Heffner emerged from his professionally attentive silence.
“I can’t believe you’re talking about The Good Novel,” he said in a voice that no longer held any professional tones of distance or authority. “I know you! I’m a member. You’ll find my name in your files.”
Francesca felt a wave of gratitude toward her nephew, the prefect with a good heart. And a fine intelligence, she thought, before continuing.
It was on that day in January, 2004, that she found out that there was someone else who thought Cormac McCarthy was the greatest author alive, and that the ensuing conversation decided her, without further ado, to undertake a project she had only dreamt about up to that point. Because she could tell from Ivan’s expression that she had just found the perfect bookseller. She would be staying in Méribel for eight days.
Ivan and Francesca saw each other every day. They met at the Mont Vallon, one of the resort’s biggest hotels. The first evening, once they had agreed to continue their plan of action the next day, Francesca saw Van sit up straight on his chair and look around for the waiter, and she told him, simply, that she had a running account at the hotel. Van allowed himself to be treated. He explained with an equal lack of self-consciousness that he had just enough money to live on, and even then only if he did his own cooking at home, at every meal.
Francesca was staying near the Belvédère in a chalet—a family chalet, she said, without going into details, so Van couldn’t tell whether she was referring to its size or its origin. She was there alone during the week. That is, she explained, when Van offered to walk her home after their first working dinner and she pointed to the gleaming black car waiting outside against the background of snow and dark night, alone with the caretaker couple.
For a split second Ivan mused that he wouldn’t have minded that job as caretaker. Too late: he’d just been hired to open The Good Novel as soon as possible. Francesca had signed a check for his first month of salary. They had agreed that Van would hand in his resignation to Mr. Bono the very next day. Francesca would take care of the issue of notice: she knew the arguments that were likely to make an employer back down. February, March, April, May, June, July, August: she counted on her fingers. Seven months: that ought to be enough for The Good Novel to be ready to open at the end of the summer, before the fall season’s huge crop of books.
“Whether it’s before or after the new fall books,” Van pointed out, “shouldn’t matter one way or the other for a bookstore like that.”
“That’s true,” said Francesca. “You’re right. But you know what they’re like in France: in October and November, they have these sort of ‘fiction weeks’ where people are reminded that literature has a certain importance. It would be a pity not to be open by then.”
On that first evening, they remade the world, bookstores, and publishing, and they talked about all the books they loved. They exchanged their telephone numbers. Francesca made Ivan spell his name. “Georg,” said Van. “It’s German. My father pronounced it the German way, go figure. But if my mother knew why, she never told me. The pronunciation of my name, that’s the happiest thing I inherited from my father. Ge-org, in two syllables, it sounds like Gay-org, like an organ in a good mood. A real lifeline.”
They spent the second evening talking about the type of books they’d have on offer at The Good Novel. Francesca was opting for a very strict selection: novels, nothing but novels.
“The only way to break through the general confusion is to stand out thanks to the simplicity of our concept. The Good Novel sells good novels: that has to be clear.”
Van found her approach somewhat rigid. If the criterion for selection was literary quality, he felt sure there were a number of narrative texts that were just as good as the finest novels.
“There are even some authors whose stories or memoirs are even better than their novels, I mean better from a literary standpoint, Jean Rolin, for example.”
He also wanted to include poetry, short story collections, and perfectly crafted essays.
“There aren’t that many.”
Francesca stood firm. In addition to novels, she’d agree to short stories and narratives, but nothing else.
Van frowned: “So we won’t have any books by Pierre Michon?”
“Oh come on,” said Francesca, lifting her hands from the table, “we will try not to be too stupid! We will have all of Pierre Michon, all the time, that’s obvious. Vies minuscules and Maîtres et serviteurs, just to mention those two, which are my favorites, you could categorize them as short stories, and the other ones, Rimbaud, le fils or La Grande Beune, as novellas. Or rather, we shouldn’t say anything. We’ll display them prominently, and that’s it. There are books that you can’t categorize under any genre.”
But as for Lévi-Strauss and Foucault, she would not budge. No essays at The Good Novel. The store was about to become one of two or three thousand bookstores in a huge city. It was not the first one to specialize. After all, there were bookstores that sold only science fiction, or history, or German-language books, and nowhere were all books sold. If people were looking for essays, they would find them elsewhere.
