Excerpt from the novel-in-progress: One Yes & Many Know

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“I would write it as fiction, so unreal things could happen. I always wanted to write books in which unreal things happened. Of course, another reason was to avoid possible libel suits from the family of the deceased. They had a lot of money and could therefore hire a lot of lawyers. Expensive lawyers. But fiction was always the best defense. It was the first time I had a story with genuine appeal. The first time anything high-profile ever happened to me. Previous to this, my life was a long series of uneventful middle ground, with few moments worth writing about, and my mid-range level of success reflected this history. But now something had really happened. How could I let it pass? It would be like a Faust story, but instead of making a deal with the devil I would make a deal with myself. Up until now, I’d fully dedicated myself to art, and to living art ethically. But now something had changed. I was dissatisfied, and my dissatisfaction suddenly had a possible solution landing directly in the middle of it, as unexpected as a UFO. (Though hadn’t I always said: it’s my nature to be dissatisfied.) There was a success that had eluded me for as long as I could remember. Was my inability to achieve it due to some shortcoming in my work, or was it only because I’d never really tried? What would it mean to reach for the brass ring, and not stop reaching until it was fully in my grasp? I didn’t know but if there was ever a time to find out, it was now. I wasn’t planning to do so at the expense of anyone else, didn’t believe that would be necessary. But I was planning to focus on myself, on my own trajectory. A trajectory that was going to be convincingly upward. At all costs. This is what I began to repeatedly tell myself. What quickly became almost an obsession, taking over my life, while at the same time realizing I didn’t know much about success or how to achieve it. What would be my first move (apart from writing the book itself)? The goal was to win a major prize. Or to have one of my books made into a movie, most likely the book I was about to write. Or to have a celebrity seen with the book on some red carpet. Or some other path onto the bestseller list I couldn’t yet intuit. I had decided on a fairly narrow and conventional definition of success. But I was open to mixing it with a broader definition. Could I imagine being as successful as Jonathan Franzen? As George Orwell? As Franz Kafka? As Willian Faulkner or James Joyce? As Shakespeare? Could this become my own small version of Citizen Kane? I knew this line of questioning was corny as hell. I should focus on success within my lifetime and let matters of legacy take care of themselves. The writers who were famous now weren’t very good anyways, it shouldn’t be difficult to overtake them.”

[A paragraph from my current attempt to write a novel about an artist who tries to sell out. Working title: One Yes & Many Know.]



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