Josh Gross

The Curse of the Failed Novel

He tells me that he wrote a novel once, that he knows it’s no big deal, that everyone’s done it, that it doesn’t even require talent, just the belief you have it, a belief so rampant it’s best described as an epidemic. Andy’s is a classical Greek dialogue between the state of nature and contemporary pop culture. Judith’s is an existential first-person narrative told from the perspective of processed food. His mother’s is a scathing imagining of the alternate life left unlived by a middle-aged housewife whose children have left home, modeled after herself, but more archetypal than autobiographical, so she claims. He says that the words people use to describe their novels are generally every bit as meaningless as the work itself, that they’re divorced from definitions, that people insist that they mean what they want them to at the time regardless of what ideas the words contained within this unpublished avalanche actually represent. Black is white. Up is down. Orwell is Huxley. That it all stems from the arrogant notion that we have something to say, that our story is different, somehow unique from the constraints of the human experience of being born, eating, drinking, sleeping, breathing, working, dreaming, loving, fucking, fighting, eventually writing a bad novel, and finally dying over the whole sorry experience.
Then he says that his is different.
Of course, he tells me, we all say that ours is dif-ferent, but that his really is, even though none of them really are. Still, his is. It’s cursed.
He tells me that everyone who’s read it has never spoken to him again, and he’s not talking about publishing industry people avoiding his phone calls. Friends, lovers, family; gone. All whose eyes have skimmed his words have skipped town or his inner circle. Five readers, five dropouts from his life. 
He tells me that his friend Michelle was at a school for publishing, that she wanted to be a book editor, that she offered to look the novel over as practice in exchange for drum lessons. Shortly after delivering her a smartly bound copy of the manuscript he had special-made for her along with a specially purchased red pen, not even enough time for more than a few chapters, she stopped arriving in his basement on Tuesdays at three, her phone number stopped working without report, she disappeared from class. She never returned the manuscript, her thoughts on it, or the pen.
He fell in love with an English major, a “writer” herself. Mad with passion and poetry, they exchanged books. Hers, a blip only of novella length, was read in an afternoon, reported on over dinner. His, a full novel, a solid hundred and five thousand words, needed more time for full analysis, time it would never receive. She gave her novella and her love to a rival by chapter 7, and he wondered if Michelle had also been on chapter 7, thinking it a shame, because the exposition and back-story had barely faded at that point, that the plot didn’t really pick up until chapter 9.
	He tells me that his roommate’s mother was a professional novelist, that they’d met and gotten along and that he wanted her to be his mentor, but that he didn’t want to give her his novel until it was at least readable enough for people to reach chapter 8, or she wouldn’t really be interested in helping him. So he gave it to her daughter, his roommate. And she promptly moved out amid a swarm of the type of meritless allegations roommates always make about one another upon exit. He didn’t know what chapter she was on, only that she didn’t pay the electric bill when she left.
He tells me that her mother moved shortly after. To a deserted tropical island. To write.
There was another interested publishing student he knew, Erin. He tells me that he resisted, that by now he’d caught on to the curse, at least in some sort of kitschy way, and that the moment those pages left his hands, those whom they were delivered to would leave his life. He would lose a friend and a nice pen. But she insisted, said that knowledge of the curse neutered its power, that not only would she reach chapter 8, she would read every single word, scouring for grammatical and logical errors, and would return the manuscript covered in so much red ink it would look like a muti-lated corpse. You can call me a butcher, she said. He flirted, said he wasn’t sure, the curse had already claimed four. She was wrong. There was an incident, he was never clear on the details, only that she lost her scholar-ship, that she had to drop out of school, return home. She had lost her desire for the ritual murder of his words, the manuscript languished in a box in her parents’ garage.
He tells me that was when his grandfather wanted to see what sort of crap he was paying for at that fancy school of his grandson’s that he begged him to want something else, that he knew what would happen, that it wasn’t fair to ask him to shoulder that respon-sibility. But his grandfather was a solid fellow of the Greatest Generation, adamant, resolved, and of the deeply superstitious conviction that superstition was for queers and pinkos, and he practically tore the pages from his grasp. He tells me that he never knew how far his grandfather read, only that it was far enough for him to make up his mind that queers and pinkos wielded not only superstition but the florid nonsense he had dribbled onto those cursed pages, that though he would finish paying the bill for school because he had made a commitment, if the words contained within those pages were how he felt about his family then he was no grandson of his, and that he never would be again.
	Though the obvious course of action after all this was to shred the manuscript, delete the file, discon-nect from the Internet to ensure the curse could not escape, remove and burn his hard drive while reciting the proper incantations to cleanse it of evil spirits, finally scattering the ashes to the four corners of the Earth to avoid its supernatural resurrection, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. It was his novel. His work. One hundred and five thousand emblems of his soul made concrete. And one day, there might be a time or situation that could defeat the curse. He could be quarantined in a room with another person, jailed, married. Then the reader could not leave and he could watch them absorb every last syllable. It was possible. He hoped.
	So you see, he tells me, the novel may contain the same bullshit, the same arrogance, the same self-aggrandizing departure from reality, and “curse” might be just another one of those words equally divorced from meaning that describe those very qualities that drove his readers away from his life. But his novel is still different. It is cursed. Even if curse is just a word. He tells me that this is why he’s never mentioned it before, that he wanted me to stick around, that all powers of positive thinking, trust and human intention were powerless against his apparently complete and total lack of talent or soul.
	And then, it’s there, on the table between us, four hundred printed pages with a black plastic copy shop binding and a big red bow. There is no pen.
	He tells me that he wishes this were about trust, about art, about love, but that it isn’t. He tells me that he found the letters, that he knows I’m leaving him, that at least this way he can rationalize it, lay blame, it’s not him that drove me away, it’s the novel, the cursed failed novel, the one that’s waged a war against him for years now, a ruthless enemy that will stop at nothing to destroy him and that he must eventually master or die trying. He tells me that he needs to understand it, that this is the only way to make it all make sense in his head. 

He tells me that he knows his desires probably mean little, but that he hopes I’ll read the whole thing, that it doesn’t really pick up until chapter 9. 
He tells me he is sorry. And then he is gone.
_____

Josh Gross’s work has appeared in The Portland Review, Ooligan Press's Irreverent Fish, Alchemy, Mercury Quarterly, and Pathos Lit Mag. He lives, works, and is generally up to no good in the areas in and around Portland, Oregon.