Workshop
“A successful poet… once told me that the only thing that would have been more devastating for his mother and father to hear was if he’d decided to become a professional mime.” So notes Jack Hercules Sheahan, a graduate of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the narrator of John McNally's bitter, funny, satirical novel After the Workshop (Counterpoint, 2010, 320 pages, $16).
Perhaps the next-most-devastating thing to electing to become a serious poet would be to become a serious writer. No, wait – failing to become a serious writer. That comes with its own special flavor of doom. Jack’s career as a would-be novelist has officially fizzled, and, to add insult to injury, he hangs around Iowa City serving as a media escort for successful writers on book tours. His days are a numbing procession of “handling” prima donna writers, observing each new crop of MFA students desperate to sell their souls for a publishing deal, and then, typically, drinking himself to sleep.
Things take a turn for the bizarre (and the improbable) when a lying memoirist, an author suffering from “postpartum psychosis,” a resurfaced J.D. Salinger-type, a stoner neighbor, an ex-fiancée who might just be opening the door to reconciliation, and the worst kind of hipster writer crowned the next-big-thing by the Manhattan publishing gods converge on Jack’s world. The novel offers a thoroughly jaded look at our Midwest neighbor’s “fiction factory” and an extended, drunken misadventure in the frigid depths of winter that may remind you of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys. —Byron Kerman
