My Mistake (19 page)

The trouble is that despite the special Fiction Issue, Tina has cut the amount of fiction in
The New Yorker
by half, shunted it from the front of the magazine to the back, and has everyone, on the factual and fictional sides, politicking and meeting and competing for her favor and attention. Some editors hold finished pieces back from her so that when they think there may a chance for them to run, they will take on the stop-the-presses urgency that she loves, and seem fresh to her eye. Hot!

So I wouldn't be losing what I had under Gottlieb, which was a kind of heaven for me, out from under three thumbs—of Shawn and Roger and my friend Chip—and publishing, for the first time in the magazine and often anywhere, such writers as Cynthia Kadohata, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Michael Cunningham, Allegra Goodman, Amy Bloom, Antonya Nelson, Abraham Verghese, Elizabeth Jolley, Ann Cummins, George Saunders, Ann Packer, and Noah Baumbach. That's already gone.

So in the fall of 1994, I take the Random House job, but I want to start in January of 1995, so that I can finish a novel I'm working on, called
The Treatment,
an extension of four stories I've published in
The New Yorker.
Evans agrees.

(When I submitted the fourth of those stories, “Influenza”—which won an O. Henry Award, my second—to McGrath, he gave it to Tina to read. She gave it back to Chip, and Chip said, “It's the most sexually graphic story that will have ever been in the magazine.” According to Chip, Tina replied merrily, “Yes, I know. My God! Dahn—call me for lunch!”)

I've also said that I won't leave
The New Yorker
if I have to wait the full five years required to be eligible for all of Random House's benefit and pension plans. Because S. I. Newhouse owns both companies, Evans manages to have the job change classified a “transfer.” So I remain fully vested, whatever that means.

When I formally accept the job, Evans says, “You have five years to fook oop.”

 

 

 

Part IV

 

 

 

 

Fifty-four

 

At the memorial gathering for my mother, my son, eleven—a would-be tough guy—dissolves into tears as people talk about her. My daughter, eight, leans forward in her chair and looks at her brother with surprise and fascination.

My mother made a practice of cultivating young friends. My girlfriends, Mike's wife, researchers at
Fortune,
neighbors in Nyack, nieces and nephews. In her last years, facing a solitary life in the big empty house, she and I arranged to have young students from the Nyack Missionary College board there for free in return for seeing to its upkeep, helping her with errands, and so on. All of these people stayed in touch, and many attend the service in her memory—which is for the most part fitting and moving. The last person to speak is Greg, my mother's last boarder. He does a bad job, unfortunately—choking back tears and speaking almost incoherently. It makes me angry.

But then I think how amused my mother would have been by this display, and that calms me down. And then I remember two incidents involving Greg that make my blood simmer all over again. Once, in the driveway at the Nyack house, Greg told me that he had been undecided about whether to take this course or that course at the college. “But I listened for God,” he said, “and God told me what direction to follow. I heard His voice saying what I should do, and I felt so grateful.” OK—that bugs me but really isn't so bad. Greg was lucky to have his traffic-cop God pointing him in the right direction. But then, as he is still gabbling and quasi-sobbing, I recall a conversation that my mother had with him shortly after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. She said: “I asked him, ‘Greg, do you believe that when I die I will go to Hell because I haven't been born again?' And he got upset and looked around and sighed and knitted his brow, and then he said, ‘Yes, Mary, I'm afraid that that is what God has decreed. You will go to Hell.'” When she told me that story, I said, “What the
fuck
kind of religion obliges its followers to tell someone with a terminal diagnosis, a very fine and moral person, that they are going to Hell?” My mother said, “That
she is
going to Hell.' ‘Someone' is singular.”

 

“You want to buy this book, Dan?” my boss, Ann Godoff, says, referring to the first work I'm trying to acquire at Random House, a novella and shorts stories called
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline,
by George Saunders (just now lionized by the
New York Times Magazine
as I write this). I had edited Saunders at
The New Yorker.
(He was discovered in the slush pile by my assistant, David McCormick.)

“Yes.”

“Well, do a P-and-L for it and we'll see.”

“What's a P-and-L?”

“Profit-and-loss statement.”

“____”

“You don't know how?”

“No. Sorry.”

“I'll walk you through it. What's the advance?”

My only knowledge came from what I had been paid for my books, so I thought surely I should offer more. “Fifty thousand dollars?”

“For a book of
stories?
A lot of them have already been published. But OK, let's stick with that and see what happens. What's the payout?”

“Payout?”

“Start with how much of the advance the author will get on signing the contract.”

“Thirty thousand dollars?”

“Twenty-five—half on signing.”

“OK, twenty-five.”

“On D-and-A?”

“D-and-A?”

“Delivery and acceptance.”

“Well, twenty-five I guess.”

“No—you have to have an on-pub payment.”

“On-publication?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty for D-and-A? And five on-pub?”

“Nothing for paperback on-pub?”

“Oh. Ten for D-and-A, ten for on-pub, and five for the paperback?”

“Nah—it's OK. You don't really need a paperback payment. But with bigger advances you do. I just wanted to mention it.”

“Oh. OK. Fifteen and ten, then.”

“OK. Initial print?”

“Initial print?”

“How many hardcovers are we going to print at the start?”

“Twenty thousand?”

“Too much. Ten.”

“OK, ten.”

“Second printing?”

“Five?”

“Good! Paperback printing, assuming we'll do it in paperback, which is open to question.”

“Fifteen thousand?” A shot in the dusk if not entirely in the dark.

