“I … am looking at this manuscript right now, sent in by you to us, dated July second: The Something by John Grisham.”
“I just meant ‘The … Something,’ ” said John Grisham—careful to calibrate both his emphasis and his anger precisely, not letting either cloud the other. He then repeated what he had just said with every possible intonation, approaching it like the methodical defense attorney he once was, just so it would be entirely, one hundred percent clear to this person named Dale. “ ‘The … Something.’ ‘The … Something.’ ‘The SOMEthing.’ Do you get it, Dale?! It was going to be ‘The … … … SOMETHING’!!! I was going to decide that part later!”
“Huh. .… Okay.… I think … Why didn’t … Okay.”
John Grisham could practically see the excessive blank space between Dale’s words: more typos, these ones over the phone.
“I gotta tell you, John,” said Dale, finally, starting again: “I gotta say, people have actually really responded to The Something. It feels … deliberately ambiguous. You know? It’s elegantly vague. It basically lets people project whatever—”
“The book,” said John Grisham, “is about a civil rights attorney who is blackmailed by the El Salvadoran maid he risked his career for in order to sneak her children into the country. Okay? It is not meant to be elegantly vague. This is about right and wrong, about the limits of the law, about concrete legal issues and specific personal actions. A good title would have been, oh, I don’t know, Dale, off the top of my fucking head? The Case? The Betrayal? The Immigrant’s Trial, The Immigrant, The Threat, The Letter, The Lawyer’s Pen, The Blackmail? Just to name a few?! Or,” he said, trying to sneak this one in there, the one he really wanted but was a little shy to bring up, “I thought So Far Only Goes So Far wouldn’t be the stupidest title in the world, if we wanted to go for something different?”
“What would that refer to?” asked Dale.
“Oh, like The Something refers to anything!” exploded Grisham. “The point is … Look, forget So Far Only Goes So Far, it’s stupid, it’s pretentious, it’s not what I do—look. Look. This isn’t a ghost story, Dale, okay? The S-o-o-o-o-m-e-t-h-i-i-i-i—no. No! This is about concrete issues of our time maybe more than anything I’ve written since probably Pelican. And thematically, it’s about the unforeseeable consequences of the compromises we all make. In any case, The Something is, on every level, a completely inappropriate title. Okay? Okay, Dale? Do you understand that now? How if you were to get any two words wrong in this book, these are two pretty fucking important ones?”
“Yes,” said Dale. “Yes. I do.”
John Grisham exhaled, feeling his breath leave his body as he did, like his wife’s yoga instructor had taught him to do that one time. He never went back to that yoga instructor, but he still thought about that session sometimes.
“I do want to say one very small thing—not to defend myself, at all, but just to make you feel a little better while we sort all this out,” said Dale. “For what it’s worth—and the answer may be nothing—people have not mentioned the title once. Really. Not once. Reviews have been good. You know, considering—you’re an extremely popular writer, and some reviewers are naturally going to hold that against you, but … really, I read all of them. All of them. Everything. I have not read one review that has brought this up.”
“Okay. That’s good,” said John Grisham.
“Not one blog—nothing. For whatever reason—and I know it was a huge mistake on my end—a monumental one that will probably … Yeah. Just, for your own peace of mind, you should know that the reaction has been one hundred percent okay so far.”
John Grisham said nothing.
“I’ll tell everyone to hold off on the next printing immediately until you’ve had a chance to figure out what you want to do here. It’ll be a big deal—first printing is a million, as I’m sure you know—but this is my fault, and literally nothing is more important to this company than you being happy here. Think about what you want to do, okay?”
“Okay. Thank you, Dale.”
“And John?”
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry.”
John Grisham hung up the phone and looked out the window.
The Something? Were they fucking kidding him?
And, also: number one. Again. Not bad. Expected, but still. Number one. He hadn’t taken a moment to let himself enjoy that. He took another sip of coffee, and as he did, he quietly wished himself a tiny, formal congratulation.
“Congratulation”? “Congratulations”? What was the singular? John Grisham wasn’t sure. He didn’t need to know. Guys like Dale were paid to know things like that.
Although apparently guys like Dale were paid to do a lot of things they didn’t do right.
John Grisham took a sip of coffee as he thought about what to do.