My novel about love, betrayal and chess in New Orleans: The Pride and the Sorrow

Sunday, March 21, 2010

The Case of Amy Bishop: Violence that Art Didn't See Coming

This is Kate Webster, female killer from my novel The Murderess and the Hangman. For more about the novel, please see my homepage here.

The following article from The New York Times deals with the role of female killers and art, particularly in light of the recent shootings by Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama.

--

When Ezra Pound declared in 1934 that “artists are the antennae of the race,” and Marshall McLuhan 30 years later called them people “of integral awareness,” both were using modern terms to update the ancient belief that works of the imagination might actually require a talent not only for invention but for attunement — for picking up signals already in the air. This is why the most forceful narratives and dramas seem less made up than distilled. They clarify events and experiences taken directly from the actual world.

Thus, the Jazz Age is better known through the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, who captured its energies in real time, than through any number of retrospective studies. And the alienated teenager, that fixture of modern American life, didn’t fully exist until J. D. Salinger, with his faultless ear and attentive eye, coaxed him into being.

But every now and then, it seems, a gap is exposed. Events occur; art offers no guidance. The powers of imagination and attunement falter. Artists suffer a collective loss of awareness. “The culture” emits signals, but they are picked up only fitfully or are missed altogether.

Consider the case of Amy Bishop, the neuroscientist arrested for shooting six colleagues, killing three, at a department meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Rampages of this sort have become familiar. But with rare exceptions they have been the preserve of men: lonely, alienated psycho killers with arsenals of high-powered weapons and feverishly composed manifestos.

With remarkable suddenness Dr. Bishop has disrupted the pattern. When she reportedly discharged her 9-millimeter handgun, she also punctured longstanding assumptions, or illusions, about women and violence — particularly as a fuller picture of her past begins to emerge, much of it indicating a possible record of previous violent episodes, including the shooting death of her brother in 1986, and her suspected role in assembling a pipe bomb mailed to a faculty member at the Harvard Medical School in 1994, when Dr. Bishop was studying there.

It is not news that so-called senseless acts often unfold along the coordinates of an inner logic. This is what makes criminal violence so attractive a topic for artists and thinkers. The Western literary tradition, from Shakespeare to Dostoevsky, teems with pathologically violent men. Norman Mailer and Truman Capote wrote nonfiction masterpieces about them. They dominate the novels of Don DeLillo and Robert Stone, not to mention films by Sam Peckinpah, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese.

But the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored. Women who kill are “relegated to an ‘exceptional case’ status that rests upon some exceptional, or untoward killing circumstance: the battered wife who kills her abusive husband; the postpartum psychotic mother who kills her newborn infant,” Candice Skrapec, a professor of criminology, noted in “The Female Serial Killer,” an essay included in the anthology “Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation” (1994).

Ms. Skrapec was writing at a time when Hollywood seemed preoccupied with women who commit crimes — in productions like “The Burning Bed,” the 1984 television film in which a battered wife finally sets her sleeping husband aflame, and “Thelma & Louise” (1991), in which a pair of women go on a outlaw spree after one of them is threatened with rape.

Both are essentially exculpatory parables of empowerment, anchored in feminist ideology. Their heroines originate as victims, pushed to criminal excesses by injustices done to them. The true aggressors are the men who mistreat and objectify them. So too with “Monster” (2003), in which Charlize Theron, in a virtuosic instance of empathy (and cosmetic makeover) re-enacted the story of Aileen Wuornos, a real-life prostitute who, after years of sexual abuse, began murdering her clients.

A decade or two ago this all made sense. The underworld of domestic abuse and sexual violence was coming freshly to light. And social arrangements were undergoing abrupt revision. The woman who achieved hard-won success in the workplace might well find herself, like the lonely stalker played by Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction” (1987), tormented by the perfect-seeming family of the married man with whom she enjoys a weekend fling.

Much has changed since then, but the topic of women and violence — especially as represented by women — remains more or less in a time warp, bound by the themes of sexual and domestic trauma, just as male depictions of female violence are locked in the noir demimonde of fantasy, the slinky femmes fatales once played by Barbara Stanwyck and Lana Turner more or less duplicated by Kathleen Turner and Sharon Stone.

Put it another way. It is not hard to imagine Mr. DeLillo or Mr. Scorsese mapping the interior circuitry of Timothy McVeigh; Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer; or Bruce E. Ivins, the Army biodefense expert who, the F.B.I. concluded last week, committed anthrax terror in the aftermath of 9/11 — the paranoia, the lethal mix of fantasy and ruthless plotting. But what artist might do justice to Dr. Bishop and her complex story, as its details have so far been reported: the privileged upbringing; her stable marriage to a uxorious husband, who was also her collaborator on scientific inventions; their four children, some of whose homework Dr. Bishop is monitoring from her jail cell? And what of the accounts given by associates and neighbors of her personal qualities — assertive, bristling with sharp opinions, vocal on the subject of her brilliance, harboring fierce resentments?

The uncomfortable fact is that for all her singularity, Dr. Bishop also provides an index to the evolved status of women in 21st-century America. The number of female neurobiologists may still be small, but girls often outdo boys in the classroom, including in the sciences. (Mattel recently announced a new addition, Computer Engineer Barbie, to its line of popular dolls.) A Harvard Ph.D. remains a rare credential for women (as well as for men), but women now make up the majority of undergraduates at many prestigious colleges. And the tenure struggle said to have lighted Dr. Bishop’s short fuse reflects the anxieties of many other women who now outnumber men in the work force and have become, in thousands of cases, their family’s principal or only breadwinner.

These conditions have been developing for some years now. But the most advanced narratives of female violence seem uninterested in them. There is, for example, Marina Abramovic, a pioneer of performance art who will be honored in a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in March, with 35 artists re-enacting five of her works. Ms. Abramovic, born in what was then Belgrade, Yugoslavia, first became a force in 1973 at the Edinburgh Festival, where she furiously stabbed a knife between her splayed fingers, bloodying 10 blades and tape recording the noises she made as she wounded herself. In 2002 Ms. Abramovic was still at it, exhibiting herself for 12 days in a downtown Manhattan installation, wordlessly moving among three raised platforms connected to the floor by ladders whose rungs were fashioned from large knives, their gleaming blades turned up.

There is also Karen Finley, whose avant-garde explorations of sexual violence put her in the middle of the federal arts-financing wars two decades ago. She is back onstage in “The Jackie Look.” Outfitted in bouffant and pearls, in imitation of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ms. Finley stands at a lectern and delivers a monologue on the female body — at one point shedding copious tears — and on the indignities ritually inflicted on public women (Michelle Obama no less than Mrs. Onassis).

All this is stimulating in its way, but it feels curiously outmoded. Although Ms. Abramovic and Ms. Finley are both charismatic presences, their antennae seem to have rusted. They persist in registering the dimmed signals of a bygone time.

For this reason, perhaps, the most useful glosses on Dr. Bishop may come from the world of popular, even pulpish, art — for instance, crowd-pleasing movies like “Black Widow,” “Blue Steel,” “The Silence of the Lambs,” Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” or even “Lost,” the ABC series. In all of them the hypothetical notion of empowerment gives way to the exercise of literal power. So too in crime novels written by women who specialize in the disordered or deranged mind. Genre art has its own limitations. But its strength is that it seeks to reanimate archetypes and is indifferent to ideological fashion.

“Everything is about power,” Patricia Cornwell, whose best-selling Scarpetta series is thick with forensic detail, maintained in an e-mail message, when asked what she made of the Bishop case. “The more women appropriate power, the more their behavior will mimic that of other powerful people.” Also: “Firearms are the great equalizer. You don’t have to be 6 foot 2 and weigh 200 pounds to kill a room full of people.”

Chelsea Cain, the author of a crime series that reverses the formula of “The Silence of the Lambs,” pitting a male detective against a female serial killer, suggested that Dr. Bishop is the latest version of an ancient figure, “the mother lioness that kills to protect herself and her family against perceived threats.”

In fact two middle-aged classics of genre literature eerily prefigure aspects of the Bishop case. In William March’s 1954 novel “The Bad Seed,” later adapted for both stage and film, an 8-year-old girl viciously murders a classmate but is protected by her mother, only to kill again. This parallels the allegations in Dr. Bishop’s case, at least according to the resurfaced police report on the death of her brother nearly a quarter-century ago.

No genre writer had sharper antennae than Shirley Jackson, whose gothic classic, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” first published in 1962, was reissued last fall. Its narrator is an 18-year-old multiple murderess who lives with her devoted sister and fantasizes about killing again. She is “socially maladroit, highly self-conscious, and disdainful of others,” Joyce Carol Oates wrote in a penetrating essay recently in The New York Review of Books. “She is ‘special.’ ” Words that ring ominously in the context of Dr. Bishop.

Ms. Oates, of course, has examined violence as thoroughly as any living American writer. When I asked her what she made of the case, she drew an implicit comparison between Dr. Bishop and Shirley Jackson’s narrator: “She is a sociopath and has been enabled through her life by individuals around her who shielded her from punishment.”

Ms. Oates’s feminist credentials are in good order. But her assessment comes from beyond the realm of predigested doctrine. It echoes the blunt assertion made by Ms. Cornwell: “People kill because they can. Women can be just as violent as men.”

