Adam Langer has been stalking me for years, and he finally found a way to get my attention.
The Salinger Contract reminds me of early Paul Auster. It seems that Adam Langer the writer, has found a way to fold reality around the man-made construct of time, and deliver a story that probably didn’t happen, or maybe it did. I have been known to sell Paul Auster soap on a rope, but it’s been years since I stopped people on the street to tell them about The Locked Room, or Squeeze Play.
Adam Langer is a washed-up writer and the narrator of The Salinger Contract. While on a trip to the mall he runs into his old friend and writer, sorta-superstar Connor Joyce. I knew right away that Connor Joyce was a figment of the narrator’s imagination, but I played along, or so I thought. Mr. Joyce is in town to read from his latest crime thriller at a bookstore that reeks of Roanoke. Adam Langer plays the I’m-too-shy-to-talk-to-a-literary-star card but happily assists Joyce in a confidence scam the next day. Joyce magically steps into an opportunity of a lifetime, and several million dollars will fall his way if he can just sit down and write another crime thriller. The only catch is that he must write it for one guy, a wealthy literary Deep Throat, who is the only one who will ever read the book.
Joyce is living off the fumes of an earlier success, and it’s clear to everyone that he has nothing new to say. Adam Langer (the narrator) invokes a few novelistic chestnuts that are perfect tent poles to hold up an interesting tapestry of publishing inside jokes (I can’t tell a joke, just read this book). We gleefully watch as the narrator takes candid shots at Norman Mailer, John Updike and J.D. Salinger. Thankfully this isn’t the whole book; Adam Langer (the real version, and narrator) isn’t trying to trade on the reputation of these Grand Masters. Instead what he presents here is an entertaining story about two men who are the unwitting subjects of a crime thriller, of their own making. Joyce realizes that he is writing the next actual crime for Deep Throat to perpetrate, and then tries to double back and write a trap door for his own characters, or is it for Joyce to escape? As Adam Langer tells it, you the reader never witness Mr. Joyce do anything, so we don’t know if what we are reading ever happened. I like to think this hall of mirrors can cut both ways. I have been thinking about the ending of this novel for the past two weeks. Maybe I’m not getting it at all, and this book is actually the key to time travel, which would be a nice twist. The moment I figured out that the fix was in for Joyce, (as told to me by Adam Langer, real and imagined), it reminded me of those breathless sections in The Locked Room when the character Paul Auster created realized he was just ink on the page.
Well played Adam Langer, whoever you are.
