![]() ![]() In all, I've written five novels that remain, mercifully, unpublished. I'd written one in my late twenties, before shipping off to an MFA program, where I hacked through a second. I wish I could report that this was my first failed novel. I, too, had foisted this monstrosity upon a host of unlucky friends, as well as an agent who took six months to read what she could before informing me (in forty seconds) that we were best to part ways. In the three years preceding its composition, I myself had written a novel nearly as wretched as Larsen's. But "Larsen's Novel" was also a veiled confession. "What did I do?" Red declared, his eyes like the eyes of a deer whose eyes are caught in a set of headlights.īut the only answer he received was the slamming of his door, like a crack of thunder inside the eardrum of his heart. ![]() Her green eyes blazed like a forest fire ablaze. ![]() ![]() "I have never been so insulted in all my life," Rosetta Stone screeched. Larsen's novel tracks the exploits of Red Lawson, "a periodontist with the soul of a bluesman." A brief excerpt of Larsen's opus should suffice: Flem spends the rest of the story crafting increasingly far-fetched excuses to avoid reading the book. Twenty years ago I published a short story called "Larsen's Novel." The plot was simple: A man named Larsen unexpectedly presents his best friend, Flem, with the novel he's written. ![]()
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