--

Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times, February 24, 2010


Saturday, March 20, 2010

Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer"

Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer
A Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s ... Pierce Brosnan in Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer
--
Roman Polanski's deft take on Robert Harris's political thriller is the director's most purely enjoyable film for years.
Roman Polanski's latest movie happens to be about a public figure, once hugely admired, now disgraced, fearing extradition and prosecution and confined to virtual house arrest in a vacation spot for rich people.
  1. The Ghost Writer
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Countries: France, UK
  4. Directors: Roman Polanski
  5. Cast: Ewan McGregor, Kim Cattrall, Olivia Williams, Pierce Brosnan
Did the director, when he shot this film, get a chill presentiment of how personal it was all going to look? Maybe. But it didn't stop him making a gripping conspiracy thriller and scabrous political satire, a Manchurian Candidate for the 2010s, as addictive and outrageous as the Robert Harris bestseller on which it's based. Polanski keeps the narrative engine ticking over with a downbeat but compelling throb. This is his most purely enjoyable picture for years, a Hitchcockian nightmare with a persistent, stomach-turning sense of disquiet, brought off with confidence and dash.
His leads are Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, actors from whom Polanski gets the best by keeping them under control. McGregor is the journo, never named: cynical, boozy and miserable in the classical manner. He makes a living ghostwriting the autobiographies of raddled showbiz veterans. In the current publishing scene, his business is booming, but even he is astonished to be offered the job of ghostwriting the memoirs of the former British prime minister Adam Lang, now living with his formidable wife Ruth (Olivia Williams) in his American publisher's palatial beachfront home. A possible war-crime prosecution for assisting the rendition of terror suspects means Lang may never be able to leave American soil. And his last ghostwriter has been found drowned – an awful fate that resonates, sickeningly, with TV images of waterboarding. Could it be that the dead man discovered something dangerous about the ex-PM and his super-powerful, super-rich American friends?
Resemblances to Tony and Cherie Blair are very far from coincidental: both Harris and Polanski have clearly calculated that a libel lawsuit would make for an uproarious day in court, precisely the sort of legal appearance that Mr Blair does not care to make, in fact or fiction. This consideration adds a kind of meta-pleasure to the narrative.


Brosnan's Lang is an alpha-ego, substantially accustomed to American mega-celebrity status, smugly nurturing his Blairish sense of entitlement and resentment, yet with a weird blankness and smileyness that resurfaces continually: a Brit tendency to ingratiation that he can never quite conquer. As with Harris's novel, part of the enjoyment is gleefully imagining Tony and Cherie, in the parts of Adam and Ruth, pacing around like characters in some reality TV show from hell. Polanski has a terrific scene in which McGregor drives the dead man's car and the sat-nav "remembers" his previous journey and guides him, ghost-like, to a vital clue. The film incidentally gives us the ghost of the late Robin Cook, fictionalised as ex-foreign secretary "Richard Rycart".
The Ghost Writer may not be a masterpiece, but in its lowering gloom (it rains almost continually) the film has some of the malign atmosphere of Polanski's glory days. And there's a wonderful final image of the windblown London street – faintly hyperreal in the manner of Hitchcock's Frenzy – where something horrible has happened behind the camera. This very involving movie shows Polanski is far from finished as a film-maker.
--
Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 12 February 2010

2010 Creative Writing MFA Rankings: The Top Fifty

If this link ever stops working, below is a list of the top 50 MFA programs for Creative Writing in the US (Seth Abramson's list as published in Poets & Writers magazine).

Rank
School
Votes
(of 508)

Poetry
Rank
Fiction
Rank
Nonfiction
Rank
Total
Funding
Rank
Annual
Funding
Rank



1 University of Iowa in Iowa City 253 1 1 1 21 22

2 University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 169 3 2 * 16 4

3 University of Virginia, Charlottesville 144 2 4 * 21 21

4 University of Massachusetts, Amherst 132 4 5 * 40 41

4 University of Texas, Austin 132 5 6 * 1 1

6 University of Wisconsin, Madison 129 6 11 * 21 22

7
Brown University in Providence 127 8 3 * 19 20

8 New York University in New York City 125 7 7 * + +

9 Cornell University in Ithaca, New York 110 9 7 * 10 2

10 University of Oregon, Eugene 104 15 12 * 27 29

11 Syracuse University in New York 97 20 10 * 5 7

12 Indiana University, Bloomington 93 13 14 * 6 8

13 University of California, Irvine 91 26 9 * 26 28

14 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis 85 17 14 8 29 27

15 Brooklyn College, CUNY 81 39 13 * * *

16
University of Montana, Missoula 78 17 17 17 47 46

17
Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore 77 11 16 * 30 30

18
Vanderbilt University in Nashville 76 13 18 23 25 26

19
University of North Carolina, Greensboro 75 10 19 * 33 31

20
Washington University, St. Louis 70 15 24 * 12 3

21
University of Florida, Gainesville 67 22 21 * 13 16

22
Columbia University in New York City 66 38 19 10 * *

23
University of Notre Dame in Indiana 62 34 22 12 + +

24
Hollins University in Roanoke, Virginia 56 32 26 4 + +

24
University of North Carolina, Wilmington 56 22 25 5 41 42

26
Arizona State University, Tempe 55 19 28 35 15 18

26
Hunter College, CUNY 55 45 22 6 * *

26
University of Houston in Texas 55 11 34 18 34 34

29
Colorado State University, Fort Collins 53 20 34 * 42 43

29
The New School in New York City 53 47 27 3 * *

31
Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York 52 27 33 8 * *

31
University of Washington, Seattle 52 27 28 * * *

33
University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa 51 25 31 29 2 18

34
University of Arizona, Tucson 49 32 28 2 + +

35
Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana 45 22 40 * 9 10

36
University of Arkansas, Fayetteville 41 31 45 * 17 24

37
George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia 40 39 34 12 + +

38
Boston University in Massachusetts 39 39 38 * + +

39
University of Nevada, Las Vegas 38 48 31 * 35 35

40
Ohio State University, Columbus 35 27 + 35 7 9

41
University of Maryland, College Park 34 37 44 * * *

42
Florida State University, Tallahassee 33 39 + * 38 38

42
Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge 33 * 46 * 3 5

42
Rutgers University, Newark in New Jersey 33 * 37 12 *
*

42
University of New Hampshire, Durham 33 39 40 7 * *

46
Pennsylvania State University, University Park 32 45 46 11 28 14

47
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale 31 27 48 * 14 17

47
Texas State University, San Marcos 31 * 40 * + +

49
University of Mississippi, Oxford 31 + 40 * 18 25

50
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 30 34 + * 4 6

50
Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond 30 + 38 * 31 32

50
Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech) in Blacksburg 30 34 + * 8 10

Note: An honorable mention goes to Bowling Green State University, a two-year program in Ohio that ranks among the top fifty programs in selectivity (#47), total funding (#46), annual funding (#45), and poetry (#48), and received pluses in overall votes and fiction. For a ranking of the additional eighty-eight full-residency MFA programs, click here.


Saturday, March 13, 2010

European cinemas join threat to boycott Alice in Wonderland

Alice in Wonderland

Contemplating a dark hole ... Mia Wasikowska in Alice in Wonderland. Photograph: Allstar/DISNEY/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

Disney's plans for an earlier-than-usual DVD release prompt film exhibitors to consider pulling all Disney films.

Opposition to Disney's plans for an earlier-than-usual DVD release of Alice in Wonderland - after it has appeared in cinemas - has spread to mainland Europe, according to Variety.

  1. Alice in Wonderland
  2. Production year: 2010
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): PG
  5. Runtime: 108 mins
  6. Directors: Tim Burton
  7. Cast: Alan Rickman, Anne Hathaway, Barbara Windsor, Christopher Lee, Crispin Glover, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny Depp, Matt Lucas, Mia Wasikowska, Michael Sheen, Stephen Fry, Timothy Spall
  8. More on this film

As reported on this site last week, UK distributors are considering a boycott of Tim Burton's new 3D CGI fantasy over Disney's proposal to release the DVD within 90 days of its cinema release. Usually, there is at least a four-month window between a film's arrival in cinemas and its debut on home video.

Now Holland's four largest exhibitors are reportedly threatening not to show Alice In Wonderland unless Disney backs down. Together Minerva, Pathé, Wolff and Jogchems represent between 80% and 85% of all cinemas in the Netherlands.

Youry Bredewold, who represents both Pathé and Holland's National Board of Cinema Owners, said the distributor's decision was not one which had been taken lightly.

"We will lose money due to our decision," he told AFP. "We expected [Alice] to become one of the most popular movies of 2010. But we decided we need to send a message to the whole industry: If you don't accept our terms, we will never show your movies again."

Meanwhile, Variety says that UK distributors have been mollified by a visit from Disney top brass last week, though an LA Times report today suggests that Vue and Odeon, two of the UK's three major cinema chains, remain undecided over whether to show the film. Disney has reached a deal with a third major chain, Cineworld, according to the newspaper. Industry insiders are said to be split over whether European anger will spread to the US or blow over before Alice in Wonderland's release on 5 March. No American chain has yet threatened to boycott the film, although some have said they will pull it from screens once it hits the home video market. Some Italian firms are also said to be considering their options.

The UK release is particularly vital for Disney because the movie has such strong British roots, and would have been expected to make £40m here. Burton, who lives in London, shot Alice In Wonderland largely in Devon and Cornwall. Apart from Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter and Australian newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice, the film features a largely British supporting cast, including Helena Bonham Carter, Matt Lucas, Stephen Fry, Michael Sheen, Alan Rickman, Christopher Lee and Barbara Windsor.



