Novel Slices Issue 3

By Novel Slices

Novel Slices is the only publication dedicated solely to novel excerpts. Each issue includes five previously unpublished novel excerpts for connoisseurs of literature across genres. Each excerpt is a winner of our semi-annual novel excerpt contest in January/February and September/October of every year.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Novel Slices
• Release date: Nov 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781088012956

Book preview

Editor’s Note

As we enter our second year at Novel Slices, we are in the midst of many activities in support of novelists. For instance, we are proud to send letters and copies of Novel Slices to literary agents and publishers on behalf of our contest winners. Recently, one winner emailed: This may actually help me get an agent—which is unheard of. Incredible. I have never been helped so much by fellow writers and editors. Another example is the soon-to-be-released video interviews with authors thanks to our incredible interns from Ithaca College, Meg Handley and Madison Martin.

At the same time, we continue to be in awe of the quality and variety of contest entries, as evidenced by the winning excerpts included here. Lou Reed’s Nephew is a humorous piece that interrogates what ‘meaningful work’ means in our contemporary world. In A Paper Boat Sails the Ocean a young girl in India wrestles with having a baby brother on the way. Stone of Heaven takes place in medieval France, where a nun has to prove her visions have been given to her by the correct divine force. From there, we return to the present and enter the Ridgewood Assisted Living Retirement Complex in What the Body Remembers—Mrs. Greene struggles with what she is ‘allowed to remember [and] required to forget.’ And in The Distractions, the future centers around fleshepeople’s Content Streams, controlled by ReelCorp, whose ‘algos and ReelPals’ have taken over most career fields.

Quite a variety, right? And wait until you see the delightful literary quality of each.

—Hardy

Lou Reed’s Nephew

Jim Hanas

Lou Reed’s Nephew on Pedagogy

I heard his voice as soon as I stepped off the elevator, muffled only a little by the security door. I swiped my card, releasing the lock with a satisfying click, and swung open the enormous glass slab.

That’s when I heard him, Lou Reed’s Nephew, in full voice.

If one is to be respected by one’s peers, he declared with a conviction that would become all too familiar, one must speak in the ways others do, even if this is not speech at all, but text. …Here, here. Hold it like this. Get it in your two thumbs. Trust it. Trust the tiny computer inside. It knows how to talk. …Look. When you try to type ‘cool’ it tries to change it to ‘book.’ Isn’t that funny? When was the last time you read a book?

…

That’s right. Trust your thumbs… and the tiny computer.

I went to my rented cubicle, a uniform enclosure lined with brown-beige fabric, the fifth one down in the second row from the elevator. Its walls were higher than in a regular office to deter, if not prevent, late-night coders from foraging inside for snacks and thumb drives. It occurred to me daily—as Ulugbek and I chased our ever-receding go-live date—that working inside was like working at the bottom of a cheaply upholstered grave.

I undid the opening, secured by two panes of corrugated plastic joined by a clumsy hinge. This was before such spaces became corporatized and manicured, like hotel lobbies or French inns. The impatient South African who owned the place had done his best, roughly brushing every aluminum surface—from the refrigerator to the elevator doors—with a Black & Decker grinder, but the place retained the feel of a sweatshop and a lingering smell of grease.

I sat down and tried to get a glimpse of my new neighbor as I plugged in my laptop. I took it home every night after my previous one vanished, along with a clear plastic cylinder of Twizzlers a customer success manager sent me with her business card tucked inside and a Blackberry I had clung to for too long.

Swiveling in my chair, I saw that his panes were pulled closed. I could only make out a slim figure—like a killer outside a shower—wildly waving its arms.

That’s all we have time for now, he announced.

The panes opened. I got my first look.

He was 26. Or younger. Not older. He had dark hair. Narrow nose. Narrow face. Unremarkable but expensive glasses. Preppy clothing laundered by three decades of hip-hop. He wore a pressed, striped oxford, untucked from crisp, stiff jeans that broke as perfectly across the shell-capped toes of his sneakers as his shirttail fell just past his beltloops. As he pulled back the panes, I saw his clients, both female, wedged into a space no larger than a fitting room.

