Adam Dalva

Adam Dalva

Trick Book

After years of failure, he could no longer trust his friends. They, novelists all, successful mostly, and a couple of them quite established, would always praise his writing, but agents and magazines were never interested. He suspected that his friends were paying him lip service out of sympathy and felt increasingly outside their social grouping, though there was never an overt effort to cut him out. But there were dinners that he didn’t learn about until after the fact, gossip about starry people whom he could never imagine knowing, impossible travel. He had broken ground on a new novel and decided to test his friends before he showed it to them. He wrote a trick book. It took him a year, but he only spent thirty minutes on it every morning. The trick book wasn’t good, which made it easy to write. The plot was all hooks and cheap crescendos, and the best parts were lifted from obvious sources, not quite plagiarism, but certainly unoriginal. Something in the trick book nevertheless gave him pleasure, not the joy of artmaking, exactly, but the fractal satisfaction of clicking into a grid. Every bit of pablum, every creative cliché, could go into the trick book. The sentences were simple, the perspective unwavering. He never read from it out loud, never bothered tweezing his language. All of it made the writing of his real book feel more beautiful, like stretching out recalcitrant hamstrings before playing tennis. He finished the trick book before the real one, then sent it to his friends. As he’d feared, they all wrote back to say that they loved what they were reading, that they couldn’t put it down. The most successful of his friends even called and said that her agent had loved the trick book too. She had sent it to her without his consent. He, expecting a prank or even cruelty, had martinis with the agent on the Upper West Side, and, drunk on the ghost of the life he’d always wanted, agreed to sign with her the second she offered to represent him. He tactfully mentioned his real book, and she said that she would be excited to read it after she sold the trick one. Her notes came in. He hit Accept All on the track changes because he did not care. The agent sent the trick book to editors, and there was an auction, and he, without thought, took the offer with the most money. There was no thrill, though his dream had come true. He agreed to all the changes from his editor and agreed to his book cover—graphic and overstated—without protest. He did promotional events. Anything the publicists asked. He gave them the passwords to his social media accounts. Cynical personal essays and faux-enthusiastic unboxing videos. He read from the trick book out loud for the first time the night it launched, its plot beats surprising him, the audience leaning in with anticipation. It was quickly optioned by a director whose films he loathed. Conferences; teaching; money. His friends drifted away. He had become too famous. Eventually, even the woman who had introduced him to their agent confessed, tipsy and indignant at a conference in Rome, that she’d become too jealous of him to remain friends. He went alone to the trick book’s film screening, where he met a beautiful actress eleven years his junior. They were soon married. All the while, he was working on his real book. But he had grown afraid of it. When he wrote, it was as if the trick book was seeping in. The characters were too predictable; the sentences flattened. The joy of artmaking was hard to remember, as was his need, because he’d always written from a place of anger. He decided to write another trick book to expunge the heavy obligations of craft, and that one sold too. Years passed. He mainly wrote sequels and became very wealthy and died prematurely of an undiagnosed internal issue. His former friends wrote pithy obituaries that promoted their own work. Then his widow found the real book in his files. She quickly shared it with his literary executor, his agent, now the head of her own firm. The real book was complete except for the last sentence, which would become the object of scholarly speculation. Because he was dead, it was deemed publishable, one final opportunity to profit. A photo of him taken by one of his friends when they were hungry, aspiring writers graced the cover. “What a pity,” the critics said in their raves. “This is what he should have been doing all along.”