The Great American Novel is a short story by Jack Rusher, published here Monday, February 23, 2004. It is part of Stories.
A morning in the life of Max.
1.
Max awoke, shivering and hungover, in his tiny studio in the East Village. He had only been asleep for four hours, but the cold, the sunlight streaming in his flat’s poorly covered windows and the team of carpenters converting the entire floor above him into a yuppie incubation chamber acted together to force him from his bed. Stumbling around the room in a daze, wrapped in a blanket, he donned several layers of clothing selected from the least objectionable laundry on the floor, sat in the broken chair by his desk, and lit a random dog-end from the pile in the nearest ashtray.
The desktop calendar he had recovered from the rubbish bin in front of his building offered him yesterday’s date, January 27th, and a capsule description of the trial of Guy Fawkes. He ripped the page from the calendar, read today’s entry on the Diet of Worms in 1521, and, in an overly mannered cursive script, wrote his daily novelistic progress report on the back:
- 193 days of work
- $14,622.97 spent
- 2304 words written
- Dysthymia: epic
He stuffed the report into the bottom drawer of his desk, amidst all his previous reports, secure in the knowledge that future generations would be able to piece together the process by which the greatest novel of the early 21st century had been written.
After fifteen minutes of concentrated but unproductive effort on the next sentence of his masterpiece, he decided to break for coffee. He descended five flights of stairs, slipping in a puddle of vile, anonymous liquid on the fourth floor, sneaking past the open door of the crazy lady who often demanded long, unilateral conversations in some unidentified and incomprehensible Slavic language, and emerged, unscathed, onto the icy sidewalk. With a glance of hatred at the NovaDollars that had, in a single day, been installed in the ground level of his building, he crossed the road to the nominally Ukrainian coffee bar that would almost certainly be his next venue of employment if he failed to complete his novel before depleting his inheritance.
Lyydiä, the barrista, wore exquisitely hip thrift store rags, six visible piercings and a collection of tattoos that, by nature of their partial exposure, gave Max the impression of undiscovered continents hidden beneath the cloud cover of her clothing. Max briefly considered the possibility of launching an expedition of exploration, but felt certain that her sexual tastes were limited to those acts that could be performed with a politically correct but anatomically unlikely prosthetic appendage fashioned in the shape of the Venus of Willendorf.
“Max! How’s our author today?” Lyydiä lilted, stretching the syllables of the final two words. She had a second job at a co-op daycare center for adopted multiracial toddlers in Park Slope, and, consequently, always spoke with a surfeit of exclamation points, as if she were addressing a group of small children.
Max blinked back the pain in his head, heightened as it was by her enthusiasm.
“Brilliantly, thanks.”
“The usual?”
“Please.”
She performed, with much screaming and pounding upon the antique bronze espresso machine, the alchemical ritual whereby simple organic compounds are transmuted into liquid creativity, finishing the drink by drawing a tiny chocolate dinosaur on the surface of the milky froth that capped his quadruple café macchiato.
“Here you go! What else can I get for you?”
“I have everything, yet have nothing; and although I possess nothing, still of nothing am I in want...”
She clapped her hands and said, “you have such a way with words! No wonder you’re a writer!”, after which he hadn’t the heart to give her the attribution for the quote.
Max mumbled noncommittal goodbyes and retreated to the corner table that he thought of as his table, extracting from his pocket a small leather notebook and a fountain pen. His journal was an orderly collection of dated entries, none of them pertaining to his novel except to document how his moods and daily adventures prevented him from making any progress on it.
He began trying to piece together the events of the previous evening, but soon shifted into a caffeinated screed against the mediocrity of the public taste and the disastrous effects of that mediocrity upon the fortunes of those in possession of true genius, meaning, of course, himself. Once he had exhausted his energy and creativity, he re-crossed the road, re-climbed the stairs and, returning to his studio, began the nap he would require before continuing his work.