Jack said nothing.
Tiff continued: “The books Blair anoints sell hundreds of thousands of copies. Without exception, they hit the bestseller lists, or hit them anew in cases like yours where the book sold well to begin with.”
Jack didn’t say anything. All right, they were back on track. He was overcome. That happened. Not that Blair thought she was all that and a bag of chips, just that what Tiff had said was true: Blair’s books sold a lot of copies. A life-changing amount of copies, for most authors.
Jack pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Books sheanoints? Is she Jesus?”
Blair blinked rapidly, feeling a bit—speaking of Jesus—like she had at church the day twenty-five years ago when Pastor Glen caught her making out with Robbie St. James in the choir room and called her a harlot.
No. Whatever happened, Blair wasn’t about to sit here and be patronized.
“You know,” Lucia said with a suspicious amount of enthusiasm that also somehow seemed tinged with fear, “books shechooses.”
Blair sat forward in her square, looked right at Jack’s square, and said, in a bitchy-on-purpose tone, “I’ve got another meeting in fifteen, so can we move this along?”
“Why isn’t my agent on this call?” Jack said, suddenly sitting up straighter, so straight his hair no longer fell in his face.
“I don’t know.” Lucia squinted at her screen. “I sent him an invite, but he hasn’t joined.”
“One of the nice things about literary agents,” Jack said, “is they can say no to things you don’t want to do. But since he’s not here, I suppose I’ll have to do it myself.” He looked into his camera, and it felt like he was looking directly into Blair’s soul, like he could see whatever it was that Pastor Glen, and every critic who’d ever called her a lightweight, had seen. “Thanks for thinking of me for your TV thing, but I’m going to take a pass.”
Part 1
California Dreaming
Chapter 1
Building Your Brand
“Finite Scroll,” The Talk of the Town
The New Yorker, September 9, 2024
Jack Branksome wants to know when the pound sign became a hashtag. For him, the answer is right now. I start our lunch unsure if his claim—that he truly didn’t know what a hashtag was before this moment—is genuine.
“Ash’s daughter frequently says things like ‘Hashtag who cares.’ I put it down to teen lingo I wouldn’t presume to try to understand,” he says as he tucks into a bowl of mussels in garlic white wine broth at a cozy Minneapolis bistro he insists I not name as a condition of our interview. “I don’t want it to be overrun. I want to be able to come back here.”
Ash is Ashwin Bajwa, fellow novelist, fellow tech-avoidant literary savant—both men were longlisted for the National Book Award last year—who is in town leading a weeklong fiction master class residency at the University of Minnesota, and the pair is having a reunion. Unlike the relentlessly single Branksome, who declares romantic entanglements “distractions that weaken theconstitution,” Bajwa is married and in possession of a hashtag-using, Instagram-scrolling teenage daughter.
When I try to explain that a hashtag organizes content online, Branksome’s expression goes from confused to contemptuous.
“A person can choose to have a rich interior life. If a person makes such a choice, a person might find himself called to protect that choice.”
“I think what he’s saying,” the genial Bajwa interjects, “is that the infinite scroll afforded by social media is the enemy of creativity.”
“No, what I’m saying,” Branksome says, “is that authenticity, which I believe we are called toward as humans, sometimes comes at a cost.”
When I tell Branksome I might have an inkling of how Blair Kellermoon felt when he rebuffed her invitation to feature his debut novel in her Books with Blair reading club, he takes his time prying a mussel from its shell, chews slowly, and only when satisfied that mastication is complete says, “Ms. Kellermoon has a lot of little projects on the go. I’m sure she’s forgotten all about me.”
Jack Branksome looked up from his computer screen at the clock on the wall in his office. The minute hand had not moved since he’d last checked on it. The little red second hand—this was a vintage analog clock of the sort that used to hang in the classrooms of Jack’s elementary school—had not even made a full revolution.
It was too early to go down for the mail.
As the second hand approached twelve, he stared at the minute hand, sensing more than hearing the click when the long black bladethat had been taunting him all day made its tiny stutter forward. Twelve fifty-five.
“It’s too early to go down for the mail,” he said into the room that was empty except for a desk, an overpriced ergonomic chair that was not doing what it was supposed to do, and the clock of doom, as if saying the words aloud would make them more true than when they had been only a thought in his head.
He turned back to the screen. Checked the word count in the lower left corner of his document. It had not moved. Just like the minute hand of a minute ago.