“And what about recent publications?” asked Van. “Will they have a place at The Good Novel?”
“I don’t see why we should exclude great books just because they’re new. To be exact: in France maybe ten or twenty great novels are published each year.”
“It’s going to be a titanic job to find them in the onslaught of fall books. And you know as well as I do that the few books worth saving are rarely the ones that get headline coverage.”
“Another tactic might be to ignore the whole new book parameter altogether. We could decide not to order books when they come out, to let other bookstores sell them while they’re hot, and then we’ll look at them afterwards, when they’ve cooled down and are still just as good.”
“Do you know the proportion of new books in a general bookstore’s sales figures?”
“A huge part, I imagine.”
“New books account for nearly 80 percent of an ordinary, general bookstore’s sales. Which is why publishers are so keen on sending out their titles automatically—it’s an irresistible invention on their part, to send their forthcoming books, en masse, every week, and the booksellers needn’t feel obliged to subscribe, but they do anyway because they’re given easy payment methods and discounts and the right to return the unsold books.”
“Van, The Good Novel will not be an ordinary bookstore. That’s our challenge. Our customers won’t be ordinary customers. The people we’ll see at our store will be people who never buy a book because it just came out, unless they adore the author already, but for other reasons that have nothing to do with its pub date, because they couldn’t care less about that. They’ll be the people who go into a bookstore knowing what they want to buy, and they go straight to the bookseller and say, I’d like Titus Alone, by Mervyn Peake. People who won’t be surprised if we tell them the book is not in stock—the opposite would have surprised them—and who’ll order it without hesitating, because they don’t mind if it comes three or eight days later. And that doesn’t mean they won’t buy two or three other books as well before they leave the shop, books they hadn’t previously thought of buying.”
Van grew thoughtful.
“It’s a challenge, like you said.”
“A wager. But you agree, if we want to open The Good Novel it’s because we don’t want to open a bookstore like all the others? And then, let’s not complicate things. All we need is to think of it as a specialized bookstore for everything to be clear. In nautical or art bookstores, the new books must only make up a small proportion of sales.”
On the third evening, they discussed how the novels would be chosen.
Van had been dreading this moment to some degree. It was the crux of the matter, and he saw only one solution. Luckily—but as the term is used here, the notion of luck contains not the faintest trace of random chance that it usually implies—Francesca had thought about it and she had the same idea as Van. There was only one way: selection could not be entrusted to a single person, or even two, that would have been too arbitrary. A committee of several writers would have to be put together, chosen writers each of whom would submit a list of their three hundred favorite novels, and the bookstore would retain not only the titles that everyone had chosen, but everyone’s lists in its entirety, excluding any duplicates, obviously.
“Three hundred?” said Van.
Three hundred titles, at least, for each elector, insisted Francesca, for reasons of methodology. If you asked each writer for fifty novels, you ran the risk of having, each time, the same fifty novels. In order to come up with other novels in addition to the indisputable masterpieces, you had to incite the committee members to suggest great unknown works: and they would only do that if they could propose more titles than the fifty obvious suggestions. The two hundred and fifty other titles were the ones that mattered, for they would make the difference between The Good Novel and all the other good bookstores that existed.
In other words, three hundred titles per committee member—two hundred and fifty, in fact. How many people should make up the committee? Six? Eight? Ten? Twelve? Dinner on the fourth evening began with this issue. A vital one. Would The Good Novel sell a thousand novels? Two thousand? Ten thousand? How many great novels existed in the French language—including translations? (For on that very evening it became clear, and therefore imperative, that the novels would be in French, and the bookstore in a French-speaking country.)
Van and Francesca hesitated for several hours. As they did not set themselves any limits, either in time or in space, and did not assign any more importance to the present day than to centuries gone by, which were incredibly rich, and no countries were excluded, no matter how tiny, even if they had only one great novel translated into French, it became clear that the selection was going to be considerable. There were thousands of great novels available in the French language.
“It all hinges on what we mean by great novel,” said Francesca.
