Richard G. Galluzzi
October 5, 2011
FLATBUSH MAN: An Unpublished Novel
Thirteen rejection letters and a handful of letters of criticism. The addresses of
publishing house written on scraps of paper the size of a butterfly’s wing. Two
hundred and thirteen Xeroxed pages contained within a faux-leather three-ring
binder. These are the contents of box number three, folders 55 & 56, of the Sheridan
Gibney collection in the Amherst College Archives and Special Collections. Taken
together, these scraps form the record of Gibney’s final creative effort—a medium
sized Jerimiad of a novel entitled Flatbush Man.
Gibney’s book was never published and, as far as I can tell, can only be found
now in the Amherst College archives. The situation of Gibney’s work—lone
manuscript stranded at Amherst—is not unique. Amherst special collections, in
addition to its curios (a lock of Emily Dickinson’s hair, a postcard from Walt
Whitman) contains copies of every thesis written by the graduating class. Among
these are a number of novels, for the most part like Flatbush Man, unpublished and
now largely unread.
At the end of this academic year my own thesis, a short novel entitled Séance
With Crying Man, will be placed in the archives alongside Gibney’s work. It is from
here that my interest in Flatbush Man stems. Is Gibney’s story a preview of my own
novel’s fate, a sort of Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come? Holding the manuscript in my
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hands I feel like a rubbernecker at the scene of a bad accident. Jesus, I say. And then:
I hope that never happens to me.
The failure of Gibney’s novel was certainly not for lack of reputation on
Gibney’s part. An Oscar winning screenwriter (he won for his screenplay, “The Story
of Louis Pasteur”) Gibney was, as he noted in his query letters to publishers, a
professor at both the University of Southern California and California State
University at Los Angeles. The very rumor of the novel’s existence in 1979, when it
only numbered some eighty pages, was enough to excite offers of literary
representation and proposals (admittedly vague) that the work “be serialized in a
magazine like the New Yorker.”
Backing Gibney’s formidable reputation was old-fashioned perseverance. The
quantity of the rejection letters suggest that Gibney liberally peppered publishers
with his manuscript. Evidence from the critical letters included in Gibney’s file,
however, intimate that Gibney contacted even more publishers than are included
among the rejections—and whose responses were lost or who simply chose never
to respond.
Why didn’t any publisher bite at the manuscript? The rejection letters,
generally speaking, tell little. Most are form letters, written en masse by an editorial
assistant, a number without even the courtesy of a handwritten signature.
According to these letters, h ere the problem lies not with Gibney’s manuscript but
rather with concerns of “fit:” W.W. Norton: “Although your work does not fit in our
plans, we wish you the best of luck.” Random House: “Your proposed book does not
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fit into our present publishing schedule.” Doubleday: “We regret that [Flatbush Man]
does not fit into our publication plans.”
Among the publishing houses that do take the time to write personal replies,
the responses are strikingly similar. Houghton-Mifflin: “What does bother me is a
lack of energy and tension in the plot. In fact, there really isn’t much of a plot, as
such.” Harcourt Brace Jovanovich: “There is little plot of interest…and what plot
there is remains unresolved by the end of the book.” Simon & Schuster (as reported
by Gibney’s agent): “It really does read like a series of lectures rather than a
humorous story with a plot.”
The publishers are probably correct that the plot is thin. Set roughly sixthousand years in the future, Gibney tells us that America has been destroyed by
disease/nuclear holocaust, leaving little beyond a half-spoiled time capsule. The
characters of the novel regard this time capsule with rapt attention. Their
civilization is facing a shortage of oxygen and legend has it that America was a land
of scientific miracles. Might the time capsule contain an answer to their plight? The
characters of the novel settle in as Dr. Sung, a professor of anthropology, explains all
he has discovered of the American civilization.
After this, the plot is quickly discarded and Gibney, through the mouthpiece
of Dr. Sung, begins to expound on America’s sins. Sentences like “‘The Icelandic
historian Neil Thorvaldsen for instance, writing in the 36th century, and often
referred to as America’s Plutarch, quotes repeatedly from books and manuscripts in
the original English made available to him at the library of Murmansk’,” begin to
crop up. The reading is difficult and dull. As one rejection letter points out, “Showing
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is always better than telling, and I’m afraid there is too much telling here.” It’s really
no surprise that a publisher might have trouble seeing Flatbush Man as a plausible
commercial book.
Though the novel is not particularly useful as entertainment, it can be made
useful by being read as a historical document, a record of the concerns and cares of
its time. Written largely between 1979 and 1986, Flatbush Man is from a time when
the Kremlin was still a vital force and nuclear annihilation remained a daily threat.
What does one man’s Jeremiad, issued in the final years of his life, say about his
society? What does Gibney’s cry say about himself? How do the publishers fit into
this? Why did Gibney choose the novel and fiction as the vehicle for his message?
Why, after the novel’s failure, didn’t he burn the damn thing?
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