Jeremy Bannister, or The Ups and Downs of An Aspiring Novelist

Yes, I am back promoting the late Gary Reilly. This July, my partner Mike Keefe and I released Gary’s 15th (all posthumously published) book. It’s called Jeremy Bannister, or the Ups and Downs of An Aspiring Novelist.

It’s an unusual book because Gary wrote every chapter the same length–one chapter to a page. It’s about a writer who wants to become a “big shot” novelist.

Perhaps you could relate?

Anyway, I’m mentioning this on the blog this month because of an inspired review posted by another writer friend of mine out who lives out in Oakland, California. His name is Brad Newsham. He’s written All The Right Places and Take Me With You (both unusual and fabulous books about travel) and a book called Free Ride, about his long campaign to give away one free taxi ride every day when he drove a cab in the Bay Area. (More about Free Ride here.)

Brad wrote the most creative review of Jeremy Bannister and, well, I wanted to post it here for you to check out, because it goes to that struggle of getting published.

And it’s brilliant. And it’s about Gary. And all of us, too.

Brad’s Review:

I, too, was once an aspiring writer AND THEN at nine a.m. on a weekday morning in February 1988 when I was thirty-six years old I was awakened by the Call. On the other end of the phone, the voice of a stranger, an editor at a New York publishing house: “I apologize for the early hour out there on the West Coast, Mister Newsham, but I just couldn’t wait any longer.”

Before she said another word, I already knew that “Mister Newsham’s” long-running knockabout life – dishwasher, construction worker, waiter, underground molybdenum miner, small-town newspaper reporter, world-circling journal-scribbling vagabond – was forever altered.

“I finished reading your manuscript last night and I want to publish it just the way it is.”

* * *

MY CONNECTION with Gary Reilly feels so primal that I sometimes forget that we are not actually related – cousins or something. We were born two years and half-a-country apart – Gary in 1949 in Kansas, me in 1951 in Maryland – and as young boys we were each hypnotized by the power of books and tantalized by fantasies of someday maybe even becoming authors ourselves. As we turned twenty, life swept us off to Asia – me to Afghanistan along the Hippie Trail, Gary to Vietnam with the U.S. Army. Later, back in the States again, Reilly immediately dedicated himself to writing, and, after another decade of knocking about, I did too. To support our habits and (crucial) avoid working for the Man, we both chose the well-worn path to literary stardom: cab driving. Gary in Denver, me in San Francisco.

* * *

A YEAR AFTER the Call, I walked into a clean, well-lit bookstore inside the busy train station in Washington, D.C., barely a filibuster’s throw from the Capitol’s gleaming dome, and was astonished to see a display – at the entrance, front and center, exhibit number one – featuring tall stacks of the latest masterpiece from my travel and writing idol Paul Theroux (“Riding the Iron Rooster” – Knopf, May 1989), side-by-side with matching stacks of my priceless firstborn (“All the Right Places” – Random House, February 1989). Beautiful hardback covers, facing the door.

* * *

I HAVE ALWAYS been a sluggish writer. During the thirty-plus years since that first book, I have squeezed out just two more. But Reilly, disciplined and relentless, finished twenty-five novels. He never tried to sell any of them, never groveled for an agent or haggled with a publisher. One by one he placed each completed manuscript into a trunk. And then, after forty years of unpublished, unpaid, unread labor, he died. Sixty-one years old. Cancer.

* * *

GARY REILLY WAS and forever will be a better writer than I – more cerebral, more dedicated to the craft, possessing a whole range of humor gears I’ve never even imagined having. He also had the prolific gene and the commercial potential so desperately craved by the publishing industry. And it rips me up to consider the hordes that would have been astounded by his writing. The late-night readers whose violent involuntary laughter would wake their bed partners. The jealous wordsmiths who would scour his Rubik’s-cube plotting and elegant phrasing, trying to hack Reilly’s brain. People precisely like me.

If only he had tried to share any of it.

