"Mister, your book ... your book ... your book ... saved my life."

Tin man folk art (National Portrait Gallery)

     As Artificial Intelligence blooms and social media spreads, filling every crevice of our culture, those of us who still care what is true, and what is not, are going to have to lean more and more on what can be considered "common sense."

     So I am happy to present another contribution from Jack Clark, the former cab driver turned prolific mystery writer. I think he points at a phenomenon we're going to see more and more of, the sinking, "Is this a person or is this AI?" dilemma.

     Before you read it, I want to give you the perspective I brought to Jack's piece. I have been a published author for more than 30 years, maybe one click better known than Jack (meaning, on a scale of 1 to 100, if 100 is Stephen King, then I am 3 and Jack is 2). In all that time, I heard one comment from a more prominent author, unbidden (I'm not counting those ahead of me on the greased pole who I reached out to, begging for blurbs, and kindly complied). 

     After my book on failure came out, I got a phone call from Harlan Ellison, the renown science fiction writer, to tell me  he really liked the book. At least I thought it was Harlan Ellison. Now that I read Jack's piece, I can't really be sure anymore.

   

     I recently got an email which claimed to be from best-selling author Karin Slaughter. She was writing to tell me how much she enjoyed my book ‘On the Home Front,’ which I wrote with my mother Mary Jo Clark. “I felt compelled to reach out and express my admiration for the quiet strength and restraint that seem to define this remarkable work.”

     Well, that made my day. There are best-selling authors, mid-list authors, and then there are guys like me (and my poor mother, I guess) who are so far down the list that publishers, probably to avoid causing embarrassment, don’t even bother to categorize us. To hear a best-selling author call my book, which was published nearly 25 years ago,  remarkable, well, that in itself is truly remarkable.

     I kept reading: “What strikes me most is the refusal to mythologize. In revisiting the years from Prohibition through World War II, the book appears to focus not on grand speeches or sweeping heroics, but on lived experience: shiny new shoes in a butcher shop, sawdust underfoot, the intimate texture of childhood memory. These private moments feel just as historically significant as the news of Pearl Harbor or the tragedy of the Dorchester. It’s in that balance between the domestic and the historic that real life emerges.”

     Well, that burst my bubble. I went to my archives and picked up the latest edition of ‘On the Home Front,’ and read this on the back cover: "The book itself is a marvel of writerly restraint... Some are private moments--being 4 years old, getting shiny new shoes and remembering looking down at them as she toed circles in the sawdust on a butcher shop floor. Other brush against history — news of Pearl Harbor, or the Dorchester, a World War II troop ship sunk off the coast of Greenland. It was famous for the four chaplains who gave up their life vests to other sailors, but Bill, who was dating Mary Jo's younger sister, wasn't one of the lucky survivors... The books strength is that it doesn't stoop to Greatest Generation mythologizing. The Clarks are real people, and Mary Jo doesn't try to make them heroes." —Chicago Sun-Times

     Back to Karin: “There is something profoundly moving about honoring ordinary people without turning them into symbols. By allowing Mary Jo’s voice to remain natural and unembellished, the narrative seems to trust the power of memory itself. That kind of writerly restraint requires confidence  and deep respect for the truth of a life as it was lived.”

     You’re probably asking the same questions I did. Could this be A.I. talking? And what exactly were they trying to sell me?

     Karin seemed to know what I was thinking: “There is no agenda behind this message, only sincere appreciation for a work that reminds us of history is carried not just in headlines, but in kitchens, shop floors, and family stories. Thank you for preserving such an authentic portrait of American life. I would be delighted to stay in touch.”

     But she wasn’t quite done. “I would be honored for you to take a look at my own novel, which you can find here:”

     There was no way I was clicking on that link. Who knew where it might take me?

     Instead I found Karin Slaughter’s website and wrote a note mentioning that I had received the letter, that it kind of looked like it might have been written by A.I., and that I wondered if she had actually sent it. My suspicion that this was just another scam did not come out of the blue.

     I’ve been hit by several of these in the past few months. Book clubs that want to feature one of my books, a TV show that would like to feature another, someone in Ireland who wants to feature a book in their Christmas Anniversary Spotlight Event, whatever that might be. They always start out by telling me how much they enjoyed my book, and they always seem to use the exact same words that you’d find in about three seconds by checking the Amazon listing. There’s always a catch, of course, and it always involves me sending them money. Thank you for thinking of me but no thanks.

     When I decided to write this, I thought I better click on the link first. If you’re going to be a writer, you have to be willing to put yourself in danger now and then. And I was right to be hesitant. The link led me to a dark corner of the universe, Amazon, and Karin Slaughter’s 2015 book “Pretty Girls.”

     What caught my eye immediately was that the book had 151,070 ratings for an average of 4.2 stars. On Goodreads, it only got 4.0 stars but this was based on 728,923 ratings. Now that is a best-selling author! My most popular book is knocking on the door of 200 ratings on both Amazon and Goodreads, (4.2 and 3.8 stars) and I’ve been looking forward to the day it crosses that threshold. I thought that would make me sort of a big-time writer. I now see that I have many more miles yet to travel.

     The other thing that caught my eye was that the book was first published in 2015. Why would an author who publishes a book every single year, and sometimes three books in the same year, send me to one that’s ten years old? Was this her favorite?

