Reminiscent of the 2012 film “The Words”, this novel presents the tantalizing notion of stealing someone else’s work and presenting it as your own. The original maker is dead and gone; the work is brilliant and deserves to be seen by the world; someone should benefit and why shouldn’t it be you, the person who discovered it in the first place? Isn’t finding a work just as noteworthy as having written it in the first place?
Yes, these are self-serving, sophistic arguments. But they come from a once-revered author, a man whose sophomore effort never matched his original promise. A man whose career as an author has devolved into that most dreaded of fates—a literary teacher.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, etc., etc., etc.
The author sets us up with our main protagonist (no, the proper term is antihero) by guiding us through his scathing thoughts and contemplations of how low he’s fallen. We shudder with reflected loathing as he looks forward to deadening evenings reading other people’s driveling prose, having to figure out how to encourage talentless students that they have talent if they can only nurture it via his magic formulae and flinching inwardly as he hears admirers tell him how they liked his work. They always mean his first work, never any of the others that followed. The lack of approval for his latter pennings only emphasize how the mighty have fallen.
This novel is no such bore. Jake’s feelings are crystal clear and sharp in their scathing dismissal of his own downward spiral and that of the students he’s supposed to teach. He can tell he has a long, awful row ahead of him to hoe and we feel every step of it.
Yes, these are self-serving, sophistic arguments. But they come from a once-revered author, a man whose sophomore effort never matched his original promise. A man whose career as an author has devolved into that most dreaded of fates—a literary teacher.
Those who can, do. Those who can’t, etc., etc., etc.
The author sets us up with our main protagonist (no, the proper term is antihero) by guiding us through his scathing thoughts and contemplations of how low he’s fallen. We shudder with reflected loathing as he looks forward to deadening evenings reading other people’s driveling prose, having to figure out how to encourage talentless students that they have talent if they can only nurture it via his magic formulae and flinching inwardly as he hears admirers tell him how they liked his work. They always mean his first work, never any of the others that followed. The lack of approval for his latter pennings only emphasize how the mighty have fallen.
This novel is no such bore. Jake’s feelings are crystal clear and sharp in their scathing dismissal of his own downward spiral and that of the students he’s supposed to teach. He can tell he has a long, awful row ahead of him to hoe and we feel every step of it.