Disney nevertheless feels that narrowing the release window is vital in the battle against home video piracy. It argues that most people see movies within two months of their theatrical release, but there is then another two-month gap before they can buy the film on DVD, which is exploited by pirates. However, distributors are concerned that they will lose business if the release window is allowed to narrow further, and are also said to be angry because they have recently spent millions of pounds upgrading thousands of screens to show 3D movies.

Bob Chapek, president of distribution for Walt Disney Studios, said on Friday that the company remained "committed to theatrical windows, with the need for exceptions to accommodate a shortened period on a case-by-case basis, such as with Disney's Alice in Wonderland.

"We feel that it's important for us to maintain a healthy business on the exhibition side and a healthy business on the home video side," he added. "We think this is in the best interest of theatre owners, because a healthy movie business is good for them and allows us to invest in high quality, innovative content."

--

Ben Child, The Guardian, 17 February 2010


Monday, March 08, 2010

Prime Suspect: The Ghost Writer

Pierce Brosnan and Ewan McGregor in Roman Polanski’s new thriller.

Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller—the best thing Polanski has done since the seventies, when he brought out the incomparable “Chinatown” and the very fine “Tess.” A few blogging goons have kneecapped the movie for not providing enough thrills, but that’s the wrong critical direction to go in. The director of “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” and “Macbeth” long ago put away his knives. “The Ghost Writer” offers not the blood and terror of Polanski’s early work but the steady pleasures of high intelligence and unmatchable craftsmanship—bristling, hyper-articulate dialogue (the stabs are verbal, and they hurt) and a stunning over-all design that has been color-coördinated to the point of aesthetic mania. Working with the British writer Robert Harris, whose 2007 novel, “The Ghost,” serves as the basis of the movie, Polanski fed the political material—troubling stuff about rendition and C.I.A. collaboration—into the mazy convolutions of a neo-Hitchcock story. He presents the entire movie from the restricted point of view of a likable young man, a hard-drinking, cash-poor writer (Ewan McGregor), who has been hired to finish the memoirs of Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan), a former Prime Minister clearly modelled on Blair. The writer, who is known in the credits as “the Ghost” (he is never named—the P.M. calls him “man”), is not the first to work at this job. The previous ghostwriter has been found dead on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard, near the house of Lang’s publisher, where the P.M. and his entourage have gathered to work on the book. The Ghost is in trouble from the beginning, and he knows it, but he needs money and self-respect, and he forges on.

The picture is set mostly in the United States, but Polanski, of course, can’t work here, so he used the drab German North Sea coast as a double for the Vineyard in winter. The publisher’s mansion has the island’s requisite gray shingles, yet it’s not some gracious Victorian affair. Instead, it’s a giant modernist shoebox, with generous interior spaces and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on dunes and a dark ocean. The interiors are all chic designer cement walls and flat or sharply angled surfaces; there’s not a curve anywhere, and hardly a cushion. This punitive luxury was created, as a set (by Albrecht Konrad), at Babelsberg studio, in Berlin, and the views through the windows are either projections or digital reconstructions. Looking through those portals, you appear to be seeing a movie of some sort, a tone poem in gray that refuses to reveal its mysteries. The skies are ashen, the rain never stops, and the writer, when he goes out on a bicycle for some air, gets blinded by the wet. For us, this mock-American landscape is a fascinating bad dream, half familiar, half strange. The cinematographer, Pawel Edelman, turns the constant downpour and gloom into a beautiful, slate-colored curtain—or perhaps I should say shroud. Polanski wants an atmosphere of daunting indefiniteness, a subdued but enveloping field of lies and secrecy, impenetrable to the Ghost, who is lost among power players far too clever for him. I don’t know when I’ve seen menace rendered with such delicate but persistent force.

The P.M.’s manuscript is also gray—maddeningly bland and opaque, a veil of debonair evasion. As the Ghost tries to bring it to life, allegations appear in the press that Lang, when he was P.M., illegally turned over captured terror suspects to the C.I.A. for rendition and torture; a former minister from Lang’s cabinet even insists that his old boss should be tried by the International Criminal Court, in The Hague. Suddenly, the house is besieged by antiwar protesters. Playing a powerful man in exile, repudiated and hated by his own party and by many of his countrymen, Pierce Brosnan gives the strongest performance of his rather lazy career. He doesn’t imitate Blair; he offers his own interpretation of a public man’s impersonally brisk and hardened charm—the smile is reflexive, dazzling, and savage. Lang tells stories about his youth with hearty indifference to their phoniness—even in retreat, he’s a calculating pol, playing the angles, manipulating his eager amanuensis. And, when Lang is criticized or challenged in any way, Brosnan’s charm dissolves into fury; he catches the defensive self-righteousness of power, a leader’s disbelief that anyone might be seeing through him. Brosnan is matched by the wonderful English actress Olivia Williams, as Ruth, Lang’s brilliant wife and longtime political adviser. Ruth has lost her husband’s love—and, more important, his ear—and is taking it hard. Slender and tense, with short dark hair, Williams pulls her legs up under her chin as she sits in the discomforting house. (Her Ruth is so angular and hard-edged that she actually seems to belong in this place, where it’s impossible to hide.) Williams’s gaze could sear the fat off a lamb shank, and her line delivery is withering, yet Ruth is badly wounded, and Williams makes her sympathetic—she’s one of the rare actresses who seem more intelligent and beautiful as they get angrier. Polanski observes the character quirks, the long-standing relations strained by the worsening disgrace of Lang’s situation—there’s something, we see, in the frayed connection of husband and wife that could be more significant than hurt feelings. Tom Wilkinson and Eli Wallach (as a very old, entirely sane hermit living on the beach) make strong appearances, too. The only flaw in the ensemble is Kim Cattrall, who, as Lang’s assistant and mistress, can’t stop smirking (Cattrall lets us know that something dirty is going on). The movie is organically structured—nothing is overstressed, but nothing is wasted, either. The banal manuscript, for instance, assumes an almost totemic power as it’s read, handled, edited, rewritten. It contains secrets finally discovered, decoded.



Life for the Ghost takes a dangerous turn when he finds evidence that Lang is lying about many things, and becomes even more dangerous when Ruth climbs into bed with him. Ewan McGregor’s career got off track in “Star Wars” foolishness, but this movie may put him back in good roles, where he belongs. He’s such a charming actor—avid, bright-eyed, yet slightly acid and self-deprecating, too. His writer, initially no more than a sleepless, overworked hack, grows tired of being a ghost; he wants to be palpable, a man, and he asks questions of powerful people that could get him killed. Polanski takes care that the Ghost’s story is never rushed, mauled, or artificially heightened—the usual style of thrillers now (see “Shutter Island” and every week’s buddy-buddy cop movie for the latest examples). Polanski respects physical plausibility and the passage of time; he wants our belief in his improbable tale, just as Hitchcock did. There may be nothing formally inventive in this kind of classical technique, but, in the hands of a master, it’s smooth and satisfying, and I suggest, dear reader, that you gaze upon it, because it’s all but gone in today’s moviemaking world. Here it works its old magic. You understand, at every instant, what the Ghost feels and knows, and you fear for him. There’s not much violence in the movie, but your scalp tightens anyway.

“The Ghost Writer” plays off the British public’s disillusion with Tony Blair and the recurring complaints about Blair’s alleged collaboration with the C.I.A. Yet, when Lang is cornered by the Ghost, the P.M. speaks with impressive conviction. In effect, he defends the use of torture; he takes the Cheneyesque hard line, ridiculing liberals who want safety and, at the same time, the luxury of high-mindedness. The answer to the question of why he’s so acquiescent to the Americans is worked out in thriller (rather than policy) terms. It’s the kind of supposition that may strike viewers, here and in Britain, as frivolous, or just plain wrong, but it’s a fine piece of mischief—suggestive, wounding to Blair, and, as a fiction, emotionally gratifying in the way of le Carré’s conspiracy plots.

Brosnan’s performance is so forceful in the climactic scene with the Ghost that I don’t think you could easily say where Polanski’s own feelings about rendition lie. But I would guess that he’s split in his personal sympathies—he’s both the man accused of crimes and the Ghost longing to assert his full humanity. Polanski edited the movie while in jail and then under house arrest in Switzerland; the movie’s narrative of an exiled man trapped in a house overtook his own disordered life. He concludes “The Ghost Writer” with a twin flourish: first, a virtuoso travelling shot of an explosive note slowly but inexorably passed through many hands at a social occasion until it reaches its destination, and then a final shot of Lang’s manuscript, the fluttering pages now forlornly scattered about a London street. As in the famous last sequence of “Chinatown,” Polanski is close to despair, but his rejuvenation as a film director is a sign of hope.

--

David Denby, The New Yorker, 8 March 2010

Thursday, March 04, 2010

A writing career becomes harder to scale

Authors used to expect to struggle as they gained experience. But now it is sell - or else.

In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends. It was titled "Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years," and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.

Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone. Only a few had flourished. Some, he speculated, had ended up teaching, publishing occasionally in small journals. But most had just . . . given up. "It doesn't appear to be a matter of talent itself," he wrote. "Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared. As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability: that is, the ability to deal effectively with uncertainty, rejection, and disappointment, from within as well as from without."

writer's apprenticeship -- or perhaps, the writer's lot -- is this miserable trifecta: uncertainty, rejection, disappointment. In the 20 years that I've been publishing books, I have fared better than most. I sold my first novel while still in graduate school and published six more books, pretty much one every three years, like clockwork. I have made my living as a writer, living off my advances while supplementing my income by teaching and writing for newspapers and magazines.