     So what’s going on here? It seems highly unlikely that Karin Slaughter became a best-selling author by trolling the internet for bottom-of-the-list writers, and trying to entice them into spending a few of their precious dollars to buy one of  her books? According to Google, Karin has already sold 40 million copies of her books. If that’s how she did it, one writer at a time, that would make her the most successful troll in publishing history. Which makes no sense at all, of course, and aren’t trolls supposed to be sitting in the darkness under bridges? How could she possibly write all those books down there?

     I looked at the email address the letter came from and it was a Gmail account. Now I use Gmail as my writer’s address but I haven’t sold anywhere near 40 million books. I’m lucky if I’ve sold 40,000, and that’s over the last 30 years. I promise when I reach one million, Gmail will be history.

            I took another dangerous leap and wrote back to Karin:

Hey Karin,

Thanks for writing. Glad you liked the book. I ordered yours at my local library and look forward to reading it.

All the best,

           

     When I’m feeling optimistic I think, well, maybe Karin really did read and like my mother’s book. I got a letter years ago from another writer who told me how much she liked the book and how helpful it was to her when she was writing a novel set during the Depression.

     Anyway Karin, if by some chance that really was you, thank you very much for reaching out, and I’m sorry for being suspicious. But that’s the world we are currently living in. And I do understand, after selling 40 million books, you probably don’t have time to personally answer all your mail. So A.I., if that’s what your letter was, is probably a very valuable tool. Hell, I’d use it myself if I had all those fans.

     If you really want to do something nice for my mother’s book, tell your fans about it. That would be greatly appreciated. And if you’re going to rely so heavily on a single newspaper article, it would be nice if you credited the paper. The Sun-Times, like most other newspapers, needs all the help and credit it can get.

     Speaking of that article, it was written by none other than my host here, Neil Steinberg, but I had to drag it out of him.

     I sent him an advance copy of the book and he said he would try to write something about it, but months passed, the publication date passed, and he never did. Now I’m the kind of guy that usually will take no for an answer. But in this case, I thought I owed it to my mother to keep pestering Neil. He eventually wrote back to tell me the reason he hadn’t written about the book was because he didn’t think it was very good.

     That’s one of the dangers of dealing with Neil, he believes in honesty.

     But I knew what had happened. The original edition of the book starts slowly — which is my fault, but that’s another story — and Neil had given up before he’d gotten to the really good stuff.

     So I wrote Neil back and asked him to read certain stories. I know I mentioned “The Coloring Business,” and the “Sinking of the Dorchester.” Those are two of my favorites. There are 80 stories all together. To my eyes, they’re all good, even the slow ones, and a dozen or so are really, really great.

     Sometimes being a pest pays off. Neil was open enough to look at the book again and change his mind. He wrote an entire Sun-Times column on the book. Two years later, I called him once again, and he was kind enough to write my mother’s obituary.

     The book went out of print after a few years, and I took the rights back and published it myself. I reordered the stories to get rid of that slow beginning. I started off with the story that Neil had highlighted in his review. It’s from my mother’s fourth birthday in 1918, where she remembered drawing circles in the sawdust on the butcher shop floor. At 200 words, it’s one of the shortest in the book, which I think sets a nice opening pace.

     Now getting back to Karin Slaughter, which I hadn’t planned on doing but, after I’d written this entire piece, she responded to my email.

Hi Jack,

Thank you so much  that truly means a lot to me. I’m really glad you ordered the book through your local library. There’s something special about stories finding their way into libraries and new hands that way.

I’m so pleased you enjoyed my book, and I genuinely look forward to hearing your thoughts once you’ve had a chance to read it. I’d love to know what resonates with you most.

Wishing you continued success with your work  and many more readers discovering it.

All the best,

 

     So now I feel like a heel. She didn’t ask for money or try to sell me anything, just my thoughts on that single book, which I just this moment ordered from the library. Yes. I lied in that last email when I thought I was responding to a scam.

     I still have reservations, of course. Could this be just another small step in a long con? That second paragraph is a bit incoherent but, hell, I’ve written plenty of those myself. If that’s an A.I. letter, it’s an early-stage one. The programs will keep getting better and better — sucking up more and more water and electricity — and pretty soon no one will be able to tell who or what wrote anything.

     This is not a good development. I’m sure you agree. But you’re just a small group of readers and I’m just another down-the-list writer. Nobody cares what we think.

     Maybe Karin does. I sure hope so. And I hope she forgives me for this story. I’d already spent two days on it by the time she wrote back. I couldn’t just throw it away.

     I suppose A.I. would have been able to write it in minutes. And that’s supposed to be progress. I don’t know. I had a lot of fun writing this — just like I had fun driving taxis and over-the-road trucks — and I got to talk to my friends Steve, Mary, and Robin, and my wife Helene, who all took a look at various drafts and shared their thoughts and suggestions. Like most of my writing, it was in many ways a team effort.

     What would I have done with all that time A.I. could have saved me? You can only watch so much TV, or soak in the bath for so long. Maybe that’s how A.I. will finally do us in. They’ll suck up all the water and drain all the electricity. We won’t even be able to take baths or watch TV and we won’t have to work because A.I. will do everything for us.

     I’ve got a pretty good idea how it’s going to end. It’s already boring me silly.