Sweet agony

I’m reading Andrew Pyper’s The Killing Circle. In Part One, the reader is introduced to protagonist Patrick Rush, a “recently widowed journalist and failed novelist,” according to the blurb. 

In one of the best expressions of a writer’s envy I’ve ever read, Patrick explains why he got to hate reading the New York Times Review of Books:

“The reviews themselves rarely mattered. In fact, I usually couldn’t finish reading the remotely positive ones. As for the negative ones, they too often proved to be insufficient salves to my suffering. Even the snarkiest vandalism, the baldest runs at career enders, only acted as reminders that their victims had produced something worth pissing on. Oh, to awaken on a rainy Sunday and refuse to get out of bed on account of being savaged in the Times! What a sweet agony that would be, compared to the slow haemorrhaging in No Man’s Land it was to merely imagine creating words worthy of Newspaper of Record contempt.” (p. 20-21, Seal Books, August 2009).

Before his life goes to hell in a hand basket—as lives do in thrillers—Patrick joins a writing circle. Da da…DAA!

Perhaps my fellow Restless Writers would like to pick up a copy. I also recommend The Wildfire Season by the same author.

Maria