Game of Tomes: An Alternate History of Brooklyn’s Literary Tribes
Despite the widespread carnage, nobody in America seemed to notice the war being waged in Brooklyn. An article in Slate about the conflict, titled “The Novel Is Dead and So Are Hundreds of Brooklyn Novelists,” briefly captured larger public interest, but for the most part it was only followed by four or five freelance journalists, who tweeted about it (and retweeted one another) several times a day.
But one person, all the way over in Britain, was paying very close attention. You see, when Martin Amis signed his first book deal as a young man, he did not receive riches—hence his continued affiliation with The New Statesman—but three dragon eggs. The editor at Faber & Faber who had given to him the gleaming eggs had thought they were artisanal stone, but Amis knew that not all that glitters is gold: sometimes it is real dragon eggs that will hatch baby dragons.
Eight years later they hatched, and Martin Amis suddenly possessed three baby dragons, which he named for his friends: Hitch, Rushdie, and McEwan. Initially, he thought he would use them to expose the “fairytale” of religion—for if St. George had slain ALL the dragons, what were these beasts?—but he soon set on a more daring and ambitious plan: when the dragons matured he would ride them into Brooklyn, claiming the borough for his own.
Dragons, of course, take decades to mature and train and Amis’s were not truly battle-ready until very recently. Though he considered invading the borough following Mailer’s death in 2007, he still feared that an invasion would weld the disparate groups into a group powerful enough to fight off three atheist dragons and their 60-year-old rider.
So, when war finally broke out, no one was happier than Amis. For months, he observed the chaos and the carnage from afar, waiting for the right moment to strike. As the sun set on Brooklyn Bridge Park, Amis knew it was time. He rode through the night and arrived on the battlefield with the slowly rising sun.
The surviving authors, carrying profound physical and psychological wounds, wouldn’t have been able to defeat Amis and his coven of dragons even if they had wanted to. Blank faced and drooling, they acquiesced to his wishes. “Bloody good show, chaps. But as they say, the hens have come home to roost. Or, more accurately in this instance, dragons,” Amis snidely soliloquized.
But to Amis’s surprise, the bloodied and broken authors weren’t angry or afraid—they were grateful. “Thank God!” shouted Lahiri. From the Dirtbags, a chorus of “Hallelujah!” rang out. At long last, an end to their strife! A worthy successor of the firm but just Mailer had arrived!
“Thank who?!” roared Amis. “Do you think me some genocidal maniac from a Bronze Age fable? You are not worthy of me!” His brow furrowed with rage, the Englishman pointed a single crooked finger over the span of the East River. He didn’t need to say another word; his thoughts were clear, and not just because Jennifer Egan had announced them to the survivors.The word was exile. Slobs and Middle-Brows, Mensheviks and Twee, they shuffled in a long line to the L train. They traveled to Grand Central and Penn Station, to JFK and LaGuardia, and from there shot out across the country. Shteyngart bid a weepy farewell to his old haunt in the semen-encrusted bowels of the Port Authority Bus Terminal.
Scattered to the winds, the survivors of the War of the Midlist Novelists wandered the earth, their clothes in tatters and their voices reduced to moans. Those who did not die for want of ‘real’ bagels gratefully ate the scraps from the table of American academia. It is rumored that they now teach freshman writing seminars at small colleges in Indiana and Iowa, Nebraska and North Dakota. They have no hope of tenure. They are the lucky ones.