The first was in her late thirties. My age, more or less. I was 43 but still rounding down. She had the glow of a determined divorcee. She might still have been married, but such was the availability of her glow. She reminded me of Renata’s college acquaintances, who we seemed to run into in every bookstore aisle and juice bar in our neighborhood.

It was mid-January, when such New Yorkers dress like extras from The Matrix or Chitty-Chitty Bang, though this woman had attempted a difficult hybrid. She wore black Lycra tights—as snug as jodhpurs but decidedly thinner and infinitely more futuristic. These disappeared into a pair of shrimp boat-grade galoshes stamped with a repeating pattern of tiny skulls. Above the waist, she was a woolly Victorian. She wore an over-sized black and red checked coat, topped with a coy newsboy made from the same fabric. She was not, however, wearing antique automotive goggles around her yoga-toned neck. These she had surrendered to her daughter—a perfect little Emma, the most popular name for 10-year-old girls in Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn in 2013, the year of my encounter with Lou Reed’s Nephew.

Emma also wore tights and a newsboy, a black and red coat like her mother’s, gel-injected death booties, the useless pair of goggles slung around her pale neck. She held a freshly unboxed iPod Touch between her peach-colored thumbs, pressing away, oblivious to the fuss taking place around her entirely for her benefit.

Mom took out her checkbook, an object that confused Lou Reed’s Nephew. When she was done scribbling, he took the check between his fingers like a tissue he’d found on the train.

Keep it up, he told the girl, who ignored him, responding only to her mother’s hand on the back of her neck, guiding her out of the cubicle, down the aisle, and to the elevator. He walked behind them, calling to them as they slowly fled.

Trust your thumbs! he said.

He returned, shaking his head. He walked into his opening and turned to catch me staring.

You teach texting? I asked, flummoxed.

As much as I can, he said.

Hard to find students?

Hard because I don’t know anything about it.

About texting?

As little about that as about anything else.

You sound convincing, I said.

He sat in his chair and swiveled toward me. He held his phone in his lap—trusting his thumbs—looking up only occasionally.

If you don’t know anything, confidence goes a long way, he said. Scolding, too. Mothers love scolding. Especially if you have a British accent. Or a French one. I forgot my accent when I picked up the phone on this one so I’m stuck charging American rates. It’s harder.

Why?

Because everyone knows Americans are stupid, he said. Especially Americans.

You are an American.

Of course.

And you don’t know anything about texting?

What is there to know? It’s like talking. And that’s not what they pay me for anyway. They pay for a performance. A woman comes in and I talk to her for a few minutes—possibly with a Belgian accent—and I tell her that she is doing the right thing. ‘You are doing the right thing, Andrea,’ I say, being sure to use her name.

You’re a student of the human condition.

"Yes. It’s crucial to use people’s names when you talk to them. It helps them narrate your interaction when they’re at dinner with friends, who are all potential customers. Boring people have their own literary point of view, I’ve noticed. It’s innovative, formally, but completely exhausting. I call it free second person indirect. It’s a technique, like free indirect or third person close, but they don’t teach it in writing programs because it’s so awful.

"People usually speak in the first person, of course, but truly boring people invariably drift into quotations of other people addressing them in the second person, and these people are always complimenting them.

"‘That’s so clever, Andrea, hiring a Norwegian to teach your daughter to text.’"

Do they always use their own names when telling these stories?

Frequently. It’s one of the conventions of the form. So, I help Andrea along by including her name, the way Ambulance" appears backwards on the front of ambulances so you can read it in your rearview mirror, or the way brands put ‘my’ before logos so you will think they belong to you rather than the other way around. Then I tell Andrea that her child’s socialization is crucial to popularity. And popularity, once a dirty word to Andrea, is making a comeback because it is