Vendettas, Gatekeepers, and Prima Donnas: (Very) Bad Mentors in Fiction

I have always loved books about mentorship or positions of influence taking for granted the trust placed in them—almost in equal measure to stories about how these relationships can foster pathways of acceptance and accountability. But there is something about the cautionary tale, the warning of a narcissist in the ascendant, that has always elicited a very strong response from me.

I felt that making a contribution to this category of literature might be worth attempting and even possible to do, if only I took in the right influences.

I read as many books about apprenticeship and formal training as I could, with depictions of vendettas, gatekeeping, and prima donna tetchiness in abundance. Sometimes they featured the lives of painters, actors, and writers, or concerned professional disciplines of law and government—maybe lovers at opposite ends of their lives. Being a mentor in some instances was as simple as someone being present during a poor soul’s moment of crisis.

I was able to combine these elements in my latest novel Kilworthy Tanner, which aims to put the problematic nature of intellectual stewardship and the vapidity of a creative life on full display. While I was writing, the following books were never far from my reach.

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Paige Cooper, Zolitude

The women in Paige Cooper’s speculative collection Zolitude find themselves at the mercy of imbalanced power arrangements. Whether they are wriggling under the thumb of imperious handlers or exercising their wills in arenas of romantic destiny, Cooper’s characters endure the inflexibility of their situations.

A child prodigy under the eye of Henry Kissinger develops a time machine, meeting multiple versions of herself along the way to imperialist world domination. A call girl falls in love with a police officer who rides a cryptozoological winged gelding and delights in breaking up protest assemblies. The driver of a bookmobile providing succor to a secluded community of convicts begins a relationship with a registered sex offender.

The thorny complications surrounding mentorship rear their head most explicitly in a story called “Ryan & Irene, Irene & Ryan,” where an injured publicist named Mad must intercede in her pop star client’s doomed relationship with a producer who sends mail bombs to anyone preventing a reunion with his protege. “He deletes truth like weather deletes history, imperfectly,” Mad thinks to herself. “He says Irene has victimized herself, twisted everything her way….Forgiveness is the temptation she’s damned to.”

Cooper’s stories depict the fluctuating emotional frequencies between people in times of duress, and the beauty of such an artistic project lies not only in the wide field of action entailed by such interpersonal dynamics, but in the moral trajectory suggested by its consideration of feminist principles.

César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

Obsession can turn into ascetic withdrawal, and this chronicle of nineteenth-century German landscape painter Johann Moritz Rugendas and his expeditions through Argentina and Chile is a haunting portrait of social detachment. Struck by lightning and horrifically disfigured, Rugendas begins wearing a black mantilla over his face to discourage onlookers from regarding his features. His only companion is Robert Krause, another German painter who purveys, according to Rugendas, “irremediable mediocrity.”

This strained power differential between teacher and student is manifest in all of the major decision-making occuring on their journeys, but the tables are soon turned following Rugendas’ injury. An artist’s evolving relationship with their tutees can often account for bizarre turns of behavior; this subject is only heightened by Aira’s barely disguised resistance toward a hypothetical reader’s inane desire to love, forgive, or identify with a protagonist.

Eschewing the redemption narrative entirely, Rugendas’ behavior becomes so morosely esoteric that his life becomes reducible to the recognition that his beloved artform will fall into decline due to the rise of the photographic arts.

Allegra Hyde, Eleutheria

At the heart of this perfect melding of commercial and experimental fiction sensibilities is a soured mentorship thrusting a young woman into the arms of utopian eco-politics. Escaping familial tragedy, the sinless Willa Marks catches the eye of Harvard professor and cultural icon Sylvia Gill. Their relationship is built around passionate discussion of philosophy and the surveillance state, but not even unconditional love can insulate against the achy political divide growing between them.

When Sylvia betrays Willa’s trust, the disillusioned student finds solace in a climate change manual called Living the Solution. Willa decamps for Camp Hope on the Bahamian island of Eleutheria, a fabled site of social harmony where the reputed author of Solution, the militant Roy Adams, leads a group of activists hellbent on saving the world from ecological ruin.

Hyde is not only able to explore how messy relationships can become when they blur personal and professional boundaries; her writing also distills questions about political legitimacy, activism, and misfitdom in compulsively readable terms, without ever losing sight of the fact that the stakes for human survival have never been higher.

Richard Hell, Godlike

Godlike is the most memorable twenty-first-century novel that I have come across about the insupportable delusion governing literary circles. Informed by pedantic cultural policing and petty squabbling, the 1970s New York City poetry scene unsurprisingly implodes on itself.

By 1997, Paul Vaughn, a semi-prominent poet from the era, is convalescing in a hospital room following a nervous breakdown. Most of his contemporaries are dead or dying, completely unknown to the broader culture. As he toys with the idea of writing his memoirs, Vaughn’s thoughts turn to his dalliance with a sixteen-year-old poetic genius named Randall Terence Wode.

While Paul held influence in the poetry world, he could open any door for his underage, ambitious lover; it was the sexually confident Wode, however, who helped guide Paul through a queer awakening after he decided to abandon his wife and unborn son. The poets’ burgeoning relationship takes on a master and servant dynamic, though who occupies which position is anyone’s guess with the constant jockeying that goes on between the hot-blooded writers.

Hell’s novel problematizes the idea that there can only be one injured party in any sexual imbroglio, and goes to great lengths to source the many indignities ill-suited partners subject their loved ones to, seemingly as a matter of form.

André Forget, In the City of Pigs

André Forget’s tour de force novel about experimental opera collectives, pontifical impresarios, and out of work classical music musicians depicts a world completely unbalanced by greed. Artwashing and real estate empires are all given forensic consideration in Pigs, courtesy of its jaded journalist narrator Alexander Otkazov.

Alexander begins having an affair with opera singer Margaret, the wife of his erstwhile mentor and benefactor. Despite the guidance she provides in the way of worldly instruction and intellectual diversion, Margaret is unwilling to sacrifice the social connections her marriage of convenience places at her fingertips—true love is sacrificed at the altar of luxury and the self-replenishing pocketbook.

Patronal communities can be unsteady hubs of social activity, Forget warns us, and the price to be paid to secure relevance in one’s chosen field may very well be in the high-priced currencies of the soul.