The Book of Joe

while I usually relish the way he can be instantly tr ansformed into a shameless syco phant where I’m concerned, today I’m not in the mood.
    “Please tell him it’s me.”
    “Of course,” Stuart says, and I can tell he’s miffed. “Everything okay?”
    “Peachy.”
    The hold music is “Band on the Run,” and Paul McCartney’s voice comes pouring through my speakerphone with surprising clarity, clashing with the Springsteen on my stereo.
    I turn off the Springsteen at the same instant that Owen’s scratchy voice replaces McCartney’s, and thus we avoid a historical duet. “Hey, Joe.” He sounds hoarse and groggy, which is at least partially my fault, since I kept him on the phone until close to five this morning.
    “Sorry about last night. I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything,” I say, although with Owen you’re almost always interrupting something. The man keeps his social life hopping with a frenetic, almost desperate intensity. It’s as if he’s worried that if he took one night off, the wild circus of his life would pull up stakes and leave town without him.
    “I’d pretty much gotten my money’s worth from Sasha by then,” he says with a low snicker.
    “Sasha?”
    “A Romanian nurse, if I understood her credentials properly.”
    “I see.”
    Owen’s brazen patronage of high-end call girls is legendary in the publishing industry. He is currently working his way through the “sensual role play” ads in the back of New York magazine, gleefully reporting to me after every encounter.
    “You heading up to the Falls now?” he asks. “The Falls” is a term used only by the locals, and it’s just like Owen to insinuate himself like that.
    “As we speak.”
    “Well, I hope your dad’s doing better.”
    “Thanks,” I say, feeling suddenly guilty, as if I might be perpetrating a fraud of some kind by accepting sympathetic wishes on behalf of my father. “Did you get the pages?”
    “They were waiting for me this morning,” he says after the slightest pause. Owen is not a man typically given to pauses.
    “Have you read them?”
    “Some.”
    Given the success we enjoyed with Bush Falls, Owen has been eagerly awaiting my new manuscript, which I’ve been promising him for the last year. I actually finished it about six months ago but have withheld that information, since I’m not particularly thrilled with the finished product. The conventional wisdom about fiction, according to Owen, is that first novels are generally highly autobiographical works, and mine certainly does nothing to contradict that notion. It’s the sophomore effort that confirms a writer’s ability and relevance in the literary marketplace, because that’s theoretically the work wherein he must truly harness his imagination and voice to create something from nothing. The publishing world is awash in blood from the slit wrists of all the one-trick ponies.
    “You hate it,” I say.
    “No.” I hear the unmistakable grind and click of his cigarette lighter. “There are actually some wonderful sections.”
    “There’s a big ‘but’ hanging over that sentence.”
    Owen sighs. “I never had you pegged as a magical realist.”
    “I do it pretty sparingly,” I object. “It’s an atmospheric conceit.”
    “It’s a pretentious distraction,” Owen says dismissively.
    “Look at me, pushing the literary envelope! It doesn’t work.
    Magical realism is not a movement or a technique. It’s a novelty act, and the novelty’s long gone. Readers will tolerate it from Marquez and Calvino because the New York Times tells them to. You’re a Jew from Manhattan and no one’s going to cut you that slack. It’s bullshit.”
    “Why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
    “I think you’re too good a writer to waste your time with experimental postmodernism.”
    I test the waters of his remark for patronizing levels and decide that he’s being sincere. “Well, other than that, how are you finding the narrative?” Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the show?
    “Honestly, Joe, I think the subject matter is beneath you.”
    It’s shocking, really, how with one sentence he is able put into words what I’ve spent six months trying to pin down to no avail. The novel - working title: It Starts Here - is about a kid who drops out of college to follow a Grateful Dead–like band around the country for a few months with a woman he’s only just met. He’s running away from his privileged