As smooth as this trajectory might seem, however, my internal life as a writer has been a constant battle with the small, whispering voice (well, sometimes it shouts) that tells me I can't do it. This time, the voice taunts me, you will fall flat on your face. Every single piece of writing I have ever completed -- whether a novel, a memoir, an essay, short story or review -- has begun as a wrestling match between hopelessness and something else, some other quality that all writers, if they are to keep going, must possess.

Call it stubbornness, stamina, a take-no-prisoners determination, but a writer at work reminds me of nothing so much as a terrier with a bone: gnawing, biting, chewing, until finally there is nothing left to do but fall away.

I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students' eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don't do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it's the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn't mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable.

If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they'd become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.

Rereading Solotaroff's essay, as I did recently, I found that he was writing of a time that now seems quaint, almost innocent. By the 1980s, he bemoaned, the expectations young writers had of their future lives had "been formed by the mass marketing and subsidization of culture and by the creative writing industry. Their career models are not, say, Henry Miller or William Faulkner, but John Irving or Ann Beattie."

With the exception of Irving, most of the writers referenced by Solotaroff (Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Joan Chase, Douglas Unger, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Alan Hewat) would draw blank looks from my students, and the creative writing industry of the mid-1980s now seems like a few mom-and-pop shops scattered on a highway lined with strip malls and mega-stores. Today's young writers don't peruse the dusty shelves of previous generations. Instead, they are besotted with the latest success stories: The 18-year-old who receives a million dollars for his first novel; the blogger who stumbles into a book deal; the graduate student who sets out to write a bestselling thriller -- and did.

The 5,000 students graduating each year from creative writing programs (not to mention the thousands more who attend literary festivals and conferences) do not include insecurity, rejection and disappointment in their plans. I see it in their faces: the almost evangelical belief in the possibility of the instant score. And why not? They are, after all, the product of a moment that doesn't reward persistence, that doesn't see the value in delaying recognition, that doesn't trust in the process but only the outcome. As an acquaintance recently said to me: "So many crappy novels get published. Why not mine?"

The emphasis is on publishing, not on creating. On being a writer, not on writing itself. The publishing industry -- always the nerdy distant cousin of the rest of media -- has the same blockbuster-or-bust mentality of television networks and movie studios. There now exist only two possibilities: immediate and large-scale success, or none at all. There is no time to write in the cold, much less for 10 years.

I recently had the honor of acting as guest editor for the anthology "Best New American Voices 2010," the latest volume in a long-running annual series that contains some of the finest writing culled from students in graduate programs and conferences. Joshua Ferris, Nam Le, Julie Orringer and Maile Meloy are just a few of the writers published in previous editions, but now the series is coming to an end. Presumably, it wasn't selling, and its publisher could no longer justify bringing it out. Important and serious and just plain good books, the kind that require years spent in the trough of false starts and discarded pages -- these books need to be written far away from this culture of mega-hits, and yet that culture is so pervasive that one wonders how a young writer is meant to be strong enough to face it down.

The new bottom line

At the risk of sounding like I'm writing from my rocking chair, things were different when I started. My first three books sold, in combination, fewer than 15,000 copies in hardcover. My editor at the time told me there were 4,000 serious readers in America, and if I reached them, I was doing a good job. As naïve as this may sound, it never occurred to me that my modest sales record might one day spell the end of my career. I felt cared for, respected. I continued to be published, and eventually, my sales improved. I wrote a bestselling memoir, appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and published a subsequent novel that found a pretty wide readership. My timing has been good thus far -- and lucky.

But in the last several years, I've watched friends and colleagues suddenly find themselves without publishers after having brought out many books. Writers now use words like "track" and "mid-list" and "brand" and "platform." They tweet and blog and make Facebook friends in the time they used to spend writing. Authors who stumble can find themselves quickly in dire straits. How, under these conditions, can a writer take the risks required to create something original and resonant and true?

Perhaps there is a clue to be found near the end of Solotaroff's essay: "Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. Similarly, his wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger."

The writer who has experienced this even for a moment becomes hooked on it and is willing to withstand the rest. Insecurity, rejection and disappointment are a price to pay, but those of us who have served our time in the frozen tundra will tell you that we'd do it all over again if we had to. And we do. Each time we sit down to create something, we are risking our whole selves. But when the result is the transformation of anger, disappointment, sorrow, self-pity, guilt, perverseness and wounded innocence into something deep and concrete and abiding -- that is a personal and artistic triumph well worth the long and solitary trip.

--

Shapiro's new book, "Devotion: A Memoir," is just out. She will read at Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena on Feb. 24 and Diesel Books in Brentwood on Feb. 26.

--

LA Times, February 07, 2010, By Dani Shapiro


Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Authors cry foul over Google 'rights grab

Philip Pullman

Proposed settlement could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing.

Philip Pullman: 'If I want to sell my rights to ­anybody, why the hell should I have to go and ask Google first?' Photograph: Rex Features

British authors are divided over plans by Google to create the world's largest online library and profit from out-of-print titles.

Philip Pullman is among those opting out of the proposed Google book settlement, which critics condemn as a "massive rights grab" and an unacceptable reshaping of the copyright landscape to the detriment of writers.

Helen Oyeyemi is also among those opposed to the settlement, currently being thrashed out in the US courts, which could prove to be one of the most important agreements in digital publishing.

Google Books would carry "substantial extracts" of books that are out of print but still within copyright, with US buyers then paying to download the title in full. Revenue generated would be split, with 63% going to the rights holder and the rest to Google. Although only US consumers will be able to use this service, the titles include works published in Britain, Canada and Australia as well as the US.

But, in a move that has angered critics, writers had to choose to opt out by 28 January. For those who did not, their work would be automatically included.

Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, said: "Many of us have books that are out of print but still receive a little bit of money from them through the PLR [public lending right]. And, jJust because a book is out of print doesn't mean it belongs to Google. It belongs to me. And if I want to sell my rights to anybody, why the hell should I have to go and ask Google first?"

Nick Harkaway, son of John le Carré and author of The Gone-Away World, said opting out was "the only way of saying I do not believe this is appropriate. What is happening here is a massive rights grab. It's reshaping the copyright landscape. I don't think it beneficial to have a private company, de facto, owning the history of the written word.

"People are quite cosy with Google. But, it is not guaranteed this library will remain with Google forever. Imagine your least favourite media conglomerate buying the sole rights to digitally exhibit the history of the printed word, over 10m titles. You start to sound like a nut. But the scale of this is enormous".

American authors, publishing organisations and Google are currently trying to agree the settlement, which has yet to be ratified by a New York court.

Google insists the proposed settlement "is not about acquiring rights to books". "It is about creating a new revenue channel for rights holders, and opening up access to these books," said a spokeswoman.

However, some writers are bemused by its complexity. Kate Mosse, best known for her 2005 novel Labyrinth, said she "never really understood" exactly what it meant, and was relieved when her publisher, Hachette UK – originally an objector to the settlement – made the decision for her by advising its authors to remain in.

Its chief executive, Tim Hely-Hutchinson, said the company did not think Google should have interfered with other people's copyright, and the proposed settlement was a "weak compromise". But, like other many other publishers such as the Random House Group and Penguin, that argument had to be weighed against the interests of its authors being better served by retaining the ability to control how titles were used by Google.

John Lanchester, whose has just published his fourth novel, Whoops!, said "every writer I know has opted out. It's is a complete violation of the principle of copyright."

The Society of Authors, which has 9,000 members in Britain, agreed that the settlement "runs against the basic principle of copyright in which you get permission every time you use something". But, said its general secretary, Mark Le Fanu, very few members had raised objections, while "the great majority seemed to think it could have potentially significant benefits".

But there remain a few who are completely unmoved by the clamour. "I leave it all to my agent," said Martin Amis. "I just can't get interested."

--

Caroline Davies, The Guardian, Monday 1 February 2010


Tuesday, March 02, 2010

James Patterson, Inc.

Like most authors, James Patterson started out with one book, released in 1976, that he struggled to get published. It sold about 10,000 copies, a modest, if respectable, showing for a first novel. Last year, an estimated 14 million copies of his books in 38 different languages found their way onto beach blankets, airplanes and nightstands around the world. Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all. Really, it’s not even close. (According to Nielsen BookScan, Grisham’s, King’s and Brown’s combined U.S. sales in recent years still don’t match Patterson’s.) This is partly because Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his stable of co-authors, he published nine original hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.

There are many different ways to catalog Patterson’s staggering success. Here are just a few: Since 2006, one out of every 17 novels bought in the United States was written by James Patterson. He is listed in the latest edition of “Guinness World Records,” published last fall, as the author with the most New York Times best sellers, 45, but that number is already out of date: he now has 51 — 35 of which went to No. 1.

Patterson and his publisher, Little, Brown & Co., a division of the Hachette Book Group, have an unconventional relationship. In addition to his two editors, Patterson has three full-time Hachette employees (plus assistants) devoted exclusively to him: a so-called brand manager who shepherds Patterson’s adult books through the production process, a marketing director for his young-adult titles and a sales manager for all his books. Despite this support staff and his prodigious output, Patterson is intimately involved in the publication of his books. A former ad executive — Patterson ran J. Walter Thompson’s North American branch before becoming a full-time writer in 1996 — he handles all of his own advertising and closely monitors just about every other step of the publication process, from the design of his jackets to the timing of his books’ release to their placement in stores. “Jim is at the very least co-publisher of his own books,” Michael Pietsch, Patterson’s editor and the publisher of Little, Brown, told me.

