bliss much too much to heart, and don’t have anything in the way of a Plan B when they’re finally forced to admit that their day jobs are really just their jobs and they were never really anything very special to begin with.

I could be forgiven, I think, for supposing the book had a shot at legitimate publication. In the thick of the Great Recession, surely there were enough Millennials feeling stuck and disheartened to make the novel topical.

The hundred or so literary agents I queried didn’t seem to think so. Most of them either sent form rejections or never replied at all; what personalized feedback I did receive indicated that publishing types in New York and Los Angeles didn’t think that white male townies stuck in shitty service jobs were people deserving of fictional treatment, and doubted anyone else cared much about them.

Even if The Zeroes wasn’t the best possible fictional treatment of the subject (and such a morbid book was always going to be a hard sell), I don’t think the gatekeepers were right about that. But last decade’s sour grapes are beside the point now, and the publishing industry’s apparently deliberate decision to stop putting out literary fiction that speaks to male readers is a separate conversation.¹

I’m still proud of The Zeroes, warts and janky cover design and all, and I’m grateful that it found a small but appreciative readership. It’s an imperfect but enthusiastic first novel written by a twentysomething who (like most twentysomethings) thought he knew more about the world than he really did—which is fitting, since at is core is a figure who labors under a profound naivete about the world he lives in. When the narrator realizes he’s been running in place under the belief that sheer perseverance does and must pay off, he has no idea how the hell he got left behind. He can’t see the outside the box he’s trapped in.

---

Zeroes: The Reunion

The sequel to The Zeroes was, like the first book, the result of a crisis.

Around July or August 2017, while working on a gigantic science fiction novel (which to this day I haven’t given up on), I decided I needed to take a break and work on something else to clear my head. I’d do something for National Novel Writing Month—I’d take a stab at speed-writing the Zeroes sequel whose basic concept had been percolating in my head for a few years. It’d be fun!

In September, an ex with whom I was still entangled in a way that wasn’t at all healthy for either of us went missing.² Vanished into thin air. Two months later, I felt in my guts she was dead and would never be found (and time has so far proven me right). So I had some impetus to find an object of intense focus, something into which I could sink as much emotional energy as I possibly could.

The initial idea was simple. I wanted to examine a character from The Zeroes: the townie narrator’s high school girlfriend who goes off to college and never comes back. She and the narrator break up over the phone before her freshman year is out, and he never completely gets over her. It doesn’t help him that MySpace and Facebook give him the means to periodically check in on her progress in life as she becomes a veritable avatar of aughts-era smart & cool Millennial indie girl chic. While the narrator flounders in Jersey, he sees her thriving in Portland.

Towards the end of the story, he meets her again after she moves to Brooklyn. She’s not the person he remembers, or who he imagined she’d be.

I wrote her more or less as a succubus, and she performed that role admirably enough. But after all was said and done, I found myself wondering about her. There was obviously more to her story than the (extremely biased) narrator could have known, and I wanted to figure out exactly what had happened to her. I started writing the book as the character’s personal journal, where she takes stock of her situation in 2015 and reminisces about the past.

I am unable to account for how The Reunion turned into what it turned into. One thing just led to another, I guess.

One of the biggest surprises for me had to do with the appearance of the first book’s protagonist toward the end. As my sense of where the story was headed began to crystallize, I imagined he’d play a much more important part. As it happened, he merely provided a convenient and consonant note on which to punctuate a chapter and transition towards the resolution. The process of working through The Reunion actually made him unimportant in my mind. I wrote myself onto Team Ex-Girlfriend.

I succeeded in writing something I feel I don’t completely understand. I can talk about The Reunion piecemeal. I can say I wanted to write about city life, addiction, loneliness, spiritual destitution, loss, guilt, forgiveness, frustrated idealism, the worst high school reunion that ever happened (and its much worse afterparty), and dragons. I can talk about wanting, in the words of William Carlos Williams, to “make a big, serious portrait of my time”—and in this, I actually don’t think I completely failed.

I made no effort at all to get The Reunion published legitimately. It never had a chance. Just imagine the elevator pitch to a literary agent at some writers’ conference. “Have I got a manuscript for you! I’ve written a 700-page sequel to my self-published novel about…hey! Where are you going?” So I just quietly put it out there, hoping that some members of the little readership I’ve accrued over the years might take interest.

A few people did. When you’re a nobody with a 700-page self-published novel on offer, you’ve got to be grateful that anyone reads it.

There is a very enthusiastic Goodreads review from somebody I don’t know and have never met that reads: “From a spiritual standpoint, this is America’s Brothers Karamazov.”

I’m not trying to toot my own horn here. I’ve read The Brothers Karamazov, and I’m not fit to clean Dostoevsky’s wastebasket. My book ain’t perfect; I can generate a list of characters, scenes, and plenty of word choices I wish I’d handled differently (I’m afraid there were times I was trying too hard), but was too deep in the fog of the thing to see that they needed adjusting. But—I can see the basis of the comparison. And I know how arrogant that probably sounds, but…well, there it is.

I don’t know how I wrote The Reunion, and I’m not sure it’s something I’ll ever be able to top.

1. I know that it’s an eternity ago in terms of the media environment and its associated habits, but I grew up surrounded by future townie dudes who eagerly read Chuck Palahniuk, Brett Easton Ellis, Kurt Vonnegut, Irvine Welsh, Hunter Thompson, etc., on their own time, even when they had websites, video games, and movies they could have been paying attention to instead. The fact that male Zoomers aren’t reading comparable new novels by comparable new authors may have something to do with something Joyce Carol Oates tweeted in 2022: “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.”

To repeat, this isn’t residual bitterness about my first novel not earning a publishing contract. Sometimes shit just doesn’t work out, life isn’t fair, git gud, etc. All I’m saying is that when people write articles scratching their heads and wringing their hands about male readers abandoning literary fiction, they might as well be asking why the “White Dudes for Harris” TV spot wasn’t exactly a hit with its target audience.

2. Just because two people love each other doesn’t mean they’re good for one another. That’s all I’ll say.