Chapter Twenty-Eight:  A Literary Prize

After two years of calls, alerts, leaks, contracts and internet avalanches, Localad had forgotten that life-changing news could still possess a stamp.

The National Calder Prize for Debut Fiction Writing had shortlisted his book, Purradise.

The nomination letter arrived by mail in early summer, on stationery from a national literary foundation that Localad had recognized only distantly, from the spines of prize-winning novels he'd shelved over the years without ever imagining his own name occupying the same category, and he read it three times at the counter before he trusted that it wasn't some elaborate mistake.

He read and re-read the letter, while checking for any giveaway mistakes to tell him it was a fraud. Then he checked the address, the letterhead, the signature and the possibility that Mrs. Alvarez had somehow acquired professional looking stationery.

She had not.

The foundation’s director had confirmed it, in person, by telephone.

His self-published manuscript, had been entered for consideration, he would later learn, not by its mere existence but by an independent bookseller in Chicago who had submitted it under pressure on her customers' over enthusiastic recommendation and it had now been shortlisted for the foundation's annual prize for debut fiction.

“An independent bookseller submitted the novel,” the director explained. “The judges were unanimous that its publication history should not exclude it.”

“Unanimous?”

“About shortlisting it. Judges remain judges that way. They preserve any disagreements for the final lunch.”

"They don't usually consider self-published books," the foundation's program director explained, when he'd called to confirm the letter was genuine and not some cruel prank engineered by an internet troll who'd followed the viral saga too closely. 

"We made an exception this year. The judges felt the book's journey, and, frankly, its quality independent of that journey, warranted a look outside our usual submission process. I want to be clear that being shortlisted doesn't guarantee anything. But the committee was sufficiently moved by your story. Genuinely moved. Several of them mentioned the ending specifically."

She told him several readers had explicitly praised the ending.

The ending. The quiet thing. The thing that had been labelled far too internal, too small, too difficult to market in fifteen seconds unless someone shouted it over falling masonry. who would have guessed?

The ending. Localad sat with that word for a long moment after hanging up the phone, thinking about a soundstage eighteen months earlier, about a shouted line over a collapsing sky, about a stranger's review at three in the morning that had understood, better than a roomful of executives, exactly what had been lost in translation. And thinking, now, about a panel of literary judges who had read the actual page, the quiet one, the one he'd been too afraid to write for two full years, and had been moved by precisely the thing Trent Vance had once called "a little quiet for the kind of finale a movie like this needs."

Localad thanked her, hung up and stood behind the counter holding the receiver.

Marjory entered with a box of stock.

“What happened?”

He told Marjory immediately and handed her the letter. She read it. Then she sat on the nearest pile of atlases and cried without apology nor any apparent embarrassment, holding a stack of paperbacks she'd been in the process of shelving when he told her.

Localad became alarmed. “Are you all right?”

“No. Something truly lovely has just happened to the man I love and my face has completely misunderstood the assignment.”

He sat beside her.

"You should tell your father," she said once she'd composed herself.

“He’s dead.”

“I remain aware of that. I know he's not here. But you should say it out loud to someone, anyone, who isn't me, even if it's just to the air."

That night Localad stood on the shop’s back steps in the dark, overlooking the harbour. The dark water moved against the pilings. The municipal clock displayed the wrong time with a lifelong display of confidence.

He said the words out loud to no one in particular.

“I finished it, Dad,” he said.

The words felt foolish until they did not.

I finished it, Dad. It's actually quite good. Someone besides me finally thinks so, in writing, on paper, from people who don't know anything about the movie at all.

And he felt, in saying it, something had finally settled in him, that had been unsettled since the day he'd watched the plane lift off from the coastal runway eighteen months earlier, leaving him feeling totally unmoored from everything he understood about who he was.

He had imagined saying this as triumph. Instead, it arrived as permission.

For years he had treated success as a verdict on whether his quiet life had secretly mattered. Now he understood that the life had mattered before the verdict. The prize could recognise the book. It could not re-create the twenty years, the grief, the cracked bell, Marjory’s kitchen table or the mornings in which he wrote before anyone was even watching.

He was not unmoored anymore. He understood, standing on those steps, exactly who he was, and it was, gratifyingly, almost exactly who he'd always hoped he might turn out to be. Not a Hollywood success story, not a cautionary tale either, but simply a writer, the kind who finishes the hard book and lets it stand or fall on its own quiet terms, and who had, in the end, gotten to find out that his terms were good enough.

The nomination spread through the media.

The news of the nomination also spread quickly through the same internet networks that had carried everything else about the book's strange journey, and for a few weeks, the literary prize coverage briefly eclipsed even the viral contrast videos, editorial pages running content about self-published fiction's growing legitimacy, about authorial rights in the age of franchise adaptation, about a small-town bookseller whose stubborn insistence on his own unedited work had somehow outlasted a film with two hundred million dollars of marketing behind it.

Other think-pieces appeared about self-publishing over in house publication, creator rights and the triumph of literature over franchise machinery. One article even described Localad as “a fierce public critic of Hollywood excess,” despite his having publicly criticised almost nothing and privately once apologised to a parking meter.

Desmond called, the week the nomination became public, and Localad, after a moment's hesitation, answered.

"Congratulations," Desmond said, and he sounded, for once, entirely without agenda, without a pitch, without a note attached explaining why something needed tightening.

"I mean that. I read the actual book again last week, the whole thing, cover to cover, for the first time since that broken-down car outside your shop. It's a lot better than I remembered it was. And even way back then, I remembered it being pretty extraordinary."

"Thank you," Localad said, and found, to his own mild surprise, that he meant it without any reservation.

“I'd also like to add, I’m sorry,” Desmond added.

Localad waited. Not because the apology was inadequate. Because he wanted to let it remain uncomplicated.

“I know,” he said at last.

This was not forgiveness in the cinematic sense. No music rose. Nothing was erased. It was simply an acknowledgement that guilt had arrived and found the correct address.

The following morning, Mr. Okafor placed his morning newspaper firmly on the counter. Localad’s photograph was on page three.

“Prize nomination,” Mr. Okafor said.

“Yes.”

“Good for you.”

He paid for his paper.

At the door he turned back to Localad.

“Your father would have complained the photograph was too small.”

Localad laughed.

“Yes,” he said. “I think he bloody would have.”

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