The Salinger Contract Read online

  ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

  THE SALINGER CONTRACT

  “Skewers pretensions of writers and writing, editors and publishers—and perhaps audiences—in a literary thriller. … Marvelously intriguing.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Whom do we really write for and why? Langer’s mad-genius look at creativity, publishing, and the difference between what we do for love and what we’re forced to do for money, plumbs the dark side of inspiration with funhouse aplomb. Dizzyingly brilliant, with prose as clear as a rushing stream.” —Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You and Is This Tomorrow

  “‘Revelatory. Keeps all its secrets to the end, which is a whopper.’ … Wait. That’s a blurb for a novel within Adam Langer’s novel. But it applies just as well to The Salinger Contract, Langer’s latest nervy excursion on the boundary between fiction, non-fiction, and literary gamesmanship. A lot of fun, up to and including that whopper …” —Ben Yagoda, author of How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoid Them and Memoir: A History

  “In The Salinger Contract, Adam Langer serves as chief anthropologist, guiding us deftly through the tribal customs of the literary world—its longings, follies, disappointments, and secret obsessions. Like nesting boxes, this novel is neat with puzzles and intrigue. I couldn’t put it down—a cliché I can’t resist!” —Patricia Henley, National Book Award–nominated author of Other Heartbreaks and In the River Sweet

  “The Salinger Contract is at once a mercilessly readable thriller, and a sly commentary on the state of the artist in the modern world. Langer undermines the reader’s expectation at every twist and turn, proving, as only the best thrillers do, that nothing is what it seems.” —Jonathan Evison, author of West of Here and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING

  OF ADAM LANGER

  The Thieves of Manhattan

  “The Thieves of Manhattan is a sly and cutting riff on the book-­publishing world that is quite funny unless you happen to be an author, in which case the novel will make you consider a more sensible profession—like being a rodeo clown, for example, or a crab-fisherman in the Bering Sea.” —Carl Hiaasen

  “Takes us to places that fiction dares not tread. Bold brave worrying work from a wonderful wunderkind!” —Laura Albert, otherwise known as JT LeRoy, author of Sarah and The Heart Is Deceitful Beyond All Things

  “I loved this book—it’s both laugh-out-loud funny and satisfyingly snarky about the state of publishing these days. Both writers and readers should find this cautionary tale a delight to read.” —Nancy Pearl, author of Book Lust

  “A page-turning thriller, a lacerating lampoon of the literary life, and a powerful tribute to the art and craft of fakery.” —Clifford Irving, author of The Autobiography of Howard Hughes and The Hoax

  “Wonderfully mischievous … as soulful and morally committed as it is funny and clever.” —Los Angeles Times

  “The Thieves of Manhattan is near perfection … an exciting read that will put a dark smile on the face of anyone discouraged by the downward spiral of literature.” —The Daily Beast

  “The Thieves of Manhattan is a marvelous yarn, a glorious paean to good books and to those who shepherd them into the world, a tale of redemption as cheering as Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys.” —Chicago Tribune

  “The Thieves of Manhattan may be to publishing what Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 was to the military.” —Associated Press

  “Love and art merge with cheerful cynicism in Langer’s madcap skewering of New York’s personality-mad publishing industry.” —Vogue

  “Part Bright Lights, Big City, part The Grifters, this delicious satire of the literary world is peppered with slang so trendy a glossary is included.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  Ellington Boulevard

  “Langer has that rare combination of fierce intelligence, wicked wit and the ability to make you turn pages at wrist-splintering speed. This is one of the very best recent novels of New York.” —USA Today

  “Wacky and wonderful … a quintessentially New York tale.” —Daily News (New York)

  “A New York City novel par excellence.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

  “Adam Langer lifts the lid off the top of New York City and lets us see, close up, and terribly personally, the cosmopolitan complexity of the city that never sleeps alone … The composition and orchestration that Mr. Langer has gifted us with would have delighted the Duke himself.” —Larry Gelbart, creator of M*A*S*H, co-screenwriter of Tootsie, and Tony Award–winning author of City of Angels and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

  “Adam Langer’s new novel, Ellington Boulevard, captures all of Manhattan’s quirky insanity with great style and a huge amount of fun.” —Barbara Corcoran

  “Adam Langer took me on a wonderful trip all over the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The reader will meet musicians, actors, and even a dog named Herbie Mann—open the cover, read, and enjoy! This is his best book yet.” —Eli Wallach, actor

  “Adam Langer, who is either a genius or a schizophrenic, inhabits his characters—from a pregnant woman to a pigeon—with brilliant stealth and lovable insouciance. Finally a book has come along that has gotten me excited about reading and even New York again.” —Jennifer Belle, author of High Maintenance and Little Stalker

  “I laughed out loud throughout this simultaneously cynical and sentimental New York fairy tale with a love for off-Broadway musicals and the seventeen-key clarinet, and a profound understanding of the importance of dogs.” —Stephen Schwartz, Academy Award–winning lyricist and composer for Wicked, Godspell, Pippin, and The Prince of Egypt

