My First Reader's Report

When I took the Radcliffe Publishing Course a number of years ago, one of our assignments was to read a manuscript and write a Reader’s Report, just as Editorial Assistants do.  We had to submit the report before the course began.  Unfortunately, I did not like the book (although  I was intrigued that it was set in Peekskill, NY where my mother had lived briefly as a child) and was baffled by the denouement. There was a pivotal scene near the end so I shrugged and wrote something like, “This story could only end in unequivocal death . . .”

Weeks later, we were very excited to have a real editor come from New York to talk to us about the manuscript.  She mingled with us at lunch and seemed very elegant and knowledgeable.   Later we sat outside, clustered around her attentively, and she read the first sentence aloud with great pleasure:

On the day he lost his right foot, Walter Van Brunt had been haunted, however haphazardly, by ghosts of the past.

She waited for us to tell us how brilliant it was but, having read and analyzed it, we were sure she had provided a manuscript from the slush pile to trick us and the intervening weeks had not convinced us otherwise.   I think my classmates piled on the criticism while this pleasant woman grew more and more annoyed with us.   Finally, Lindy Hess, the beloved director of the program turned to me, perhaps hoping I would smooth the waters.  “What did you think?” she asked.   Nervously, I said, “Well, the ending was abrupt but I felt that the violent death was . . . inevitable.”

The editor stared at me, both annoyed and puzzled, and said there was no violent death at the end of the book.  Someone else said, "Yes, there was!"  Then she lost it and told us this book was written by a very talented author and we were all lacking in good taste.  We hung our heads.  It turned out her assistant had sent us an incomplete manuscript: there was a whole missing section/conclusion in which the character in question made a speedy recovery!

Several months later, the book got a front page New York Times Book Review!   So she was right and that was an early sign that literary fiction was not my thing.  The editor later wrote several books herself which all sounded like more fun than World’s End. 

What made me start thinking about Boyle?  He is admired but not really well known; however, I happened to see on Twitter that Nancy Pearl features him in her new book.  I had not thought of him for many years but have no doubt he is quite a personality and full of good stories.  It amuses me that following her Boston Public Library talk yesterday, Nancy Pearl and I were discussing Mary Stolz (Nancy reminded me that Stolz had two Newbery honor books) and today she’s moved on to Boyle.   Nancy Pearl's taste is much broader than mine, and that long ago editor would be pleased.

 

The Radcliffe Publishing Course was a lot of fun.  It was a five or six-week summer program for recent college graduates interested in book or magazine publishing.  We all lived together in a dorm in Cambridge, a few doors down from mystery writer Robert Parker (Lindy invited him for sherry hour but he never came).  At the end of the summer, many of us moved to New York for poorly paid publishing jobs.   Sadly, Radcliffe sold the Publishing Course to Columbia in 2000.