Amateurs Read Free Page A

(“Untitled Play”) and scrolled to a stubbornly problematic scene. It had started out as play of a different type. After Jason moved out, she would come to this room late at night to improvise faintly satirical a cappella songs—the most inspired was “Kissing Bug”—and during these retreats she began to imagine herself as a witchy pre-Raphaelite hippie at the romantic center and on the musical periphery of an eccentric Scottish folk group. The group was closely patterned after the Incredible String Band, and at first she didn’t bother to change the names of the ISB’s joint leaders. She would pretend to play one of her songs for Robin or Mike, usually Robin, and he would demur: the song wasn’t ready yet, he would say,wasn’t right for the new album, though probably there would still be room for “Kissing Bug.” He said the name with a smirk. After their argument and his offstage ramble, a precarious reconciliation.
    These fantasies seemed to progress without calculation: Robin took on some of Jason’s qualities and was renamed—no, he simply became —Callum; Karyn recorded several of her improvisations on her phone and transcribed the best parts into a notebook; at a garage sale, she stumbled on a pair of suede lace-up knee boots and a peasant blouse that smelled, she was sure, like her protagonist, now named Anisette. After Karyn had memorized, effortlessly, much of what was clearly a play, she started typing it up.
    Now she fine-tuned Act Three’s showcase speech, checked her e-mail, and searched out interviews, reviews, and miscellanea pertaining to Eminent Canadians, Archer’s debut novel from a few years back. In the interviews he was sometimes charming (to write the book, he told two separate interviewers, he’d “taken pains as well as naps”), sometimes goofily pompous (“I want every sentence to stand as impossibly as a tower of blueberries,” he said on the podcast Dog-Eared, “and the only means to that end is draconian self-editing”). The reviews were by and large favorable though never ecstatic; a few were cutting ( Bookforum: “This is one of those novels in which characters are said to ‘walk right off the page.’ From there, apparently, they amble onto the set of a bad sitcom”). The blurbs, oddly, could also be called mixed. One nasty endorsement praised “a young writer who’s just loaded with talent,” inviting in-the-know readers to put ellipsis points or a full stop after “loaded.” Karyn teleported the book into her e-reader, retweeted a girlfriend’s so-so aperçu, and got up to thumb Maxwell’s toothbrush for moisture. She could tell from his sighs and rustles that he’d been lying awake for the past hour. “Did you brush your teeth?” she called out. From bed he answered that he thought so. “It would be a very recent memory,” she said.
    Back in the office or guest room, she used customer-rewards points to book a hotel room in Winnipeg, judged the word relished at the start of the Isle of Wight scene to be too breathless, and checked the Facebook wall of a systems consultant who’d spent part of the previous month introducing Karyn’s department to the new HRIS. He was home now in Lake Forest, Illinois, where he remained, among other faults, libertarian and married. She resisted looking carefully at his photos but gathered from abashed glimpses that his wife was plain. Bear’st thou her face in mind? is’t long or round? (She’d played Cleopatra in college.) Karyn was surprised by the wife’s plainness, since the consultant was quite good-looking. When considering men at first hand—when she wasn’t, that is, in the semi-ironic locker-pinup sphere of waxed Olympic swimmers or Hemsworth-as-Thor—she was ordinarily turned off by physiques denoting even a measured commitment to weightlifting, but the