  Crossing California

  “A work of unusual mastery, compassion, insight, and wit.” —Gary Shteyngart

  “In his ambitious, irresistible debut, Langer packs in more hilarious and agonizing moments than most writers manage in a lifetime.” —Entertainment Weekly

  “A teeming, hilarious, ambitious, and almost blindingly vivid portrait of a very particular Chicago at a very particular time.” —Newsday

  “Crossing California is the most vivid novel about Chicago since Saul Bellow’s Herzog and the most ambitious debut set in Chicago since Philip Roth’s Letting Go.” —Chicago Tribune

  “In this rich saga worthy of Philip Roth and Anthony Trollope, Langer has finally given us [Chicago’s] definitive document.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Langer drills to the core of people—five gifted teens and their clueless elders in 1979–81 Chicago—as deeply as Jonathan Franzen did in The Corrections.” —People

  “A brilliant debut.” —Publishers Weekly

  The Salinger Contract

  A Novel

  Adam Langer

  Contents

  I: Upon Signing

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  II: Upon Submission

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  III: Upon Acceptance

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37
r />   38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  IV: Upon Publication

  53

  54

  55

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For Wendy Salinger, my favorite writer with that surname

  As always, for Beate, Nora, and Solveig

  As for my parents, I hope someday they’ll forgive me

  for the secrets I have revealed here

  Promise me that if ever I find the courage to think like a hero,

  you will act like a merely decent human being.

  John Le Carré, The Russia House

  I:

  Upon

  Signing

  Forgive me, Father, for I know exactly what I did.

  Forgive me, Father, for I know all that I still must do.

  Conner Joyce, Ice Locker

  1

  I never believed a book could save your life. It makes sense that Conner Joyce would be the one who changed my mind about that. The story of how one book saved me while another nearly killed Conner began, appropriately enough, in a bookstore—to be more precise, at Borders in Bloomington, Indiana, where I saw a poster with Conner’s picture on it. By then, I had nearly forgotten Conner. I had figured I was done with books.

  After my magazine, Lit, folded half a dozen years earlier and I lost my plum position as books editor, I pretty much stopped reading contemporary fiction, particularly crime novels like the ones Conner wrote. I may have spent a fair amount of time decrying the demise of America’s reading culture, but it wasn’t like I was helping to improve the situation. My wife had a good gig at the university, and we had two young daughters: Ramona, age six, who was just starting chapter books, and Beatrice, two and a half, who was a voracious consumer of picture books, and that’s pretty much all I found time to read. As far as I was concerned, the interesting part of my life was over.

  When I lived in New York and worked for the magazine, I wrote author profiles—pieces of 1,500 to 2,000 words that allowed authors to tell their stories in their own words in an environment in which they felt comfortable. I walked the Freedom Trail in Boston with Dennis Lehane; rode the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island with E. L. Doctorow; attended a Springsteen concert with Margaret Atwood; and went camping in the Pocono Mountains with Conner Joyce and his wife, Angela De La Roja. Not exactly hard-hitting journalism, but the authors usually liked the articles because I printed their quotes verbatim and cleaned up their swearwords if they asked. Plus, the pictures that accompanied the articles were extremely flattering. Hardly anyone had ever called Maurice Sendak or Stephen King handsome before they saw my profiles. And even Conner Joyce—once named one of America’s Sexiest Writers by People magazine—told me he’d never seen a better photo of himself.

  My Lit profiles usually conformed to one of two basic templates—either an author was exactly like the characters he wrote about in his books or (surprise!) he was nothing like them. My profile of Conner (“His Aim Is True: How Stories Saved Conner Joyce’s Life”) fell somewhere between the two: though I sensed he was too compassionate and earnest to commit the crimes he wrote, the humanity of his characters was clearly his own.

  When I interviewed Conner in Pennsylvania, we talked a lot about books. I turned him on to my favorite authors, Italo Calvino, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and José Saramago; he tried to convince me of the merits of Jarosław Dudek and J. D. Salinger. Most of his favorite authors were recluses, he said. He admired writers whose own stories were as interesting as the ones they wrote. He loved the mystery of Salinger, holed up in his home in Cornish, New Hampshire, refusing to publish for more than forty years. He was captivated by the life of Jarosław Dudek, the Olympic shot-put silver medalist and Ministry of Internal Affairs functionary who won just about every international literary award with his only novel, Other Countries, Other Lives, then disappeared shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Conner had read every biography ever written about B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, who concealed his identity using anagrammatic pseudonyms such as Ret Marut and Hal Croves and was rumored to be the son of Kaiser Wilhelm. He had spent hours admiring and puzzling over the last-known photographs of Thomas Pynchon taken at Cornell University. He had written a high school research paper about Roland Cephus, the unofficial poet laureate of the Black Panther movement who had gone underground after the 1971 publication of A Molotov Manifesto.