A couple of months ago, I sat in on one of Patterson’s regular meetings with Little, Brown to discuss the marketing and publicity for his coming titles. The meeting was held not, as you might expect, at the publisher’s offices in Midtown Manhattan but in the living room of Patterson’s Palm Beach home, a canary yellow Spanish-style house on a small island in Lake Worth. Patterson’s wife, Sue, a tall, athletic-looking blonde whom he met at J. Walter Thompson, served coffee and gooey chocolate-chip cookies to the guests: Pietsch; Megan Tingley, the publisher of Little, Brown’s young-readers books; and David Young, the C.E.O. of Hachette.

Pietsch and Tingley showed mock-ups of covers and presented ideas they had been working on. From the plush, caramel-colored couch facing them, Patterson, who is a trim 62 with a habitual slouch and laconic manner well suited to his dry sense of humor, acted as creative director, a familiar role from his years in advertising. At one point, the conversation turned to the next installment in Patterson’s Michael Bennett series, which revolves around a Manhattan homicide detective and widower with 10 multiracial adopted children (“Cheaper by the Dozen” meets “Die Hard,” as Patterson describes it). Pietsch mentioned a possible promotional line, “New York Has a New Hero.” Patterson instantly amended it: “Finally, New York Has a Hero.”

A number of former Little, Brown employees who attended these sorts of meetings with Patterson in the 1990s and early 2000s described him to me as low-key but intimidating, more cutthroat adman than retiring writer — a kind of real-life Don Draper. Unsatisfied with publishing’s informal approach to marketing meetings, Patterson had expected corporate-style presentations, complete with comprehensive market-share data and sales trends. “A lot of authors are just grateful to be published,” Holly Parmelee, Patterson’s publicist from 1992 to 2002, told me several weeks earlier. “Not Jim. His attitude was that we were in business together, and he wanted us both to succeed, but it was not going to be fun and games.”

But that was when Patterson was still making a name for himself and fighting for his publisher’s full attention. Now that he is the world’s bestselling author and Little, Brown’s most prized possession, Patterson seemed agreeable, easygoing. Even when he shot down an idea, like Pietsch’s suggestion that Patterson promote the new Michael Bennett book with a day of events in all five boroughs, he did so gently: “I just don’t want for it to be like one of those things when an athlete goes through and shakes four hands.” Halfway through the meeting, Patterson suggested that they take a short break to listen to some songs from a musical he’s developing based on his romance novel “Sundays at Tiffany’s.”

When the meeting was over, Patterson and his wife drove everyone to lunch in their matching Mercedes sedans. On our way to the restaurant, they took us past their future home, an oceanfront mansion in Palm Beach that they bought last year for $17.4 million and are now in the midst of renovating. “There’s my little cottage,” Patterson said as the 20,000-square-foot house came into view.

ACCORDING TO FORBES magazine, Patterson earned Hachette about $500 million over the last two years. Hachette disputes the accuracy of these numbers but wouldn’t provide me with different ones. Regardless, it seems safe to assume that Patterson, who puts out more best sellers in any given year than many publishing houses, is responsible for a meaningful portion of the company’s annual revenues. “I like to say that Jim is the rock on which we build this company,” David Young told me in his office one recent morning.

Like movie studios, publishing houses have long built their businesses on top of blockbusters. But never in the history of publishing has the blockbuster been so big. Thirty years ago, the industry defined a “hit” novel as a book that sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in hardcover. Today a book isn’t considered a blockbuster unless it sells at least one million copies.

The story of the blockbuster’s explosion is, paradoxically, bound up with that of publishing’s recent troubles. They each began with the wave of consolidation that swept through the industry in the 1980s. Unsatisfied with publishing’s small margins, the new conglomerates that now owned the various publishing houses pressed for bigger best sellers and larger profits. Mass-market fiction had historically been a paperback business, but publishers now put more energy and resources into selling these same books as hardcovers, with their vastly more favorable profit margins. At the same time, large stores like Barnes & Noble and Borders were elbowing out independent booksellers. Their growing dominance of the market gave them the leverage to demand wholesale discounts and charge hefty sums for favorable store placement, forcing publishers to sell still more books. Big-box stores like Costco accelerated the trend by stocking large quantities of books by a small group of authors and offering steep discounts on them. Under pressure from both their parent companies and booksellers, publishers became less and less willing to gamble on undiscovered talent and more inclined to hoard their resources for their most bankable authors. The effect was self-fulfilling. The few books that publishers invested heavily in sold; most of the rest didn’t. And the blockbuster became even bigger.

Patterson has been a beneficiary of the industry’s shifting economics, but he was also a catalyst for change at Little, Brown and in the world of publishing in general. When Patterson published his breakout book, “Along Came a Spider,” in 1993, Little, Brown was still a largely literary house, whose more commercial authors included the historian William Manchester, biographer of Winston Churchill. Patterson’s success in the subsequent years encouraged Little, Brown to fully embrace mass-market fiction. But more than that, Patterson almost single-handedly created a template for the modern blockbuster author.

There were, of course, blockbuster authors before Patterson, among them Mario Puzo, James Michener and Danielle Steel. But never had authors been marketed essentially as consumer goods, paving the way for a small group of writers, from Charlaine Harris to Malcolm Gladwell, to dominate best-seller lists — often with several titles at a time — in the same way that brands like Skippy and Grey Poupon dominate supermarket shelves. “Until the last 15 years or so, the thought that you could mass-merchandise authors had always been resisted,” says Larry Kirshbaum, former C.E.O. of the Time Warner Book Group, which owned Little, Brown until 2006. “Jim was at the forefront of changing that.”

The lesson was not easily learned. Publishing is an inherently conservative business. Patterson repeatedly challenged industry convention, sometimes over the objections of his own publisher. When Little, Brown was preparing to release “Along Came a Spider,” Patterson tried to persuade his publisher that the best way to get the book onto best-seller lists was to advertise aggressively on television. Little, Brown initially balked. Bookstores typically base their stocking decisions on the sales of an author’s previous books, and Patterson’s had not done particularly well. This was going to be the first of several novels about an African-American homicide detective in Washington, D.C., named Alex Cross; the prevailing wisdom was that the audience for a series built around a recurring character needed to be nurtured gradually. What’s more, large-scale TV advertising was rare in publishing, not only because of the prohibitive cost but also for cultural reasons. The thinking was that selling a book as if it were a lawn-care product could very well backfire by turning off potential readers.

Patterson wrote, produced and paid for a commercial himself. It opened with a spider dropping down the screen and closed with a voice-over: “You can stop waiting for the next ‘Silence of the Lambs.’ ” Once Little, Brown saw the ad, it agreed to share the cost of rolling it out over the course of several weeks in three particularly strong thriller markets — New York, Chicago and Washington. “Along Came a Spider” made its debut at No. 9 on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list, ensuring it favorable placement near the entrance of bookstores, probably the single biggest driver of book sales. It rose to No. 2 in paperback and remains Patterson’s most successful book, with more than five million copies in print.

It’s not hard to understand the popularity of “Along Came a Spider.” It’s a police procedural with an uncomplicated yet ever-twisting plot, some sex, betrayal and plenty of violence. The book’s hero, Cross, is smart and tough, yet sensitive and vulnerable. He has a Ph.D. in forensic psychology from Johns Hopkins, lost his wife in a drive-by shooting — leaving him to raise his two children alone — plays Gershwin on a beat-up baby-grand piano and volunteers at the soup kitchen of his local parish. Still, hundreds of suspenseful, fast-paced novels are published each year; few become successful, let alone blockbusters. It’s entirely possible, even quite likely, that without those ads, “Along Came a Spider ” never would have made the best-seller list, and that James Patterson would now be just another thriller writer.

Patterson quickly turned Alex Cross into a booming franchise, encouraging Little, Brown to unify the series with a single jacket style — shiny, with big type and bold, colorful lettering — and titles drawn from nursery rhymes (“Kiss the Girls,” “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “The Big Bad Wolf”), with their foreboding sense of innocence interrupted. “Jim was sensitive to the fact that books carry a kind of elitist persona, and he wanted his books to be enticing to people who might not have done so well in school and were inclined to look at books as a headache,” Kirshbaum says. “He wanted his jackets to say, ‘Buy me, read me, have fun — this isn’t “Moby Dick.” ’ ”

Patterson built his fan following methodically. Instead of simply going to the biggest book-buying markets, he focused his early tours and advertising efforts on cities where his books were selling best: like a politician aspiring to higher office, he was shoring up his base. From there, he began reaching out to a wider audience, often through unconventional means. When sales figures showed that he and John Grisham were running nearly neck and neck on the East Coast but that Grisham had a big lead out West, Patterson set his second thriller series, “The Women’s Murder Club,” about a group of women who solve murder mysteries, in San Francisco.

No sooner had Patterson established himself in the thriller market than he started moving into new genres. Kirshbaum didn’t initially like the idea; he was worried that Patterson would confuse his thriller fans. Patterson’s first nonthriller, “Miracle on the 17th Green,” published in 1996, did very well. That same year, Patterson wanted to try publishing more than one book despite Little, Brown’s view that he would cannibalize his own audience. In addition to “Miracle on the 17th Green,” Patterson published “Hide and Seek” and “Jack and Jill,” each of which was a best seller. From there, Patterson gradually added more titles each year. Not only did more books mean more sales, they also meant greater visibility, ensuring that Patterson’s name would almost always be at the front of bookstores, with the rest of the new releases. Patterson encountered similar resistance when he introduced the idea of using co-authors, which Little, Brown warned would dilute his brand. Once again, the books were best sellers. “Eventually, I stopped fighting him and went along for the ride,” Kirshbaum says.