* * *

FOLLOWING MY SHOCK at the train station, more nice surprises would come my way. Readings in packed bookstores. My name in newspapers and magazines. My voice on “All Things Considered.” My face live and nationwide on the “CBS Early Show.” Me, pulled to the side of an LA freeway to chat up the global audience of the BBC.

My fleeting fifteen seconds in the spotlight are a distant firefly in the rearview now. Next month I will turn seventy, and I have spent many of the intervening years involved in things other than writing. But as I look back I can see, with ever-increasing clarity, how becoming – ahem – “a published author” punched my ticket in ways I perhaps haven’t yet fully grasped, opened new doors for me (including doors to other previously unknown parts of my own psyche), and gave me permission to go out and rail at a few more of life’s countless other windmills.

* * *

UPON GARY’S DEATH in 2011, two of his closest friends were surprised to learn that he had bequeathed to them a trunk. After fourteen months of inventorying, absorbing, and assessing its contents, the friends felt compelled to – what else? – form a tiny publishing company and leak Reilly’s genius into the world. One book at a time, fifteen and counting. I have read all of them. Each one is brilliant.

* * *

FOR NEARLY a decade “placed them into a trunk” has vexed me. What writer does not want to be read while they are still alive? Reilly’s talent stamped him as an outlier, but his bizarre approach to the writing game anoints him with a mysterious-oddball-savant immortality. Each of his first fourteen books almost always struck me as “better” than the previous one. But how could a guy as smart and gifted and driven as Reilly not know what he had? Did he simply not care? Did he know something I have not yet learned? Was he playing some larger game? Did the cancer stop him short? What else did he have planned? Up his sleeve?

Ever since I began pondering the weird legend of Gary Reilly, I have shared countless imaginary beers with my own imagined version of him – my imaginary sitcom bro. Episode after episode here’s what I lay on him: “Dude! It was all right there for you! Stacks of your books at the entrances of bookstores everywhere. Movie deals. For sure, a tv series. A cult following – Gary Reilly tee-shirts and everything. You woulda needed a publicist, a personal assistant, you’da had your pick of agents – and you KNOW it! Right now you’d be signaling one of ‘your people’ to go fetch us another beer. Did something traumatic happen to you in childhood? In Vietnam? Is all that humor hiding something dark? Or are you just nuts? Dude… Dude…” My imaginary cousin/beer bro always chuckles. Just chuckles.

* * *

I USED TO BELIEVE that nearly everyone regarded cab driving as their fallback option: “If everything in my life goes down the tubes, I can always head over to Yellow Cab.” More recently it seems that everyone’s Plan Z has changed; “Well, I can always become a rich and famous author.”

Two months have passed since I finished reading Reilly’s fifteenth posthumously published novel, “Jeremy Bannister, or The Ups and Downs of an Aspiring Novelist.” This one should be required reading for anyone holding stock in Plan Z, for anyone enrolled in (or teaching) a writing course. (But I don’t think it’s the optimal starting place for newcomers to the Gary Reilly canon – this stuff is graduate level.) In hilarious depth, it explores, exposes, ridicules the role of ego in writing; the high falutin’ psychology of authorship; the power and magic and timeless allure of the profession. And proves beyond doubt that Reilly was achingly aware of the explosive difference between owning a trunk full of word-perfect manuscripts and becoming a published author.

* * *

WEEKS HAVE passed since I wrote the above. I’m stymied, stumped. Where do I go from here? What’s my point? Even after years with this fellow living in my head (it’s hard to believe that I never actually met him, never even heard of him until he’d been gone a while) I still have no clue…

But this morning I have instructed my people to get ahold of Gary’s people and arrange a beer summit as soon as our busy schedules will permit – and this time things are going to be different. This time I’m going to walk right up to the table where he’s sitting, waiting for me, and I’m going to reach down and grab him by the lapels of his tee-shirt, yank him to his feet and put my nose inches from his nose. “No more screwing around, pal! Now it’s personal – you and me. And TONIGHT you are going to show me every one of your cards. What’s your game? Dead for a decade and still toying with us readers! Tonight – got it? To-NIGHT!”

Then I’m gonna shove that sneaky so-and-so off toward the bar.

“Now go get me a beer, dammit!”