Topics and Questions For Discussion

When the author’s agent initially asked the author who he thought the readers of his proposed book would be and he defensively replied, “Everyone,” do you think the author should have immediately realized that there is a thin line between everyone and no one?

Did the agent’s pitch that the proposed book “brilliantly bridges genres” give the author license that caused him to, in the later words of his agent, “miss the boat” completely, by failing to inhabit any genre whatsoever?

Did the negligible advance justify the author’s contention that he could “write what I liked,” without regard to the book’s marketability, plausibility, or legibility?

Why do you think the agent stopped returning the author’s phone calls?

Do you think the editor’s decision to refrain from intervening in the text was an instance of the dereliction of standards in the publishing industry, or was it an indication of lingering prudence and respect for the practice of literature within what the author would invariably refer to as the “military-industrial publishing complex”?

Who or what do you think is most to blame for the failure of this book: the author, his agent, his publisher, the reading public, or the collapse of literacy in society as such?

Was the author’s insistence that the plot was basically “pages from my diary” sufficient justification for the grossly sentimental predicaments in which the main character finds himself—predicaments that, as one critic for a prestigious newspaper suggested, “seem to define the meeting place between self-flagellation and contempt for the reader”?

Do you think that the rapid accumulation of zero-star reviews on Amazon in the aftermath of that review repudiates the old saw that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity”?

At what point in this book did you stop reading? Why? Was it the overwrought language, or the underdeveloped plot? Was it the absence of sympathetic characters or the lack of an overarching thesis that most irritated you as a reader?

Do you think the author will ever recover from this latest confirmation of his complete irrelevance to the “cultural conversation”? At this point in his “career,” what would recovery even mean?

Did the author’s wife know that the book was doomed from the start? If so, why did she nurture in the author the crazed delusion that it would “find its audience”? Is she now, in some sense, more responsible for its failure than the author is, as the author has argued in some imaginary interviews he has conducted with himself?

Was it appropriate for the author’s wife to recoil physically when the author referred to the breakfast nook that he had made uninhabitable with his proliferating papers, filthy coffee receptacles, and discarded socks as “his study”?

What do you think will happen when the author bumps into the smug critic of his book at a party for another author’s book? Will the author’s dousing the critic in Merlot be viewed as a grand gesture in the tradition of Mailer and Hemingway, or will it be, as the author’s wife will suggest on the sidewalk after they have been ejected from the party, another symptom of the chronic small-mindedness that undermined his work in the first place?

Should the author’s wife have taken a cab home alone, or given her husband “another chance”?

Do you think it is fair for the author’s wife’s lawyer to demand half the author’s paltry advance as part of her proposed divorce settlement, even though she knew full well that the advance had immediately been spent on regrouting the tiles in the bathroom?

Do you think the author’s new life in a “shit hole in Caracas” will endow his work with the atmosphere of authenticity he endlessly bitched about being lacking in brownstone Brooklyn?