Patterson’s vision of a limitless empire forced Little, Brown to reorder its priorities. Publishers have finite resources, and the demands of publishing Patterson were extraordinary even for a blockbuster author. Some Little, Brown editors worried that other books were suffering as a result. “To have one writer really start needing, and even demanding, the lion’s share of energy and attention was difficult,” Sarah Crichton, Little, Brown’s publisher from 1996 to 2001, told me. “There were times when some of us resented that. When Jim felt that resentment, he roared back. And he was too powerful to ignore.”

Crichton says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson’s books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. “Jim felt his ambitions weren’t being taken seriously enough,” Crichton says. “And in retrospect, he was probably right.”

WHEN I VISITED Patterson one day in Florida this fall, his wife met me at the door in tennis whites. Patterson soon followed in a white polo shirt, pleated blue trousers and boat shoes. He stopped in the kitchen to pour himself a glass of orange Fanta and led me upstairs to his home office, an airy, uncluttered wood-paneled room overlooking a lap pool — Sue, who is 10 years his junior, was an all-American swimmer at the University of Wisconsin in the late 1970s — and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Patterson’s bookshelves are evenly divided between thrillers — books by Michael Connelly and Jeffrey Deaver — and more highbrow, literary fare like Philip Roth, John Cheever and Denis Johnson. When I asked him what he was reading now, Patterson mentioned “Wolf Hall,” by Hilary Mantel, the winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, and “The Power Broker,” Robert Caro’s doorstop biography of Robert Moses. “My favorite books are very dense ones,” Patterson told me. “I love ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude,’ and I’m a big James Joyce fan — well, at least until ‘Finnegans Wake.’ He kind of lost me there.”

There is no computer in Patterson’s office; he writes in longhand on a legal pad and gives the pages to his assistant to type up. Hanging above the round wooden table where he works is a photograph of President Clinton taken during the Monica Lewinsky scandal walking down the steps of Marine One with a copy of Patterson’s “When the Wind Blows” tucked under his arm. (Patterson’s popularity in Washington is apparently bipartisan: the wall of one of his downstairs bathrooms is plastered with fan mail from both George Bushes.) Neatly arranged on an adjacent L-shaped desk were 23 stacks of paper of varying heights, Patterson’s works in progress.

Patterson grew up in Newburgh, N.Y., the son of a tough man who overcame a difficult childhood. Raised in the local poorhouse by a single mother, Patterson’s father earned a scholarship to Hamilton College and dreamed of becoming a writer or a diplomat but wound up selling insurance. “He didn’t have a father, and I don’t think he knew how to do it,” Patterson told me. (When his father retired, he wrote a novel and showed it to Patterson, already an established author. Patterson gave him the same advice he gives all first-time novelists: Write another one.)

Patterson discovered books late for a man who now makes a fortune writing them. Right after his senior year in high school, his family moved to a suburb of Boston, and Patterson got a job working nights and weekends as an aide at McLean Hospital in Belmont. With nothing else to do on his overnight shifts, he guzzled coffee and read.

At first, Patterson’s literary taste ran toward the highbrow — Jerzy Kosinski, Jean Genet, Evan S. Connell. “I was a snob,” he says. After graduating from Manhattan College in 1969, Patterson was given a free ride to Vanderbilt University’s graduate program in English literature but dropped out after just one year. “I had found two things that I loved, reading and writing,” he told me. “If I became a college professor, I knew I was going to wind up killing them both off.”

Instead, Patterson moved to New York and got a job as a junior copywriter at J. Walter Thompson. He also started reading commercial books like “The Exorcist” and “The Day of the Jackal.” “I always felt I could write a reasonable literary novel, but not a great one,” he says. “Then I thought, I can do this. I understand it, and I like it.” Patterson set up a typewriter on the kitchen table of his small apartment on 100th Street and Manhattan Avenue and wrote after work every night and on weekends. The result was his first novel, “The Thomas Berryman Number.”

More than a dozen publishers rejected Patterson’s manuscript before his agent, whom Patterson found in a newspaper article, finally sold it to Little, Brown for $8,500. “I remember going up to Boston — Little, Brown was still in Boston then — and walking into this library with a huge fireplace,” Patterson recalls of his first visit to his publisher. “On the bookshelves were all of these other Little, Brown books, ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ ‘The French Lieutenant’s Woman,’ ‘The Executioner’s Song.’ I’m thinking, They’re going to publish me? This is so cool.”

“The Thomas Berryman Number” is the story of a newspaperman in Nashville who is assigned to cover the assassination of a local politician and ends up on the trail of his murderer, a professional killer from the Texas panhandle named Thomas Berryman. The action bounces around a lot, ricocheting between Berryman’s various murders, the newspaperman’s reporting and his subsequent effort to turn his articles on the case into a book. “Berryman” bears none of the hallmarks of Patterson’s later thrillers. It’s more brooding and stylized, more classically noir. The bad guy — Berryman — is not a sadist or a psychopathic serial killer; he’s a hired gun. There is no real good guy, other than the reporter and narrator. At its best, the prose can call to mind Raymond Chandler. Here’s Berryman in the book’s opening pages, about to hitch a ride out of Texas with a man he would soon kill: “Thomas Berryman shaded his sunglasses so he could see the approaching car better. A finely made coil of brown dust followed it like a streamer. Buzzards crossed its path, heading east toward Wichita Falls.”

The book won a prestigious Edgar Award for a first novel from the Mystery Writers of America. No doubt, some of those who praised it at the time would now say Patterson has failed to live up to its literary promise. That’s not how Patterson sees it. “It’s more convoluted, more bleak — more of the sort of thing that some people will find praiseworthy,” he says of “The Thomas Berryman Number.” “The sentences are superior to a lot of the stuff I writenow, but the story isn’t as good. I’m less interested in sentences now and more interested in stories.”

After “The Thomas Berryman Number,” Patterson wrote several more books for a number of different publishers that were neither successful nor critically acclaimed. In 1980, he tried his hand at the “demonic child” genre — memorably popularized by the film “Rosemary’s Baby”— with the horror novel “Virgin” (which was later retitled and published as “Cradle and All”). In 1987, the year the movie “Wall Street” was released, he published a Wall Street thriller called “Black Market.”

Patterson is unsentimental about his early, somewhat clumsy attempts at popular fiction. “That’s an absolutely horrifying book,” he says of his 1977 novel, “Season of the Machete,” the story of a sadistic husband-and-wife team who carry out a series of gory machete murders on a Caribbean island. “I actually tell people not to read it.”

Several weeks later, I witnessed this firsthand at one of Patterson’s signings. When a woman handed him a copy of the book to autograph, he groaned. “Not my best work,” Patterson said. “It’s scaring me half to death,” the woman answered. “Don’t read it,” Patterson replied.

WHAT IS PERHAPS most remarkable about the Patterson empire is the sheer volume of books it produces. The nine hardcovers a year are really only the beginning. Nearly all of those books are published a second and third time, first as traditional paperbacks, then as pocket-size, mass-market paperbacks. “Scarcely a week goes by when we aren’t publishing something by James Patterson,” Young told me, only half-joking.

This summer, Patterson will begin his fourth thriller series, “Private,” which centers on a detective agency with branches all over the world. In addition, he does frequent thriller one-offs, including an annual summer beach read, usually set at or near a resort.

The thriller genre is generally not for the squeamish, but Patterson’s tend to be especially graphic, and the violence often involves sociopathic sexual perversion and attractive young women. For instance, the villain in his second Alex Cross novel, “Kiss the Girls,” is a psychopath who kidnaps, rapes and tortures college girls in an underground bunker; at one point, he even feeds a live snake into the anus of one of his victims.

As long as there has been mass-market fiction, it has had its detractors. In the late Victorian era, the English poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold denounced “the tawdry novels which flare in the bookshelves of our railway stations, and which seem designed . . . for people with a low standard of life.” Yet even within the maligned genre, Patterson has some especially nasty critics. The Washington Post’s thriller reviewer, Patrick Anderson, called “Kiss the Girls” “sick, sexist, sadistic and subliterate.” Stephen King has described Patterson as “a terrible writer.”

Patterson has written in just about every genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, “women’s weepies,” graphic novels, Christmas-themed books. He dabbles in nonfiction as well. In 2008, he published “Against Medical Advice,” a book written from the perspective of the son of a friend who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, and last year, he took on the supposed murder of the child pharaoh King Tut.

Patterson’s fastest-growing franchise is his young-adult books. He published his first Y.A. title, “Maximum Ride: The Angel Experiment,” in 2005, not long after the languishing genre was jump-started by blockbusters like “Harry Potter” and “Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” Last month, he introduced his third Y.A. series, “Witch and Wizard,” a dystopian fantasy about a teenage brother and sister who wake up to discover that they are living in a totalitarian regime and that they have supernatural powers that have made them enemies of the state. Despite some negative prepublication reviews, the book was critic-proof, making its debut at No. 1 on the Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books.

Each of Patterson’s series has its own fan base, but there are also plenty of people who read everything he writes. His books all share stylistic similarities. They are light on atmospherics and heavy on action, conveyed by simple, colloquial sentences. “I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”

Patterson’s chapters are very short, which creates a lot of half-blank pages; his books are, in a very literal sense, page-turners. He avoids description, back story and scene setting whenever possible, preferring to hurl readers into the action and establish his characters with a minimum of telegraphic details. The first chapter of “The Swimsuit,” a recent thriller with a villain who abducts women for pornographic snuff films, opens with the kidnapping of a supermodel on a beach in Hawaii:

“Kim McDaniels was barefooted and wearing a blue-and-white-striped Juicy Couture minidress when she was awoken by a thump against her hip, a bruising thump. She opened her eyes in the blackness, as questions broke the surface of her mind.

