Mentor: A Memoir by Tom Grimes Page A

only seven of us, and our fitful discussions lacked verve and acuity. Many stories were weak and I often found myself having nothing constructive to say. I endured the two hours, contributing few comments, concerned only with catching up with Frank at the Mill, or in the parking lot, where he often waited for me, his car idling in the dark, the heat turned up high or the defroster blowing against the icy windshield when I climbed in. One afternoon, a student—I can’t remember his name, but he was fair-haired, slight, wore glasses, and was from Canada—put up a story set in a jungle. The story’s cardinal sin, in lit-speak, was that it didn’t establish a set of rules by which the reader could understand and contextualize the story’s meaning. For example, when Kafka announces in the first sentence of The Metamorphosis that poor Gregor wakes up to find himself changed into a giant dung beetle, the reader knows that Gregor won’t be shopping at Wal-Mart. The less “realistic” a story is, the more precise, concrete, and convincing its details need to be. All fabulists observe this rule: Rushdie, Calvino, García Márquez. Unfortunately, my Canadian classmate did not, even though his story featured philosophizing chimpanzees and a talking piece of luggage. My written comments on a copy of his manuscript were restrained and polite. I wrote, “You lose me here” and “I don’t quite follow,” and concluded with “Hope these notes help” because I agreed with Kurt Vonnegut, who once compared writing a savage review of a novel to “using a sledgehammer to smash an ice cream sundae.” And as I didn’t want to hurt my classmate’s feelings, I remained quiet. When prompted by the instructor to offer a few words of advice, I kept my response brief. Then he smiled and said, “Come on. I know you have more thoughts than that.” Indeed, I did. And had the story not been thirty-eight tedious and confusing pages, I might have expressed them with more sympathy. But having wasted six hours trying to make sense of the manuscript, I’d lost all interest in being kind. For five minutes, I cited grammatical, logical, and structural mistakes. I asked what the suitcase looked like. Was it leather or canvas? Did it have snaps or a zipper? Since the story’s set in a jungle, why don’t you mention heat? Or macaws squawking. Or smells, like elephant shit, chimp feces, and rotting bananas. And if you insist on interpreting Nietzsche, it would help if you had a clue as to what he actually meant.
     
    Across the room, my classmate had adopted the classic posture of a workshop student who was having his or her work mercilessly criticized. He’d stationed one elbow on the table, pressed one fist against one cheek, and focused his eyes on his manuscript as he chiseled a hole in it with the tip of his pen. Silence followed my comments. Then the instructor said, “Anyone else?” When no one raised a hand, we passed our manuscript copies to the author.
     
    As others shuffled out of the room, a classmate said to me, “Jesus.”
     
    “You think he hates me?” I said.
     
    “You were pretty relentless.”
     
    “How did that happen? I didn’t even want to say anything.”
     
    “Yeah, well. I guess you failed.”
     
    Several weeks later, I submitted my novel’s latest chapter and during a subdued discussion regarding its countless flaws, my classmate didn’t say a word. When class ended, we twirled scarves around our necks, slipped into our coats, and tugged on our gloves. Outside, I made my way toward Frank’s snow-crusted car, its taillights glowing in the dark. I’d promised never to read criticism of my work. I could always return to it later. For the moment, maintaining the novel’s momentum was crucial. I couldn’t be distracted. Yet curiosity trumped discipline and I peeked. “Congratulations,” I read, “you’ve created the most despicable narrator in American literature!” Although I shouldn’t have been