“That’s what I was going to say,” confirmed Van. “Let’s leave aside the obvious choices for now, the two thousand or so blatant masterpieces. Where things start to get complicated is for the other great novels. I’d like to take a different approach. I think we have to ask ourselves where we’re going to draw the line, and our electors will have to ask themselves the same thing on a case-by-case basis. Take, for example, Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate. Do we order it for the store or not?”
“No,” said Francesca. “It’s a fabulous book, I’ve read it several times, it made me laugh out loud, you learn more about England than if you stayed there for months. But we’ll have better books. Precisely because we’ve inherited from the English a taste for understatement—and for that reason alone—we won’t be calling our bookstore The Great Novel.”
Ivan thought for a moment.
“How many great novels exist in French, do you think? Thousands, but how many? Let me formulate the question yet another way: we needn’t be afraid of being arbitrary, for our choice of books will be. Let’s be downright arbitrary. We’ll settle on a number that seems a good place to start, and we’ll take it from there.”
“Three thousand?” suggested Francesca.
“A bit more. In my little cellar, if I filled it to bursting, I could get eighteen hundred books, roughly. I can picture at least double that at The Good Novel, just to start.”
“Between three thousand five hundred and four thousand?”
“Exactly. That represents roughly the capacity of an old-fashioned bookstore—that is, the old-fashioned size of the bookstore, you see what I mean?”
“Perfectly. Let’s start with that. And are we even sure of finding three thousand five hundred great novels?”
“If you multiply the total body of literature written in French and translated into French by the four and a half centuries since the invention of the printing press: yes, I think so.”
Of course the stock would have to change and develop. Every year, their consultants on the committee would have to nominate twenty or twenty-five new titles. Every year, the faithful customers of The Good Novel would also find two hundred or so new titles. Did that mean that two hundred others would be withdrawn?
“No,” said Francesca. “We’ll expand. It would be fatal if our first selection were insufficient. We’ll grow as much as we need to.”
Those were the words that Van had been waiting for. Finally, for the first and last time he brought up the issue of financing.
“Don’t worry about that,” said Francesca. “Just get it into your head that the financing is being taken care of, no matter what.”
“Even if we operate at a loss?”
“Whatever those losses might be, and to the end of my days,” smiled Francesca. “I’m forty-seven years old.”
But she understood that for Ivan such vague verbal reassurance might not really be enough for him to embark on such an adventure.
Van exclaimed in protest.
“I know,” she said, as if he hadn’t said anything, “I’ll endow the bookstore with a sizeable capital; it will all be legal. And with full guarantees where you’re concerned.”
“Don’t worry about that.”
“Yes, I’m committing myself.”
“If you only knew how much I trust you. And the kinds of risks I’ve taken in the past. With you I feel safe for the first time in my life. Besides, safety is a pretty paltry word to describe such a change of plan. I am certain you’re going to help me reach my true self. Forgive me all the grand words.”
“We may fail.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t think so, either, but I’m asking you to bear in mind that failure is a possibility.”
Ivan promised. It was late, and they parted.
On the fifth evening, no sooner had they sat down on either side of their usual table than Van pulled from his pocket two sheets of paper covered with figures, and put them down in front of him.
“We made a mistake yesterday. Nothing serious,” he said. “A mistake in our calculations.”
“About the lists?”
“Yes. If you recall, we started with the idea of a dozen or so people on the committee, and we would ask each of them for three hundred titles. From there we moved on to another problem, the total number of books we’d need at the start, and we came up with roughly three thousand five hundred to four thousand. But that doesn’t work. I woke up during the night. I did some calculations in my head. I had the feeling we had gone too quickly with our figures. I finally got up and took a pencil and a sheet of paper.”
He pointed to the two sheets on the table.
“It’s very simple,” he said. “The error is with the number of titles to be given each elector. Let’s suppose the committee consists of eight members. We started with the idea that of the three hundred titles, our eight committee members might have fifty in common. Now that makes a total of fifty plus eight times two hundred and fifty, which makes two thousand five hundred books, and that’s not enough.
“Another thing, even more important, that I realized during the night is that we did not take into account the titles that might not be mentioned eight times, but between two and seven times. At a rough estimate, at least half of the titles will be mentioned several times. The difficulty is knowing how many will be mentioned twice, how many three times, and so on up to eight. One thing is for sure, to reach a minimum of three thousand five hundred books in the bookstore, we have to ask each member for six hundred titles.”
