Free The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky Page B

it’s too much a reach to suggest that Emily dies from heartbreak. “You are not that kind of writer,” Iris writes. Is she implying that Denise’s talents don’t match her vision? No real writer feels like her talents match her vision, but Iris doesn’t seem to want Denise to have grand ambitions. She seems to want Denise to write an accessible and pleasant book, maybe just a little off-kilter, a book the publicists can compare to Anne Tyler or Alice Hoffman. It will sell a reasonable number of copies, enough to make the bosses happy, so she can keep publishing books.
    A woman’s book.
    In other words, do not think you are Monsieur Proust.
    At some point Denise starts crying softly, very softly. It is barely audible. I imagine her holding the phone away from her face for a minute while I go on talking, doing my stupid best to say the right thing. And then she takes her hand off the mouthpiece.
    The sentence Denise keeps coming back to concerns the novel’s opening. Iris writes, “You have to earn an opening like that.” Denise says it again, and after two minutes, she repeats it, this time with more molten rage.
    From here, I can see that Iris might be talking about cause and effect, consequence. Iris might in fact be saying that the opening is too intense, too elaborate, with too many embedded clauses in the sentences, to be friendly to the reader.
    The fact is this: Iris wants another Good Deeds , but a Good Deeds that sells more, gets more reviews, gets more attention for the other books on the list. She wants the writer and the book she fell in love with five years back, but one with all the nouns changed.
    Denise, however, hears Iris’s words differently, and maybe Denise knows what she’s talking about. Denise believes Iris is telling her that she doesn’t have the sophistication or education to write a sentence like that. Iris has an MFA from Iowa, just as Famous Writer, Flannery O’Connor, and Jayne Anne Phillips have MFAs from Iowa. Denise herself had wanted to go to Iowa, but stopped herself from putting the application in the mail even after she’d filled out the forms, filled out the check, sealed the envelope. I don’t understand how you could want something so much that you’d make sure it wouldn’t work out, but maybe I deal with that complexity by convincing myself the opportunity wasn’t so great to begin with.
    Denise, though, will never let go of her feeling and fury. Iris doesn’t know she is dealing with a thunderstorm. Denise knows exactly what it is to please. And she will please Iris as if pleasing is a kind of murder.
    With that in mind, Denise looks at the pages. She moves chapters around, pares back sentences to their essence. She makes Emily someone the reader can “identify with,” as they say. She makes her “sympathetic.” She makes the book linear. She stays up night after night, coffee on constant brew. Over the next few months she writes a simpler, more streamlined version of the book she’d wanted to write, a book she probably loves a little less, though she doesn’t have it in her to say it to herself like that. But maybe that’s a better place to write from: loving a little less. The new book is a replacement for the dream book. Others will never see the dream book, but she’ll always have it in her head. It will pulse like a jellyfish, dangerous, blue, just out of reach, up in the sky rather than down, underwater. “If only—” she’ll say years later, punishing herself for walking away from it.

Monster
    1888 |  Vincent loves Aries: the filth of it, the light, the brothels, even the people, who strike him as creatures from another world. The town is a bit of a backwater: a plus to him. Though he’s been sick—smoker’s cough and too much absinthe—he’s been working well, paintings of yellow, ultramarine, and mauve, curled and slapped onto the canvas with a knife. He loves his Yellow House, where he’s lived since leaving the Hotel-Restaurant