Books: A Likely Story By Donald E. Westlake (1984)

 

"Supporting one and a half families is not the ideal situation for a man who makes his living as a writer --unless he comes up with a book so certain to be a bestseller that he doesn't have to worry about money ever again. (Or maybe Mary will find a fella of her own who can start contributing to the support). So Tom's surefire bestseller, The Christmas Book is begun, and Tom's troubles begin. His editor quits, Ginger doesn't want to get married, Mary won't give him a divorce, his new editor announces she's pregnant (and quits), the woman in an iron lung enters his life, and a third editor begins work on the book. Then things really get complicated."

A Likely Story is not a Donald E. Westlake crime novel, more of a skewering of the publishing industry. Tom is a freelance writer who is in need of easy money and believes a book about Christmas will sell itself. Who hates Christmas? But the road to the holidays is not as simple as it seems, as Tom is forced through several editors (according to David Bratman, who runs the site: Donald E. Westlake: an annotated bibliography, one of them “is based on the unsatisfactory editor Westlake had for the first edition of Kahawa”). So our narrator must constantly juggle this problem with issues of a personal nature, mainly his ex-wife who wants him back, a jealous girlfriend and a mistress, who happens to one of the after mentioned editors.

Not surprisingly, this is a very meta-novel, as Westlake takes the publishing industry to task --“Publishing is the only industry of where most of the employees spend most of their time stating with great self-assurance that they don’t know how to do their jobs.”

“I don’t know how to sell this, they complain, frowning as though it’s your fault. I don’t know how to package this. I don’t know what the market is for this book. I don’t know how we’re going to draw attention to this. In most other occupations, people try to hide their incompetence; only in publishing is it flaunted as though it were the chief qualification for the job.”

It also pairs well with Westlake’s take on the murder mystery genre in A Travesty, the novelette length tale that appeared in Double Feature book I read last month, if only because Westlake is great at these genre conventions. It’s a fun book, told in diary form, it’s also a light bedroom farce the studios used to put out in the late 1960s, early 70s. It’s certainly flawed in some respects, but it still had some laugh out loud moments.