When Chris Pavone published his first novel, The Expats, about a lady spy coming in from the cold, I was curious. His second book, The Accident, takes a shot at the publishing business, which is always rich chocolate cake, flour included. We are thrilled to have an essay from him, and couldn’t be happier to share it with you. -JR
When We Fell In Love by Chris Pavone
I used to read Literature, and nothing but. I left college a quarter-century ago with a standard-issue liberal arts degree, a pile of student debt, and boxes filled with Hemingway, Dos Passos, Dostoyevsky and Proust. I was also willing to indulge the occasional contemporary novel, but only if it had won a prestigious prize or had been excerpted in The New Yorker. I was a book snob.
For some reason, I thought that my love of literary fiction was an indicator that I should get a job in the book publishing business, and I did. Doubleday in the early 1990s was a very successful commercial house; I remember a party celebrating the achievement of three-fourths of the number-one slots on a New York Times bestseller list. We published cookbooks and business books, pop-culture memoirs and pop-religious tracts, legal thrillers and women’s fiction, and here and there, the types of novels that are called literary.
I was an in-house copy editor, and I worked on all these books. I leafed through typeset pages to review the author’s changes, I nitpicked cover copy, I fact-checked and proofread and edited indexes. As a rule, though, I didn’t read these books.
But every year, part of my job was to try to ensure that the new book from our bestselling author, John Grisham, was printed pristinely—no typos, no wrong page numbers, no delays, no problems. I’d fly down to the printing plant in Virginia, where I’d sit in a conference room poring over the sixteen-page signatures in which books are printed and bound, slender little blue-lined pamphlets on waxy paper. When I was satisfied that a signature was as error-free as could reasonably be expected, I’d scrawl my initials on the top page, and the presses would start rolling for two million copies of those sixteen-page sets (actually one large piece of paper, printed on both sides, folded, and trimmed).
This is how I started to read John Grisham books: it was my job. And when I set aside all the old clothbound books written a couple of generations before I was born, and I read what everyone else in America seemed to enjoy, I realized that these Grishams were absolutely terrific: issue books whose side I was always on, with compelling plots populated by engaging and credible characters, fun to read and impossible to put down and thought-provoking to boot.
It’s true that there’s no mistaking The Firm’s prose style for The Sun Also Rises, just as it’s impossible to confuse the tastes of pork shoulder and a peach. But John Grisham has written a couple dozen adult books, and I’m pretty sure that every single one is better than To Have and Have Not.
Slow-roasted pork and a perfectly ripe raw peach are two very different foods, serving two very different roles in my diet. I love them both. But I can’t imagine spending the rest of my life eating only one of those.
