At one of the first public readings for my new novel, “The Complex,” in a dim bookstore and bar in Providence, my interlocutor turned to me and asked, “Now, I know that my copy of the book has a different beginning from that of the finished book. Can you talk about why this is?”
Gabe, the friend and editor who was interviewing me, had read an advance reader copy, or galley, which is distributed six months or so before a book’s official publication date to give booksellers and reviewers a chance to read the book and get excited about it. The ARC is supposed to be nearly identical to the finished book, minus supplementary sections, like the acknowledgments, and barring errors caught during a final proofreading.
Yet in the months before the publication of “The Complex” in March, I had broken a cardinal rule: I had made wholesale changes to the galley — and not just to any part of the book, but to the very first page, the doorway into my turbulent family saga.
As a result, there were two mutant versions of the book out in the world, and Gabe wanted to know why.
ARCs are one of the strangest aspects of the publishing business because they are a candid admission on the part of publishers that books take a long time not just to write but to read. Unlike with movies, you can’t just hand out screeners to reviewers a few days before the release date.
In theory, a publisher could release a finished book into the wild and wait a few months for reviews to trickle in, but this means the book might sit dormant on a shelf, without massing attention, a no-no in capitalist time. (The book business is weird precisely because it tries to find a middle ground between the vagaries of reading time and capitalist time.) And because the number of galleys in circulation is typically limited, galley possession has become the subject of “brags” on BookTok and Instagram, especially if the author is a cult figure like Sally Rooney. “Everything in life is a flex,” as one podcaster told Air Mail. “This is just a literate person’s version of a Kelly bag: I got the new whatever.”
But of course there’s another wild card at play in this temporal interregnum: the writer himself. A galley might purport to be the near-finished version of the book, but for most writers, writing is never finished. In a lecture printed in The Believer, Zadie Smith mordantly describes sitting “backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our published novels into fit form so that we might go onstage and read from them.” She adds: “It’s an unfortunate thing, but it turns out that the perfect state of mind to edit your own novel is two years after it’s published, 10 minutes before you go onstage at a literary festival.”
The same can be said, really, for any stage of a novel — writers are inveterate revisers — but especially for the galley version, which is the first time the writer is seeing his work in near-book form and technically the last time he will be able to edit it, ever.
For some writers, this experience leads to resignation, a feeling of being close to the finish line. “It’s too late to worry about its failings,” Eudora Welty said about seeing her advance copies. “I’ll have to apply any lessons this book has taught me toward writing the next one.” The memoirist Mary Karr told me that she always faces her galleys “as you would some rickets-ridden child about to be sent to some Dickensian orphanage.” For others, encountering an ARC of their work sets off a bout of panicked industriousness. My friend Vauhini Vara admitted that she basically tried to rewrite her acclaimed debut novel, “The Immortal King Rao,” at the galley stage — and had to be talked down.
An editor who worked with Saul Bellow remembered that the Nobel Prize winner told her that “he couldn’t take his writing seriously when it was still a manuscript, that it was only an ‘undergraduate effort’ until typeset.” Commenting grandly on “the moral power of the justified right margin,” Bellow would “beef up passages he found slack, alter effects that had charmed him in manuscript and now put him off, cross out whole passages and add new paragraphs.” (Nobel Prize winners are given extra rope, of course. Besides, this practice had a happy ending for Bellow, with another editor at the same publishing house exclaiming, “Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better.”)
My own problem was more specific to “The Complex,” which I had worked on for 10 years. After I finished the final draft, one writer friend gave me mixed feedback about the opening chapter, and though my editor disagreed with this feedback and advised me not to “try to please everyone,” I had begun to feel anxious that the start was, in my friend’s word, “tentative.” So, at the very last moment, before the book went into galleys, I took what I had and punched it up.
While making the change, I had convinced myself that it was a matter of life or death — that the fate of the entire 450-page novel hinged on the inexorability of the opening. The revised beginning, I told myself, was more sensory and lyrical. It signaled its themes majestically. And I could almost hear another writer friend — one who is easily impressed by lyrical writing — purring approvingly about the succession of pretty images.
My certainty didn’t last. A few weeks later, when I saw the galley itself — that fetal version of my book, with its facsimile of authority and finality — I knew that I had gone against my own instincts for concision and directness, and I wanted the original beginning back.
My poor editor! She had stoically warned me against last-minute changes and now she stoically accepted the reversion. But how could I resist the opportunity to make a change when a galley was fundamentally changeable? This is the dilemma at the heart of the galley’s existence: It is supposedly for the public (or at least a semipublic cohort of critics and booksellers), but it is also, secretly, for the writer: a glitch in the matrix of publishing. And this, dear reader, is how I ended up with two incarnations of my novel on a stage in a dim bar in Providence, with my interlocutor interrogating me about the alterations.
What could I say to Gabe? Before I could answer his question, an audience member shouted, “Can we hear both?” And that’s what happened: I read the opening of the finished book; Gabe read the galley version. After we were done, I asked people to vote on which they preferred. I was playing my nerves for comedy but, to my relief and gratitude, nearly everyone — save for Gabe and my wife! — voted for the final (or was it the first?) version I had alighted on.
I went on to speak about the self-doubt and self-negotiation that goes into arriving at an honest “style,” and the ways in which writers are forever battling their own vanities and egos, picking at supposed pimples in the text to try to please an imagined audience.
As my book tour progressed, the dueling readings of the openings became a shtick I repurposed for other events. In fact, it is only now, months after the novel’s release, that I see what I was doing: having it both ways and giving up neither beginning. Maybe there are many versions of the same book and they all deserve to exist.
We’re going to show you both openings. Read them and vote for your favorite!
Here is my initial opening, which appeared in the finished book:
Then I received news that my father would be released from prison. I had known this was coming — had known his 25-year sentence was concluding — but still the date exploded upon me. I ended the call with the lawyer and sat back in my scaly-walled flat, blinking against the onrush of hot green mulberry leaves outside the window.
In the tall days of summer, family members began to ring my bell.
Here is the galley version:
I was trying to get the internet to load when the lawyer called and gave me the news.
My father was to be released after 25 years in prison.
At the end of the conversation, the lawyer said, “You must be very happy, no, sir?”
Did I say anything? I don’t remember. But I do remember that the call dropped and that my senses suddenly and painfully sharpened. I could distinguish individual squirrels shrieking on the balconies of the gulmohar tree outside my dusty window. I could hear brisk ropes of water being let down onto the bottoms of plastic buckets, the swell and the music and the chaos of the family complex in which I lived with 20 other relatives — relatives I rarely saw but whose dramas gave shape to my dreams.
The family, in its tentacular way, must have had its own connections to Tihar Jail because the news got around quickly, and my Nokia began to jump and glow with texts. I ignored them. But then the bell rang.
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