“Six hundred!”
“If half of each list is mentioned several times, that makes eight times three hundred that won’t make two thousand four hundred titles in all but, let’s say, one thousand two hundred. To those titles you have to add eight times the three hundred titles that were only mentioned once. Two thousand four hundred plus one thousand two hundred, that makes three thousand six hundred titles.”
“What we don’t know is the half of the lists made up of titles that will be quoted several times. Will they be mentioned twice? Three or four times? Or five, six, seven times? Or eight? How can we find out? Did you calculate the way they might be distributed?”
“I spent half an hour on it, in my pajamas, frozen, before I realized I wouldn’t manage. It’s not an easy calculation to make. I began by reasoning as if the books were equivalent in units: with interchangeable units, you can use probability theory. But I understood pretty quickly that I was getting off track, precisely because novels are not undifferentiated, not at all. On the contrary, they contain greatly differing values and levels of notoriety. I went back to bed once I decided to call Serge for help.”
“Serge?”
“My friend Serge is a math graduate so passionate about the mountains that he finally decided to settle in Méribel. Well, it was actually more complicated than that. At the age of fifty, he was tired of high school and high school students. As for his wife, she was tired of him and she’d just left him for a Hellenist. He took early retirement and moved into a small apartment he had inherited from his father. In addition to mathematics and peaks, he’s passionate about books. I met him at the bookstore.
“This morning, first thing, I called him. I didn’t tell him anything about our project. I talked to him about a newspaper that had asked me to imagine the ideal bookstore. Here’s the problem, I explained: you’ve got a selection committee of eight members, and you need to have four thousand titles in the store, and you know that some titles will be chosen several times, how many do you need from each committee member?
“He called me back an hour later. He put his finger on the problem. According to him, mathematics cannot provide the answer. If all the books were equal, it would be possible, he explained, confirming my suspicion. But not all books are equal. Montaigne’s Essais should be mentioned eight times, but it is impossible to know in advance how often Le Cousin Pons or Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations will be chosen. Once? Twice? Or more?”
“I see,” said Francesca. “We are left with trial and error. We’ll ask for our lists and then we’ll do the math.”
“One thing is for sure, three hundred titles is not enough if we have eight electors.”
“And six hundred?”
“With six hundred suggestions per elector, we should come up with four thousand books.”
Long afterwards, when Van related these discussions to me, they seemed technical and austere. Van assured me of the contrary. He had recalled extraordinary moments. Time flew by with the quickness of thought, their project was coming to light, and its credibility was at stake.
“That’s an enormous amount, six hundred,” said Francesca. “Who will go along with that?”
“It’s not as much as all that, you’ll see. I’ve been thinking about it since this morning. Of the six hundred titles, let’s say that three hundred of them might be French. Does it seem impossible to you to make a list of the three hundred greatest French novels?”
“Well, difficult in any case. You have to have read a lot.”
“By definition. The committee members won’t be kids. We have to think of people who are known to have been avid readers from childhood. We’ll find them.”
Francesca nodded, silent.
“We may indeed get up to three hundred fairly quickly,” she continued. “In my head I’ve been drawing up a list of all the French novelists of the twentieth century who should be represented, and it goes quickly. Proust, Colette, Cendrars, Segalen, Renard, Gide, Drieu, Céline, Aragon, Giono, Bernanos, Malraux, Mauriac, Gracq . . .”
“You’re mentioning the most famous,” said Van. “Don’t forget Calet, Dietrich, Fargue, Jouhandeau, Reverzy, Bove, Vialatte . . . Over four centuries, we’ll have no difficulty at all in finding a hundred and fifty or two hundred great French authors. And for many of those authors, you can’t possibly limit yourself to just one work. I can’t see any other way but to include all of Stendhal, all of Flaubert, ten by Balzac at least, ten by Zola . . .”
“And more recently, too, there is no end of choice,” said Francesca. “I’m thinking of all the novels that have come out in French in the last twenty years and that I love, there are loads of them, including Modiano, Michon, Laurrent, Gailly, Echenoz, Oster, Bobin, the two Rolins, Grenier, Roubaud, Rio, Bianciotti, Benoziglio, Bergounioux, Deville, Laclevetine, Cholodenko, Visage, Rousseau, Raphaële Billetdoux, Sylvie Germain, Annie Ernaux, Régine Detambel, Nicole Caligaris, Maryline Desbiolles—” she took a breath—“Carrère, Millet, Chevillard, Holder, di Nota—”
“Listen,” Van stopped her. “For tomorrow, we can make up our own lists. Let’s try. Let’s see how long it takes us, and if we get up to three hundred.”
“Very well. Let’s try. Now for foreign literature. Three hundred great foreign novels, that’s not very much either, given the number of countries involved. Thirty Italian novels, thirty Spanish, thirty German, thirty Belgian and Dutch, thirty English, thirty American . . .”
“North American,” corrected Van. “In fact, thirty is nothing for the countries you have just mentioned. Each of them ought to be represented by three hundred novels. But, as our bookstore will be French-speaking, let’s keep that as our basis. Thirty Latin American novels, thirty Russian, thirty from Eastern Europe—Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, thirty from the South Slav countries and the Balkans—Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria . . .”
“. . . Albania. Ismael Kadare’s Albania.”
“Greece, Turkey . . .”
“Thirty from China, and from Japan . . .”
“. . . from Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia.”
“Thirty from Iran, Iraq, and Syria.”
“Thirty from Israel and Egypt, thirty from New Zealand and Australia . . .”
“Let’s stop there,” said Ivan. “We’ve gone way over our total. You see, six hundred titles seems like a huge amount, but if you take into account the literary heritage of the entire globe, it’s nothing. I even wonder if, when we draw up this list, we won’t find the ceiling of six hundred low. I’m not so sure that sticking to that figure will be so easy. The difficult thing may be to come up with only six hundred titles.”
“Let’s try,” said Francesca again. “Will you have time between today and tomorrow?”
On the sixth evening, they showed up with their drafts. Neither one of them had finished the list, it was impossible in one day, but they no longer wondered whether it was possible. Van had found inspiration on his shelves in the basement, and in the huge booksellers’ yearbook—he called it his Bible—where all the books in print were listed. Francesca had spent the day on the Internet, every author made her think of another, one name led to another.
They got back to the issue of the committee. What would be a good number of electors? Without talking about it any further, on the basis of a common intuition they agreed upon eight.
“We have to choose eight great novelists,” said Francesca.
“Great prose writers.”
“Who are hooked on novels, and won’t be intimidated by the figure six hundred.”
“Exactly. Setting the limit high will help to promote an excellent choice. The ones who play along will be best at it.”
“We’ll have to find people who have read everything.”
“By definition.”
“The hardest thing will be to find people whose tastes are not too similar. Who are not too much alike.”
The electors mustn’t influence each other, said Francesca. Van: The best would be if each of them goes off to work on their own. Francesca: And what if they didn’t even know who the others were? Van: Keep it secret, of course. If the makeup of the committee is kept secret that would make it easier, it would guarantee the members’ freedom of choice. Secrecy would avoid any pressure. Francesca: And our electors would be truly sincere. Without the secrecy, they would find it hard not to include books by friends on their list, or by people who are on the juries of literary prizes. Van: Yes, we must insist upon the fact that the books on sale at The Good Novel have been chosen by members of a selection committee whose identities have been kept secret. Francesca: But we can say that they are writers. Van: Nothing more. For example, we mustn’t say how many of them there are.
And they began to suggest names.
“I can’t imagine the committee without Paul Néant,” began Francesca.
“That goes without saying,” said Van. “Or without Ida Messmer.”
“I was thinking of her. I despise pornography, but I know of no one who writes more beautiful erotica.”
When they saw that the same authors were springing to mind, they each jotted down on a piece of paper the names of the twelve Francophile authors for whom they had the greatest respect. They compared their lists. Of the twenty-four nominated, they had eight in common. They decided to begin with the eight whom or both liked.
“What shall we do in case they refuse, to make sure they respect the secrecy?” wondered Francesca suddenly. “How can we approach a candidate and explain to him or her what we expect, that is, what the committee will be, then if they refuse, be sure they’ll tell no one about the project?”
“That’s not really the problem,” said Van. “I’m thinking out loud. Each writer will be sounded out separately. Whether they refuse or accept they won’t know who the committee members are. The only thing they might say if they refuse and then talk about it would be: I’m not on the committee. And we’ll also ask those who agree to be on the committee to deny that they are if anyone asks them about it. No,” pursued Van, “the problem would be if one of the electors played along for a while, and then withdrew. There, he would have to be silent as the tomb.”
“That’s not a problem either,” said Francesca in turn. “Once the committee is put together, all it takes is to make sure that the members never meet one another, and never find out who the others are. If one of them leaves, he can say, I was a member, but we can deny it. How could he possibly prove his claim, anyway?”
That meant that any written correspondence between the protagonists must be confidential, and destroyed upon receipt.
No, they would do without anything in writing as much as possible. They would avoid the Internet—everyone knows that it’s accessible to all and sundry. They would communicate by telephone, using code names.
“We could give each of the eight members a cell phone,” said Francesca. “It could be used exclusively for communicating about The Good Novel.”
Van was reticent.
“A cell phone would probably be the surest way, but the problem would be eight contracts drawn up at the same time by you or me. It would be better if each of them used their usual cell phone, that way our conversations about the bookstore would be buried among all the others.”
“Would you like another coffee?” asked Francesca.
“My third? Sure, I need it.”
Then they talked about location. Where did the bookstore stand the best chance of finding its audience, given the fact they would only be selling books in French? The answer was so obvious that, without daring to say as much, they forced themselves to mention Brussels, Lyon, Geneva.
“Perhaps the simplest would be Paris, after all,” said Francesca after five minutes had gone by.
“But where in Paris?” asked Van. “Given the cost of commercial leases . . .”
Francesca was the co-owner, with some cousins, of a building on the rue Dupuytren, right by the Odéon.
“A fine seventeenth-century building,” she said. “We could occupy the ground floor and the second-floor.”
“You could hardly find better,” agreed Van.
On the back of her draft list, Francesca made a sketch of the premises. The street, the entrance, the rear courtyard, with its magnolia tree; there was already a display window; the layout of the rooms on the second floor.
“And it’s available?” asked Van.
A few years earlier, the cousins had requested that the building, undivided at that point, be shared out in lots. Francesca was the only one who had a marked preference for the commercial space on the ground floor and the adjoining apartment on the second floor. She had an idea in mind. There were several artists she admired and who she knew were having difficulty breaking through: a painter, a photographer, and two sculptors, and she wanted to give them the opportunity to exhibit at a gallery . . . She hesitated: “Something not expensive,” she said. “You see what I mean?”
Ivan understood perfectly. Not expensive at all.
“I read something in the papers that I found enchanting,” continued Francesca. “Oe, the great Japanese novelist, founded a literary prize where he is the only member of the jury. He is not at all convinced by the leading critics, and he wants to act as a counterweight and support unknown authors.”
Francesca had begun to redecorate the gallery on the ground floor. The work was fairly far along when the project suddenly changed.
“I was talking to a friend about it, and she said to me, That’s my dream. I moved her in there. I didn’t have the choice, I’ll explain why. She was a woman who had been on her own, for a long time, and she was bitter. She had just been diagnosed with cancer. When her lover at the time found out, he packed up and left: a married man, a very sporadic lover, but the only man in her life. She was a sociologist, an academic, she was dissatisfied with teaching and she said she’d gone astray because her real vocation was art. She had carte blanche on the rue Dupuytren to exhibit what she liked. I didn’t always agree with her choices, I hope she didn’t realize. But that wasn’t the issue. She had no success whatsoever. And it wasn’t enough to give my friend her smile back, either. She died last spring, feeling bitter toward me. I haven’t had the heart to do anything with the space.”
“And now?” asked Van. “Would you use it, the space?”
“It would be ridiculous not to.”
They talked about the space: how to arrange it, the layout, neighborhood traffic. The easiest would be to group the novels by country and alphabetical order. Or chronological? wondered Van. All three, proposed Francesca. “For example: England, nineteenth century, and the author, alphabetically. Van, what do you think about armchairs, in bookstores? In Switzerland and Germany, you often see sofas among the shelves.”
They got up from dinner feeling light-headed. The next day they shared with each other the fact they’d had an awful time getting to sleep, from all their excitement, and joy.