The Mythmakers

April 1, 2023
A journalist reconstructs the history of a recently dead writer by stepping into the life he left behind. Salale Cannon is an aspiring writer who lives with her boyfriend, Hugh, in New York City. After the publication of an admiring magazine profile about an elusive playwright, her subject is revealed to be a plagiarist and a scumbag and to have told big lies about his life--all of which Sal failed to uncover. Now unemployed and adrift, Sal stumbles across a short story by Martin Scott Keller, a much older writer she once hit it off with at a literary event. To her shock, Sal realizes this story is about her encounter with Martin and, to her greater shock, learns that Martin is dead. Sal becomes personally invested when she learns that this story may be part of a larger unpublished novel--has he written more about her?--and is professionally inspired to chase a new profile that could redeem her reputation and put her career back on track. After a fight with Hugh, Sal heads to upstate New York to meet with Martin's widow, Moira, a theoretical physicist. Sal moves from interviewing Moira to spending her days at the widow's home going through archives and reaching out to others in Martin's life to piece together a portrait not just of the man and his work, but of the people, especially the women, who loved him. Beginning in Part 2 of the novel, Weir--herself an editor at Vanity Fair--alternates Sal's story with chapters from the lives of Martin and his circle of family and friends, rippling further into the past as the tale unfolds. In this way, the novel itself is the result of Sal's imaginative rebuilding of Martin's world, though one that dissipates the psychological tension that builds during Sal's chapters. It's a testament to Sal that we want to stay with her more than we do. A thoughtful, if meandering, debut about what it means to make, and remake, a self.

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April 24, 2023
Weir, an editor at Vanity Fair, debuts with the engrossing narrative of Sal Cannon, a magazine writer who recognizes herself in a short story by a famous novelist. The story, published in the Paris Review by the late Martin Keller, a contemporary of Norman Mailer, includes a detail from Sal’s brief encounter with Keller six years earlier, when they flirted at an event and he took a silver barrette from her hair. This detail appears in the story, which is about a young woman’s effect on an older writer’s imagination. It turns out the story was excerpted from a longer work, and Sal pitches a feature on Keller, hoping to get her hands on his manuscript. She’s already in a vulnerable place, having blundered a profile of a playwright in her desire to tell a good story. After she gets the assignment, she talks with Keller’s widow, Moira, hoping to pick up clues about why she inspired Keller. Along the way, Weir shifts the perspective to Moira, Martin, and other characters related to the couple, delving into themes of creative ambition. Weir has a journalist’s eye for mood and setting, whether in her perceptive account of Sal’s trials or her astute portrayal of Martin’s turbulent early years as a novelist. It’s a rather auspicious debut. Agent: Jen Marshall, Aevitas Creative. Michelle Brower, Trellis Literary

May 31, 2023
Weir's expansive debut considers the tricky matter of transforming life into fiction. Journalist Sal's life is in shambles, both personally and professionally. She reads a story by a recently deceased writer in a literary magazine and realizes that it is based, at least in part, on an encounter she had with the author when she was in college. Growing increasingly obsessed, Sal abandons her boyfriend and their New York apartment to head for the small town in the Hudson Valley where the author's astrophysicist second wife lives and spends the summer, ostensibly working on a magazine story, but really attempting to find further traces of herself in the late author's work. The novel broadens out to include the points of view of the author's first and second wives, his best friend, and his daughter. While it occasionally loses focus, and the rehashing of events through multiple eyes could be trimmed, Weir offers a provocative perspective on the stories we tell about ourselves and their consequences.

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