Where was she? What the hell was going on?

TO MAINTAIN HIS frenetic pace of production, Patterson now uses co-authors for nearly all of his books. He is part executive producer, part head writer, setting out the vision for each book or series and then ensuring that his writers stay the course. This kind of collaboration is second nature to Patterson from his advertising days, and it’s certainly common in other creative industries, including television. But writing a novel is not the same thing as coming up with jokes for David Letterman or plotting an episode of “24.” Books, at least in their traditional conception, are the product of one person’s imagination and sensibility, rendered in a singular, unreproducible style and voice. Some novelists have tried using co-authors, usually with limited success. Certainly none have taken collaboration to the level Patterson has, with his five regular co-authors, each one specializing in a different Patterson series or genre. “Duke Ellington said, ‘I need an orchestra, otherwise I wouldn’t know how my music sounds,’ ” Pietsch told me when I asked him about Patterson’s use of collaborators. “Jim created a process and a team that can help him hear how his music sounds.”

The way it usually works, Patterson will write a detailed outline — sometimes as long as 50 pages, triple-spaced — and one of his co-authors will draft the chapters for him to read, revise and, when necessary, rewrite. When he’s first starting to work with a new collaborator, a book will typically require numerous drafts. Over time, the process invariably becomes more efficient. Patterson pays his co-authors out of his own pocket. On the adult side, his collaborators work directly and exclusively with Patterson. On the Y.A. side, they sometimes work with Patterson’s young-adult editor, who decides when pages are ready to be passed along to Patterson.

Some Patterson fans have complained in online forums that his co-written books feel too “cookie cutter” and lack the “roller coaster” feel of his previous work, but his sales certainly haven’t suffered. In at least one instance, Patterson took on a co-author in an effort to boost sales: last year, after noticing he wasn’t selling in Scandinavia, he invited Sweden’s best-selling crime writer, Liza Marklund, to collaborate with him on an international thriller. Their novel, “The Postcard Killers,” is just being published in Sweden and will be out in the U.S. this summer.

For the most part, though, Patterson draws his co-authors from the vast sea of struggling writers. A few weeks after visiting Patterson, I had lunch with one of his collaborators, Michael Ledwidge, in Manhattan. An amiable 39-year-old redhead in a black leather jacket and jeans, Ledwidge told me he grew up in a large, working-class Irish family in the Bronx. He wanted to be a cop, but when he applied in 1993, the Police Academy was oversubscribed. So he worked as a doorman and started writing a heist novel on the side. When Ledwidge learned that he and James Patterson shared an alma mater, Manhattan College, he delivered his half-finished manuscript to Patterson one morning at J. Walter Thompson. That night, his phone rang.

“It must be James Patterson,” Ledwidge joked to his wife.

It was. Patterson helped Ledwidge get his first book published and his writing career started. A few books later, Ledwidge had garnered some critical acclaim but not much commercial success. In 2003, Patterson suggested that they collaborate on “Step on a Crack,” his first Michael Bennett novel. Ledwidge leapt at the opportunity. The book went straight to No. 1 on the Times best-seller list. One book quickly led to another. In 2005, Ledwidge quit his day job as a cable-splicer at Verizon, left the Bronx for Connecticut and became a full-time co-author for James Patterson.

Ledwidge told me that he and Patterson have an easy working relationship, that Patterson playfully teases him when he writes a scene that Patterson doesn’t like and praises him when he’s pleased with something. I asked Ledwidge if he missed writing his own books. “Honestly? ” he asked. “Not at all. This is much more fun.”

ONE NIGHT IN Florida, Patterson and I met his wife and their 11-year-old son, Jack, for dinner at the Palm Beach Grill. When the maître d’ noticed Patterson entering the restaurant, she told him his table was ready. A well-dressed, white-haired woman quickly spun around.

“Are you James Patterson?” she asked excitedly.

“Yes,” Patterson answered.

“I just read your last one. What was it called?”

Patterson hesitated, unsure which book she was talking about.

“It was brutal!” she woman continued.

“ ‘The Swimsuit’?” Patterson ventured.

“Yeah,” the woman said. “Boy, was it brutal! I liked it, but it was brutal!”

After dinner, Sue and Jack went home, and Patterson and I had another glass of wine and continued talking. Patterson told me that Jack, who had been working on his laptop for most of the meal, only recently started to like reading. It required a deliberate effort on Patterson’s part. Beginning a few summers ago, Patterson told Jack he didn’t have to do any chores; he just had to read for an hour or so every day. The first summer Jack resisted. The second summer he didn’t complain. Last summer, he no longer needed any prodding. Patterson ticked off some of the books Jack had recently read and enjoyed — “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “A Wrinkle in Time” and “Huckleberry Finn” — with obvious pride.

Patterson told me that Jack’s initial reluctance to read helped inspire him to move into the Y.A. genre. He wanted to write books for preteens and teenagers that would be fun and easy to read. The young-adult realm was, in one sense, a big leap for an author known for violent thrillers. At the same time, it was a natural fit for Patterson, whose unadorned prose and fast-paced plots are well suited to reluctant readers. Promoting literacy among children has since become a pet cause for him; he has his own Web site, ReadKiddoRead.com, aimed at helping parents choose books for their children. “There are millions of kids who have never read a book that they liked, and that is a national disgrace,” Patterson said. “What I’m trying to do is at least wake up several thousand of them.”

Later, our conversation turned to Patterson’s critics. “Thousands of people don’t like what I do,” Patterson told me, shrugging off his detractors. “Fortunately, millions do.” For all of his commercial success, though, Patterson seemed bothered by the fact that he has not been given his due — that unlike King or even Grisham, who have managed to transcend their genres, he continues to be dismissed as an airport author or, worse, a marketing genius who has cynically maneuvered his way to best-sellerdom by writing remedial novels that pander to the public’s basest instincts. “Caricature assassination,” Patterson called it.

Patterson said too much has been made of his marketing savvy. (A few years ago, a professor at Harvard Business School went so far as to do a case study on him.) To Patterson, the explanation for his success is less complicated. Whether he’s writing about a serial killer, a love affair between a doctor and poet in Martha’s Vineyard or a middle-aged ad executive who miraculously becomes an exceptional putter and joins the senior golf tour, his books are accessible and engaging. “A brand is just a connection between something and a bunch of people,” Patterson told me. “Crest toothpaste: I always used it, it tastes O.K., so I don’t have any particular reason to switch. Here the connection is that James Patterson writes books that bubble along with heroes I can get interested in. That’s it.”

Patterson considers himself as an entertainer, not a man of letters. Still, he bristles when he hears one of his books described as a guilty pleasure: “Why should anyone feel guilty about reading a book?” Patterson said that what he does — coming up with stories that will resonate with a lot of people and rendering them in a readable style — is no different from what King, Grisham and other popular authors do. “I have a saying,” Patterson told me. “If you want to write for yourself, get a diary. If you want to write for a few friends, get a blog. But if you want to write for a lot of people, think about them a little bit. What do they like? What are their needs? A lot of people in this country go through their days numb. They need to be entertained. They need to feel something.”

Shortly before we left the restaurant, Patterson brought up “The Swimsuit” again. “I like ‘The Swimsuit,’ ” he said. “It’s nasty, but I like it. But I think I went a little farther than I needed to. I’m going to tone it down for the paperback.”

Patterson noticed a look of surprise on my face; it’s not every day that an author decides to rewrite one of his books. “Look,” he said, “if you’re writing ‘Crime and Punishment’ or ‘Remembrance of Things Past,’ then you can sit back and go: ‘This is it, this is the book. This is high art. I’m the man, you’re not. The end.’ But I’m not the man, and this is not high art.”

Whatever ambivalence once existed toward Patterson inside Little, Brown has long since been replaced by unequivocal enthusiasm and gratitude. Pietsch, who succeeded Crichton as publisher, says Patterson belongs in the same class as Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. “Every novel of Jim’s is master class in terms of plotting, pace and striking the right balance between action and emotional content,” Pietsch told me. “I have never read a writer who I think is better at keeping your eye moving forward and your heart moving forward.”

Thanks in part to Patterson, Little, Brown’s identity has changed considerably since he first visited the publisher’s former offices in a town house on Beacon Hill in Boston. In addition to Patterson, it is now home to such thriving commercial novelists as Michael Connelly and Stephenie Meyer, author of the wildly popular “Twilight” vampire series, as well as consistent best sellers like Malcolm Gladwell and David Sedaris. In 2008, a year in which many of its competitors were laying off employees and shutting down imprints, Little, Brown gave out Christmas bonuses.

In September, Little, Brown hosted an anniversary dinner in Patterson’s honor — “20 Years of Publishing James Patterson” — in a private room at Daniel, one of the most expensive restaurants in Manhattan. (Patterson left Little, Brown after “The Thomas Berryman Number” but returned in 1989, a few years before “Along Came a Spider,” with a book called “The Midnight Club.”) It wasn’t the sort of party you see often in the world of publishing, particularly now, with much of the industry in free fall. In addition to a meal of crabmeat salad, beef tenderloin and warm madeleines, the 45 guests were given party favors: bottles of red wine with labels that read “Vintage Patterson.”