“Probably more like ten. Returns?”

“Returns?”

“How many unsold hardcovers will booksellers send back?”

“Five hundred? A thousand?”

“Nah. Usually figure one-third—in this case, five thousand.”

“Whoa!”

“It's a shitty business, Dan.”

“OK, five thousand returns.”

“OK. Trim?”

“Trim?”

“How big is this book going to be?” She takes three books from the shelf in her office and shows me the three choices.

“The small one,” I say.

“Right, an A trim. And the PPB?”

“PPB?”

“Plant, printing, and binding—how much it costs to manufacture each book.”

“I have no idea.”

“With this book—no photographs, short book, no colored or printed endpapers, nothing fancy—figure a dollar a book.”

“A dollar a book!” I say.

“OK, what's the price?”

“The price?”

“What will a retail book buyer pay for this book?”

“Twenty-one ninety-five?” I say, using my own most recent book as a guide.

“Good. For now, anyway. The sales reps may want to price it under twenty dollars, though. So how much will we earn against this advance?”

“____”

“Here's an easy way to approximate it. We make about three dollars for each hardcover sale, one dollar for each paperback. The agent probably won't let us have world rights, and there might not be any foreign publishers interested in this book anyway, so we can't include that in any estimation of revenues.”

“So if we sell ten thousand hardcovers, that's thirty thousand dollars.”

“Right.”

“And say ten thousand paperbacks. That's forty thousand dollars.”

“Right—so the P-and-L probably won't work. It has to show a profit in the bottom line. So we have to adjust the figures. Remember, you can't change the returns percentage.”

“Increase the first printing to fifteen thousand and the second printing to seven thousand five hundred?”

“That ought to do it. Isn't this scientific?”

Considering that I was Harry's hire, Ann was being, and continues to be, remarkably generous to me in her tutelage.

 

Now I have been Senior Literary Editor at Random House for six months. I remain in many ways ignorant of the realities of book publishing, even though I've had two books of short stories of my own published, one of them,
The Old Left,
by one of Random House's sister divisions, Alfred A. Knopf. But it begins to dawn on me that if a company publishes a hundred original hardcover books a year, it publishes about two
per week,
on average. And given the limitations on budgets, personnel, and time, many of those books will receive a kind of “basic” publication. Every list—spring, summer, and fall—has its lead titles. Then there are three or four hopefuls trailing along just behind the books that the publisher is investing most heavily in. Then comes a field of also-rans, hoping for the surge of energy provided by an ecstatic front-page review in the
New York Times Book Review
or by being selected for Oprah's Book Club. Approximately four out of every five books published lose money. Or five out of six, or six out of seven. Estimates vary, depending on how gloomy the CFO is the day you ask him and what kinds of shell games are being played in Accounting.

Sometimes—often—a non-lead-title book's success emerges from pure randomness. I am told that it's always a good idea—and a tradition—to take a book to lunch with agents, writers, people in the media. So when I end up having lunch with a
Today
show producer, Terry Schaefer, I mechanically give her a copy of a first novel I've edited that Random House is about to publish,
Amy and Isabelle,
by Elizabeth Strout, about a high-school girl in Maine who has a sexual relationship with one of her teachers.

The producer actually reads it. She loves it. She gives it to someone else who works at the show. Strout is invited on for an interview. I watch the segment, and at the end the book's lovely jacket fills the screen for three or four seconds—very important, I'm told, though even in my ignorance I figured as much—and the book “works.”

Most of my colleagues have told me that that jacket image isn't very good. After the book's success, editors and sales reps and publicity people start asking for the “
Amy and Isabelle
look” for novels with small-town settings and similar themes.

I sometimes think that many books at all houses are more nearly privished than published.

 

Fifty-five

 

As I go through my mother's and father's belongings in the house in Nyack, in the bottom drawer of an old secretary at which my father used to sit and pay the bills and curse, I find two pristine copies of
The
New Yorker
of August 31, 1946
—
the issue in which John Hersey's “Hiroshima” was published in its entirety. They are wrapped in what looks like shelf paper, a ribbon tied around them, with a note in my mother's small, tidy hand:
Save.
I'm sure she saved them simply because the writing was so good and so new, and the publication was so famous, and because, surprisingly, she had a sliver of the collector's set of mind.

Viz.:
In the attic of the house, I find a brown box made of some kind of old-fashioned plastic, about two feet long, a foot wide, and eight or nine inches deep. It has a lid and a kind of belt that goes around it and is fastened on the top. I recognize it as the box in which I sent laundry home from college. My mother would wash my dirty clothes and fold them and send them back to me. “Believe it or not,” I say to myself, as shame comes over me. I open the box. There, in a pretty large plastic food container, are the baseball cards I collected in the Forties and Fifties, often bought with stolen change. About two hundred of them. They are in excellent shape. A Mickey Mantle rookie card. Don Newcombe, Allie Reynolds, Gil Hodges, Jim Piersall, Warren Spahn.

When my mother was ill, I didn't visit her often enough. What would have been often enough? I'm not sure, but it would have been more often. Once, when she was in a drugged sleep on the couch where, home from college, I used to watch
Soupy Sales,
I was so impatient for the next nurse to arrive that I went out and stood at the bottom of the driveway and paced back and forth, muttering, like a New Yorker. I had to get back to the city for work, I had to get back for the kids, I had to get back so that I wouldn't be here. I returned to the house to find my mother awake, her eyes filled with fear. “Oh,” she said, “you're still here.” She relaxed a little. “I'm still here,” she said.