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A new novel sends up the writing world's highest institution.
John McNally is hoping he’ll be granted the benefit of the doubt.
That’s not likely to happen, given how humorless literary fiction writers tend to be about themselves and how much fun McNally has at their expense in his new novel, After the Workshop (Counterpoint, $15.95). Our narrator and reluctant hero is Jack Hercules Sheahan, a graduate of the prestigious (and occasionally maligned) Iowa Writers’ Workshop, who’s hung around town for ten years, having peaked while still in school with a New Yorker publication. He hasn’t published a word since and now spends his time as a media escort, carting around visiting authors whose careers he once envisioned having.
On the first day we’re in Jack’s world, he’s responsible for Vanessa Roberts, a novelist who’s penned her first memoir, The Outhouse, about her Amish heritage and the time she and her brother fondled each other in, yes, an outhouse. On the same day, he’s responsible for hotshot hipster novelist Tate Rinehart, who has a habit of flipping through his own novel in a bookstore, hoping someone will inquire. Not long after Jack drops her off at her hotel, Vanessa disappears, and later that night, Tate insists on meeting up with Vince Belecheck, an old classmate of Jack’s who’s found success by reinventing himself as a blue-collar hero.
If it’s not clear how Jack feels about the current crop of self-aggrandized, entitled writers, it’s summed up by this exchange with Tate about The Outhouse:
“An amazing book,” Tate said. “Scary, honest, sad.” He wagged his head and said, “Human.”
“Human,” I repeated flatly. “I can’t wait.”
McNally aims his lampoon at all of the writer characters—including the elderly, impish S.S. Pitzer, who mysteriously reappears in Iowa City after having disappeared more than ten years before—and some of their real-world foils are recognizable, which is why McNally is hoping for that benefit.
“I think if people read it in the spirit in which I wrote it, as a comic novel, they’ll react positively,” he says, on the phone from his office at Wake Forest University. “But if they read it as some sort of a parlor game, trying to figure out who’s who, it might get a little touchy.”
In the grand tradition of literary farces, Jack is tugged along on a minor adventure by characters whose ridiculous traits only escalate and intensify. Vanessa’s vicious New York publicist flies to town to find her, Vince’s false machismo flashes in embarrassing ways for everyone, Tate has a plan to steal Jack’s life, and S.S. has a plan to steal even more. It’s like Fawlty Towers for writers. Finally.
Of course Jack wants little to do with any of it, but there’s still part of him that wishes he could pick up the long-dormant, half-finished novel, abandoned around the time his fiancée left him. It’s that struggle that makes the book about more than just poking fun at authors.
“There’s that great quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American lives,” says McNally. “I think the question for Jack is whether you can reinvent yourself. And I think that’s common for writers, questioning if you have any talent or whether whatever success you’ve had is a fluke.”
McNally, who grew up in southwest suburban Burbank, has had plenty of success. After the Workshop is his third novel and fifth book, all published since 2000. But before that, he was a media escort in Iowa City, schlepping around the authors whose company he now keeps. So we had to wonder if he’s anticipating any authors recognizing themselves and calling him out.
“Well, to be cynical about it, if it helps book sales, that’s fine,” he says with a laugh. “I didn’t use anyone as a template for a character who hasn’t had good fortune. So in that respect, I think they can buck up and take their medicine.”
McNally reads Thursday 4 at The Book Cellar.