Days earlier, Hachette Book Group and Patterson’s representative, the Washington lawyer Robert Barnett, hammered out the terms of a new 17-book deal. (Forbes reported that the contract is worth at least $150 million, though Little, Brown and Patterson dispute the number.) “Don’t you need to be home writing?” I joked with Patterson. He told me matter-of-factly that he’d already started 11 of the 17 books, and even finished more than a few of them.

Some toasts accompanied the dinner. Pietsch talked about the conflicting mythology surrounding who actually discovered Patterson. (“Not only did I know the editor who discovered James Patterson, I once ate a hamburger cooked on his grill.”) Patterson’s young-adult editor, Andrea Spooner, recounted her campaign to persuade her father, an English professor, that Patterson was a worthy writer. (“ ‘It’s worth noting, Daddy, that Dickens was one of the most popular and successful storytellers of his time, too!’ ”) When Young told the crowd that Patterson “contributes significantly” to five of Hachette’s six publishing groups, Patterson interjected: “What am I missing?”

“FaithWords,” Young replied, referring to the company’s religious imprint.

“I can do that,” Patterson said.

Patterson was the last to speak. The only man in the room without a tie, he wore a black T-shirt beneath his dark suit. “I’m sorry my good friend Stephen King couldn’t be here,” he began. “It must be bingo night in Bangor.”

Patterson then proceeded to tell one of his favorite stories about his mother’s father, who drove a frozen-foods truck in Upstate New York. During the summer, Patterson said, he would occasionally get up at 4 in the morning to ride along with him. As they drove over a mountain toward his first delivery, Patterson’s grandfather, an irrepressibly joyful man, would be singing at the top of his lungs. “One day he said to me: ‘Jim, I don’t care what you do when you grow up. I don’t care if you drive a truck like I do, or if you become the president. Just remember that when you go over the mountain to work in the morning, you’ve got to be singing,’ ” Patterson went on. “Well, I am.”

It’s no surprise that Patterson loves what he does. What’s not to love? He plays golf most mornings on Donald Trump’s Palm Beach course and spends the rest of the day working on guaranteed best sellers for which he is paid millions.

But the image of Patterson as a carefree man lucky enough to make money doing what he loves is a bit misleading. Patterson is nothing if not relentlessly ambitious. At J. Walter Thompson, he rose from the lowly station of junior copywriter to become the youngest creative director in the firm’s history — along the way dreaming up such ad slogans as “I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid” — and then the C.E.O. of the company’s North American operations. And as Patterson is the first to admit, he didn’t even like working in advertising. It goes without saying that writing was never just a hobby for him.

Patterson’s current preoccupation is Hollywood. Despite some attempts, including two Alex Cross films (both starring Morgan Freeman), which Patterson doesn’t think much of, some made-for-TV movies, a failed ABC series and a lot of books that were optioned but never developed, there still hasn’t been a blockbuster film or hit TV show based on one of his novels.

A few years ago, Patterson hired a former colleague from J. Walter Thompson, Steve Bowen, to oversee the development of his various movie and television projects. In 2007, they signed a deal with Avi Arad, the producer of the “Spider-Man” and “X-Men” films, to make a movie based on Patterson’s “Maximum Ride” young-adult series. In addition to trying to make sure that Patterson is more involved in the development process, Patterson and Bowen plan to produce some projects themselves. They have already raised the financing for a new Alex Cross movie that Patterson is helping to write.

When I met Bowen, a good-looking ex-Marine with a trimmed, graying beard, for coffee in Manhattan several weeks after the dinner at Daniel, he told me that part of his challenge is to change Hollywood’s perception of Patterson. He cited Clint Eastwood, whose name was once synonymous with “Dirty Harry” and spaghetti westerns, as a model for the sort of image transformation they are aiming to pull off. “Jim’s been wrongly stereotyped out there as the master of slash and gash,” Bowen said. “What people don’t fully understand is that there’s a unique talent and storytelling ability that has allowed him to do what he’s done in the book world. He just knows what’s going to grab people. The man has a golden gut.”

IN THE MID-1960S, Jacqueline Susann, the author of “Valley of the Dolls” (30 million copies sold), famously demonstrated — via hundreds of bookstore signings — that even blockbuster books are built one reader at a time. When Patterson was still making his name, he, too, barnstormed the country, signing books late into the night and exhausting publicists. These days, though, Patterson doesn’t do many bookstore events. He certainly doesn’t need the publicity, and he would rather be home with Sue and Jack. But on a Monday night in mid-November, he turned up at a car-dealership-size Barnes & Noble in a strip mall on Route 17 in Paramus, N.J., to promote his latest Alex Cross novel, “I, Alex Cross.”

This is Patterson’s 16th Cross book. Since “Along Came a Spider,” Cross has been through a lot. He has had several jobs and a number of ill-fated relationships; he has chased down numerous serial killers, a Russian mobster and a cult of goths; and has even written his own novel based on his late uncle’s investigation of a series of lynchings in Mississippi in the early 1900s.

Patterson came straight from the Newark airport, arriving early to sign the store’s “I, Alex Cross” stock in a back room. “We haven’t seen you in years,” said Dennis Wurst, a Barnes & Noble manager of author promotions who stopped by to say hello.

“How’s business?” Patterson asked.

“It helps when you write an Alex Cross book,” Wurst answered.

A month before, Barnes & Noble was caught in the crossfire of a preholiday pricing war between Wal-Mart and Amazon, with Wal-Mart dropping its prices on several hardcover blockbusters, including “I, Alex Cross,” to $8.99, more than 50 percent off the retail price. The battle set off a panic inside an already-anxious publishing industry: such deep discounting may help move merchandise, but along with trends like the proliferation of e-readers that instantly deliver many blockbusters for $9.99 or less, it further devalues books. The days of $25 hardcovers are surely numbered. Without those revenues, publishers will be even more reluctant to devote shrinking resources to new, unproven authors, which will, in turn, limit the range of books being published.

Whatever the future of publishing may hold, Patterson’s place in it seems secure. By the time he was introduced at the Paramus store, in excess of 300 people — more women than men, but fairly evenly divided, with a handful of children as well — had crowded into the bookstore’s large event space to see him. Stragglers were looking vainly for a spot on the wall to lean up against. Patterson, dressed casually in a sweater and slacks, delivered some brief remarks, took a handful of questions and then got down to the main event — signing books. To avoid a crush of people at the signing table, the staff divided the audience into several groups by letter. They were told that Patterson would autograph any of his books purchased in the Paramus store and one additional title from their own Patterson collection, but that he would not personalize any copies.

The system quickly broke down. Patterson was soon adding names and short inscriptions to books. He bantered easily with his fans as he wrote. Many asked about Jack; more than one wanted to know if he had brought any pictures.

“I skipped work to be here,” one woman said as her husband snapped a picture of her with Patterson.

“That’s always a good thing,” Patterson said.

“Well, I’m a police officer, so I guess that’s bad,” the woman replied.

“I won’t tell,” Patterson said.

There is something unique about the relationship between readers and their favorite authors, a sense of emotional intimacy that doesn’t exist, say, between sports fans and athletes. Patterson’s fans can read him virtually all year. They aren’t just addicted to his books; they see him as a constant companion, a part of their lives. One woman asked Patterson to sign a book for her grandmother, who passed away a few days earlier. “We used to read your books together, and I want to put it in her casket with her,” she said. Another told Patterson that he got her reading again after a recent stroke. A truck driver said that he had never read any of Patterson’s books but that he had listened to every single one of them on the road: “I don’t know what I’d do without them.”

Still another woman gestured at her elderly mother, whom she was pushing in a wheelchair: “She just had heart surgery. You make her happy, and that makes me happy.”

“And that makes me happy,” Patterson said.

After an hour of signing books without interruption, Patterson seemed to be doing fine. “We’re really cooking along here,” he told his publicist. A half-hour later, though, Patterson was starting to tire. “This is getting out of hand,” he said.

After almost two hours, a voice finally came over the loudspeaker: “Will all remaining groups please report to the James Patterson signing area.” Patterson signed his last books, posed for a few photographs with some of the store’s employees and got ready to go. “That was a fairly respectable crowd,” he said as we walked to the escalator.

On our way out, Patterson picked up on a theme he raised with me weeks earlier, during our conversation about his detractors. “This goes to the notion we were talking about in Florida, about my critics — people who call themselves open-minded but then make judgments about what I write,” he said. “Well, these people like it. They’re happy. So what’s the big deal?”

--

Jonathan Mahler, a contributing writer for the magazine, is the author of “The Challenge: How a Maverick Navy Officer and a Young Law Professor Risked Their Careers to Defend the Constitution — and Won,” which is just out in paperback.


My novel about painting, criminality, and the greatest art forger of the twentieth century!

My novel about painting, criminality, and the greatest art forger of the twentieth century!
Please click the cover!

My novel about London, murder, mayhem, and a female killer!

My novel about London, murder, mayhem, and a female killer!
Please click the cover!

My novel about running, Princeton University, and a conman who lost it all!

My novel about running, Princeton University, and a conman who lost it all!
Please click the cover!

My novel about love, betrayal and chess in New Orleans

My novel about love, betrayal and chess in New Orleans
Please click the book!

My semi-autobiographical novel about a very British education and becoming an American!

My semi-autobiographical novel about a very British education and becoming an American!
Please click the cover!

My novel about London, murder, mayhem, and a female killer!

My novel about London, murder, mayhem, and a female killer!
Please click the cover!