The Mythmakers, Keziah Weir's ambitious and intrepid debut novel, is about a quest for a late novelist's unpublished last work--partly. A young journalist's search for the manuscript is equally a search for herself. After a playwright fed Sal Cannon lies for a profile she wrote about him, she lost her job and credibility. Sal is at an impasse, including romantically, when she reads a short story in the Paris Review written by Martin Scott Keller, author of the cult classic Evergreen. Sal, who once chatted with Martin at a book launch, is unnerved by his Paris Review story: it was "about me.... I mean it was actually based on Martin's and my evening at the New York Public Library six years earlier." Determined to turn this revelation into a publication-worthy piece, Sal travels upstate to meet Martin's widow and find the manuscript from which, she has learned, the Paris Review story was taken.
The Mythmakers interlaces Sal's narration with chapters from the perspectives of consequential people in Martin's life. (The suggestion is that Sal has reimagined these scenes.) Although these chapters don't always advance the story, Weir irresistibly captures the New York literary world at midcentury: boozy and yeasty social gatherings attended by people who read Mailer and Cheever as much for status as pleasure. Sal's flaws--self-absorption, undependability--are mitigated by her doggedness, courage, and, ultimately, self-awareness; as she tells a friend about her writing project, "I think if I could change anyone in this story it would be myself." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer