Van had provided her with the addresses of the publishers and wholesalers. She spent the entire day Tuesday driving to their warehouses.
Some publishers still had stores in Paris, and Francesca began with them. Every time she had more than fifteen books in her possession, she would swing back by the bookstore. She felt as if she were carrying gold nuggets around, and you can imagine that with fifteen or more gold nuggets in your possession you’re complicating your life somewhat, and you are overly on the alert, and you get the impression that traffic lights stay red longer than green, and you can’t get out of your car without walking around it twice to make sure the doors and windows are locked, not to mention the hatchback.
Once she had done a first round, at two o’clock, Francesca headed for Ivry (Volumen, Sodis, Union-Diffusion). She came back to the rue Dupuytren, then popped over to Vanves (Hachette), then back to the Odéon, once again.
Whenever possible, while she was at it she would take four or five copies of the title to be restocked. Eduardo, one of the Cinéor drivers whom she had requisitioned for the occasion, wasted his breath telling her what he had heard from Oscar that very morning, that she would only have to do this once, because as of the next day all the restocking would be taken care of automatically on a daily basis, and the books would be delivered by couriers. Francesca wanted to do her best, and her best, on that particular day, seemed proportional to her happiness, which was abundant.
How thin she is, thought Ivan, watching her climb out of the car outside the bookstore for the fifth time.
At the end of the afternoon, she left again for Arpajon, where a friend of Van’s, a retired bookseller, had put together an incomparable stock of old books, which he only sold reluctantly when it was absolutely necessary. For the first time in a long while, as she drove through the dense green meadows and the yellow fields of wild mustard, she felt as if she were no longer being supported but was being drawn by something powerful, she was full of volition, against any temptation to let herself sink. Her strength, she would tell Van much later on, was nothing more nor less than the hope of, at last, attaining that goal which had become so important for her—not to succeed in doing something, but simply to do something good.
Every time she went by The Good Novel, the bookstore was full, and corresponded almost exactly to the vision she had had in her most confident moments, with its contemplative readers, capable of remaining motionless for an entire half a day, immersed in their reading, next to each other in silence, often standing—out of choice, since everything at The Good Novel had been arranged so that people could sit down, unless they had merely become distracted—and only the touch of madness in their eyes, characteristic of their addiction, betrayed their euphoria when, as it came time to leave, their gaze met that of one of the attendant priests, and whether their arms were full of books or their hands quite empty, they could hardly keep from dancing the moment they went out the door.
By the end of the third week, the bookstore had already found its clientele. From the first to the last day of autumn, it was never empty.
Right from the beginning of September, encouraging articles appeared in the newspapers, but the opening of a bookstore is not exactly headline news, and however laudable an undertaking it may be, and however risky, it is usually described in economic rather than lyrical terms.
What was decisive, something that neither Doultremont’s experts, nor the advertising agency, nor the quivering press attachés had foreseen, was how much was discussed on the Internet. Right from the opening on Monday, and never letting up thereafter, a powder trail led from blog to Web site and from chat room to forum, presenting The Good Novel in terms so passionate that readers were bound to be taken by an irrepressible desire to go and see for themselves. It’s marvelous, Go check it out right away, The secret we are burning to reveal: the panegyrics bordered on literary criticism in their form, accumulating the most conventional clichés in their own way. Basically, they all shared the same idea: At last! At last a bookstore where only superb novels are to be found. At last a real choice. At last you can be sure you won’t be disappointed.
By then—mid-September—the press was treating this development like a news event. Radio stations broadcast their reports, and then, always last, television channels ran images that showed strictly nothing, and Ivan’s sentences were amputated of their beginning and their end, not to mention every nuance, so they no longer meant a thing.
Nevertheless, the effect was positive. Sales continued to increase. The accompanying advertising that Francesca had planned turned out to be unnecessary. Oscar was a virtuoso on the Web, and by the end of the month he had taken charge of online sales and orders. He became the champion of restocking—so quick and precise at recording orders and sales, so friendly with the couriers, who were an essential element of the circuit and well aware of it—and he used the space on the rue Dupuytren to such good effect, that very rarely were they out of anything. During these first weeks, Ivan recognized among their customers four of the Parisian members of their committee, who had come incognito to see the results of their contributions, to see what success, something they did not know, looked like. Ivan, who was usually so naturally friendly and cheerful, found himself face to face one day at the cash register with Larry de Winter, and he would not smile: after the fact he realized he’d been afraid he might give something away. But he could not restrain a fit of giggles when the older gentleman gave him a very amateurish wink, so exaggerated that his head and the top of his body jerked forward, as if someone were pushing him roughly from behind.
Many of the buyers became regulars. Oscar and Van noticed the ones who came several times a week. The member cards that Anis had inspired were printed up. (In fact, the good customers seemed to think of them as an accessory, and never remembered where they had put them.) Van came up with the idea of opening accounts, the way people used to in the old days in grocery stores. The initiative was a great success. As people signed up, they introduced themselves. Names were exchanged. The appellative “Mr. Georg” began circulating. Call me Ivan, said Van. Oscar was immediately baptized “Mr. Oscar,” as his Malagasy name was too difficult to remember. Just Oscar, he said graciously, and from time to time you heard people call him “Mr. Justoscar.”
Other customers adamantly refused to give their names. They were well-known writers or literary commentators that nearly everyone in the bookstore could identify the moment they came in, having seen them in photographs or on television. Bertrand Poirot-Delpech, for example, came every other day at the end of the afternoon, and he immediately stood out because of the way he tried to go unnoticed. One time he came upon Bernard Frank and both of them, visibly thinking no one had recognized them, laughed hysterically for a good quarter of an hour, side by side, leaning over Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall.
Customers soon began to suggest missing titles. Often it was disappointment that drove them to it: I can’t find Au pays du matin calme. And yes, it’s a magnificent novel. Would you care to order it? asked Oscar (or Van). But most of the time the customers who suggested a title did not want to buy it, they already had it. They just wanted to point out something that did not seem normal to them.
It’s one thing to order a book for a customer, another to have it permanently on the shelf. However, when customers couldn’t find a novel and ordered it, even if they did not explicitly suggest it be added to the stock, the issue was raised at the store all the same. Finally Van and Francesca decided to share with the eight committee members all the titles that people were surprised not to find at The Good Novel. Let the committee decide. All that was needed was for one elector to approve the addition for it to take effect. But if the eight of them disapproved, then the novel was not added to the bookstore’s permanent stock.
Among those who made suggestions there were certain customers they quickly recognized, although they never gave their name. The authors. You could tell them from the very first words they uttered. Because their tone of voice was not neutral, but vindictive, painful, disillusioned, even hurt. They did not pronounce the titles normally, they whispered, and for good reason: they had devoted more time and care to choosing them than they had to choosing names for their own children. These authors never bought anything. Their suggestions were transmitted in the same manner as the others. Francesca and Van had hesitated, but what else could they possibly do, at this stage?
Others intervened in a more direct fashion. Publishers called, and they were not always diplomatic: you think it’s right not to have a single book by Henri Troyat? They gave the same answer to all the publishers: send us a letter, or an e-mail. We will pass it on to our committee.
Numerous suggestions came in via the Internet, too. Van spent two hours every evening reading the day’s messages. To those who suggested titles, he sent a stock answer explaining the rules of the game, how they referred to the electors, how each one of them had the power to add a title, but not individually to block a title. (Is there a word that signifies the opposite of veto? asked someone on the Internet. Bravo, added someone else.)
Some suggestions or remarks were worthy of debate. Van got in the habit of writing a brief every day, where he would note down an idea, emphasize a point of view, or share some information. This daily communiqué ended up as a newsletter and, for lack of a better name surfacing any quicker, it was soon referred to universally as The Newsletter.
Doultremont grew more distant than ever when reality went against his predictions. Francesca hardly ever saw him during those first weeks of The Good Novel. Not once did he mention the bookstore to her. He would not set foot inside—at least as far as Francesca could tell. She wished she were mistaken. He probably went by without drawing attention to himself, she told Ivan, and he did not have the heart to contradict her. “Yes,” he said, “I’d be surprised if he could contain his curiosity. He could easily have found out that I often left the bookstore in Oscar’s hands, while I went to work upstairs.”
But that all time, it would have taken more than his lack of interest to destabilize Francesca. She had things to do. Questions without precedent were being asked every day at The Good Novel, and they needed to be dealt with. They had to think about the upcoming months, too. For Francesca, that fall was a turning point in her life. The obsessive thoughts of her loss now created a barrier to new experiences; Violette no longer held her back.
The customers acted like associates. One of their most loyal customers was a press cartoonist who, when his day was over at around two o’clock, and he had submitted his drawing to the daily paper where he worked, was in the habit of coming to hang around The Good Novel until evening. So when Ivan told him one day that the word “customer” did not seem right to designate the support they were receiving from people like him, Roselin Folco (his name was an echo of his Provençal origins) suggested he refer to them rather as friends. The Friends of The Good Novel, said Ivan slowly. No, corrected Folco, the Friends of the Novel.
They kept the name to use as a title for the forum where loyal followers met on the Web, at any time of day, but naturally mostly at night.
Another passionate reader, a dark-haired young woman, (oenologist by profession, who had discovered The Good Novel while attending a Salon du Vin in Paris, since she lived in a village on the slopes of the Jurançon), asked during her second visit whether they could mail her three novels from the stock every month. You choose, she said. If I’ve already read them I’ll reread them, or give them as gifts.
She was the first to take out a subscription of a type that would become extremely successful not only in Paris, but throughout the entire Francophone world, and which, according to a friendly gentleman who they later learned was a professor at the Collège de France, was the revival of an old publishing practice from the time when most publishers were also booksellers. Oscar improved on the formula by coming up with the idea of tailor-made subscriptions. You signed up (Subscriptions to the Novel), and you could receive the number of novels you wanted, as often as you wanted, and you could ask that for the duration of your choice—a month, six months, a year—one particular author be favored, or a century or a country, or on the contrary, that all the genres and the origins be mixed up.
By November it had become clear that the Friends of the Novel could generate enthusiasm for a long-forgotten title, and in eight days they might exhaust the tiny stock at the publishers and in the week after that make all the online booksellers rich—until the publisher reprinted the work and the press finally reported on the rediscovery of an author like Eudora Welty or Patrick White.
By the end of the year of the publishers had got it. They would stick an intern six hours a day in front of a computer, with the instructions never to leave planet The Good Novel (the Web site, the newsletter, the forum), and to note down any spark of curiosity for a title or an author, and inform them of it that very day.
Gradually, without realizing it, Van was becoming a bit of a celebrity. Truth be told, he was great on television. For someone who was so neglectful of his appearance, and did not know how to dress, and never combed his hair, and refused point-blank to wear makeup before going on the air, he was perfectly natural onscreen and far more confident than in everyday life. He expressed himself with simplicity, precision, and humor, and talked about the books with so much enthusiasm that, in the days which followed, the ones that he had mentioned sold like hot cakes. He was the ideal incarnation of The Good Novel’s plan to invite everyone to dine on the best and most agreeable literature. With his allure of an inspired dunce, bird-catcher, and friend of fairies, he enchanted the viewers, and they asked for more. The television people could not get enough of him, but Van only accepted if it was to talk about literature, and he never spoke about anything else, so without even trying, for those few months he became an unexpected star of television, the man who transformed cultural programs into large-audience programs.
Francesca had her eyes on Van; she was vibrant, serious, smiling now and again as he evoked a name or an anecdote, and then she was illuminated in one instant, the way a gray day is illuminated when, without warning, the sun shines through and changes it entirely.
To describe certain phenomena, there is only one possible metaphor, thought Heffner who, for the entire hour he had spent watching Francesca, had already thought of this metaphor several times. That’s the way it is.
Francesca was looking at him now. “Thus, there are times,” she said slowly, adopting the tone you sometimes use to tell a story to a child, “when in love stories, after a very long ordeal (shock, observation, despair, guesswork, calculation, hope), an accelerating impulse arrives (accident, decisive gesture, tears, declaration), and at that moment, contrary to the dark predictions that were all one had remembered, no doubt to prepare for the worst, there is an immediate agreement and shared jubilation. And then comes a period where one goes from bedazzlement to bedazzlement with stupefying ease, so much so that one regrets having waited so long to take the plunge. Afterwards, one remembers this succession of blissful moments as if it were a marvelous story that had happened to other people.”