  As a boy and as a teenager, Conner had written letters to the agents and publishers for Dudek, Salinger, Pynchon, and Harper Lee. He hoped his heartfelt appreciation of To Kill a Mockingbird and Atticus Finch would make Lee break her silence and tell him about her quiet little existence in Monroeville, Alabama. He never received responses, yet he fantasized about meeting those writers, and he still wondered what it would be like to be so intriguing that people would actually care if he disappeared.

  The way I remembered him, Conner was one of the good guys—a big, earnest Irish-Catholic from a family of police sergeants, fire department captains, Eagle Scouts, and Navy vets. The kind of guy you wanted to captain your ball team, to help talk your way out of a bad neighborhood after dark, or to pilot your plane through rough weather. He was one of the few authors I interviewed who actually seemed more interested in hearing about me than I was in hearing about him.

  In the time we spent together, even though I told him I didn’t really like talking about it, somehow he got me to tell him my whole family story—what I knew of it anyway: being born to a single mom; growing up in a two-bedroom apartment on West Farragut Street on Chicago’s drab north side; putting myself through college at UIC; refusing my mother’s offers of money because I knew how cash-strapped she was; working as a waiter, a writer for CBS Radio, and a freelancer for various alternative newspapers such as Neon, Strong Coffee, and The Reader; meeting my future wife, Sabine, one night at the Lakeview café called Java Jive when she was on a study-abroad program and I was working behind the counter, long before anyone had heard the word “barista”; moving with Sabine to New York, where she went to grad school and I edited Lit. I told Conner about my vain attempts to track down my birth father, about my tight-lipped mother, Trudy Herstein, a longtime worker for the Tribune Company who cocooned herself in silence whenever I asked about her life before I was born. When I told Conner I was writing a novel about my search for my father, he said it sounded like a great book and he’d love to read it.

  When I finished writing up the interview, I let him approve his quotes before I published the piece. He didn’t ask me to change anything, and only requested that I airbrush the cigarette from his pictures. He wanted to be a dad someday, he said, and didn’t want his kid to see him smoking. I got into a big fight about it with my publisher, M. J. Thacker, who had been trying to get Philip Morris to take out a full-page ad, but ultimately, I won that battle for Conner.

  When I needed someone to endorse Nine Fathers—my first and, to date, only novel—I sent out about a dozen e-mails and letters to various authors I had interviewed. And though, at the time, Conner was one of the biggest names among them, he was first to respond. He didn’t act busy and self-important like E. L. Doctorow, whose agent told me he didn’t have the time to devote to a first-time author. And he wasn’t one of those patronizing assholes like Blade Markham, who tossed off something in half a minute, misspelling my name and getting the title wrong (Nineteen Fathers) just to let me know he was doing me a favor and hadn’t read a word. From what Conner wrote, you could tell he had actually read the whole book, had thought about it carefully, and apparently understood more about me from reading it than I did from writing it. “Revelatory,” he wrote. “Keeps all its secrets until the ve
ry end, which is a whopper.” I thought the blurb was a little over the top, but it looked good on the jacket.

  The last time I had seen Conner—at the New York premiere for the movie adaptation of his debut novel, Devil Shotgun: A Cole Padgett Thriller—he told me to give him a ring whenever I passed through Pennsylvania, and he didn’t seem like the type of guy who would bullshit about something like that. But then my wife got her faculty gig here at the Graduate School of Foreign Policy and we moved away. I fell out of touch with most of my old contacts, and I barely spent any time in Manhattan, let alone in Philadelphia. When Nine Fathers was published, I kept wishing vainly that my old assistant, Miriam, who now worked as one of Terry Gross’s producers for Fresh Air, would book me for an interview in Philly so that I would have an excuse to call Conner up.

  But that never happened. Conner had his life writing crime novels in Pennsylvania; I sat on my front porch with my laptop, or in my wife’s library carrel in Indiana, surfing other people’s iTunes playlists and trying to think of ideas for a follow-up to Nine Fathers that wouldn’t offend my mother.

  When I saw the poster at Borders advertising Conner’s reading, I was with Beatrice. We were shopping to replace her copy of Knuffle Bunny Too, which I had accidentally washed along with a load of her cloth diapers. This had become my life—cooking dinner, walking the dog, squiring Ramona to school and Beatrice to day care, and taking the two of them to cafés, ballet class, gymnastics, play dates, birthday parties, and bookstores. I would write a few pages per day on drafts of stories and books I wasn’t sure I would ever finish while my spouse slaved away on the syllabi, scholarly articles, and book proposals that would win her tenure so that we would never have to worry about health insurance or the price of college tuition.

  Dr. Sabine Krummel, my spouse, was a graduate of both the Freie Universität of Berlin and Columbia University. She had published one book with Routledge Press (Fusion and Diffusion: A Network Analysis of How Rules Governing Nuclear Power Safety Procedures Transfer Across European Member State Borders) and had a contract for her follow-up book with Cambridge University Press (Autostimulation and Autonomy Under Import Substitution in Postcolonial Society). She was “a shoo-in for tenure, man,” at least according to her dreadlocked, eternally stoned department chair, Dr. Joel Getty, who was better known by his nickname, “Spag.”