Con Artists, Windmills, and the Reliable Narrator Problem

We met in a restaurant in Hartford that Twain had chosen because, he said, it was the only place within walking distance of his old house where you could still get a steak without someone explaining its provenance to you. This turned out to be optimistic. The waiter began telling us about the ranch in Vermont where the cattle were raised on a specific kind of grass, and Twain listened with the expression of a man watching a dam give way — fascinated, doomed, unable to look away.

“Go on,” he said.

“The grass is a heritage blend —”

“I said go on. I didn’t say I was enjoying it.”

Ephron ordered a Cobb salad and a glass of white wine and did not ask about the chicken’s childhood. She had been reading something on her phone when I arrived — I couldn’t see what — and set it face-down on the table with the deliberateness of someone closing a file. She looked at me the way she looked at everyone, which was with the warm attention of a woman who was already composing the paragraph about you.

“So,” she said. “A picaresque.”

“A rogue’s journey,” Twain said. “My specialty.”

“Your specialty is the river. The rogue is the excuse for the river.”

He considered this. “That’s not wrong. The Mississippi was the thing. Huck was just the raft you rode it on.” He flagged down the waiter. “Is there bourbon, or has that been heritage-blended too?”

I told them the assignment: Twain’s vernacular voice and satirical eye, Ephron’s self-aware modern wit, the episodic picaresque structure of Huckleberry Finn, the delusional self-narration of Don Quixote. And the risk card — protagonist is wrong. Not revealed in a twist. Visible to the reader throughout, invisible to the protagonist.

“Well,” Twain said, “that’s every con man I ever wrote about and most of the senators.”

“It’s also every person who has ever sent a long email explaining why a relationship ended,” Ephron said. “The protagonist of a breakup email is always the hero. Always reasonable. Always the one who tried. And the email is always twelve paragraphs, and every paragraph makes you more certain that this person is absolutely the problem.”

“The Duke and the King,” Twain said, and I could see him warming to it. “Every town they hit, they’ve got a new scheme, and every scheme is the one that’s going to work. They tell you about the scheme as though they’re geniuses. And you — the reader — can see the tar and feathers coming from three counties away.”

“But the person telling the story can’t,” I said.

“Huck can see it,” Twain corrected. “That’s the thing. Huck’s watching these fools and he knows they’re fools. The comedy’s in the gap. The reader sees the folly, the narrator sees the folly, and the fools don’t.”

“But what if the narrator IS the fool?” Ephron said. She was picking at her salad in the surgical way she had — extracting the bacon, leaving the egg, a private editorial process conducted over lettuce. “What if your Huck is the Duke? What if the person telling you the story is the one who can’t see?”

“That’s the Quixote part,” I said.

“It’s the Quixote part, and it’s the part that makes me nervous,” Ephron said. “Because a deluded narrator who doesn’t know he’s deluded — that can be unbearable. You’re reading someone who’s wrong about everything and they WON’T STOP TALKING, and after twenty pages you want to reach into the book and shake them.”

“That’s the pleasure,” Twain said.

“That’s the risk. The pleasure is when the reader can see what’s really happening. The misery is when the reader can ONLY see the delusion. You need the world pushing back. You need other people in the story who are sane, who react normally, so the reader has a foothold.”

Twain pulled at his bourbon — they had found one, unprovenanced — and thought about it. “She’s right. Quixote works because Sancho Panza is standing there, watching a man fight a windmill, and saying, That’s a windmill. Without Sancho, you’ve just got a crazy man and a story with no floor.”

“It’s not just Sancho,” Ephron said. “It’s the innkeeper. It’s the people at the inn who stare at Quixote like he’s lost his mind — because he has. The world reacts. The world tells you the truth the protagonist won’t.”

I asked what kind of protagonist they were imagining.

“Someone who’s charming,” Ephron said immediately. “Someone whose delusion is attractive. You know those people — they walk into a room and they’re the most interesting person there, and they tell you about their life and it sounds extraordinary, and it takes you about forty-five minutes to realize that nothing they’ve told you is exactly true. Not lies. Not exactly. Just — curated beyond recognition.”

“A fabulist,” Twain said.

“A fabulist with a good vocabulary and a generous self-image. Someone who rewrites every humiliation as a victory. Every rejection as a bold choice. Every fired-from as a resigned-from.”

“Every run-out-of-town as a moved-on-from,” Twain added, and he was grinning now.

“That’s it,” I said. “That’s the Quixote and the Huck Finn in one. The picaresque journey where the protagonist keeps moving from place to place, and in every place something goes wrong, and the protagonist tells you it went right.”

“Tells you it went brilliantly,” Ephron said. “There’s a difference. Wrong is a tragedy. Brilliantly is a comedy. This person doesn’t just survive their disasters — they don’t even recognize them as disasters. The disasters are, in the telling, their finest moments.”

Twain set down his glass. “The river. You’ve got to have the river.”

“Not a literal river,” Ephron said.

“Not a literal — I know that. A journey. A road. Something that carries them from one episode to the next. Huck had the Mississippi. This person needs their Mississippi.”

“A car,” Ephron said.

“A car is fine.”

“Not just any car. A specific car. A bad car. A car they’re proud of that they shouldn’t be proud of. Because the car is the delusion in miniature. The car is the thing they love that everyone else can see is a disaster.”

“A car that’s breaking down and they call it vintage,” Twain said.

“A car that stalls at intersections and they call it temperamental. Like it’s a poet, not a mechanical failure.”

I was writing furiously. “And the episodes — each one has to work as a complete scene. Huck Finn structure. New town, new people, new scheme, new failure that the protagonist reports as a win.”

“Three or four episodes,” Twain said. “You don’t need more. You need enough that the pattern establishes itself and the reader starts anticipating. The fourth time the dog bites you, nobody’s surprised. But they’re still watching.”

“Three episodes and an ending that doesn’t resolve,” Ephron said. “Because a deluded person never resolves. They just keep going. The story has to end, but the delusion doesn’t. That’s the Quixote of it. Quixote doesn’t wake up and say, Oh, those were windmills. He dies still believing. The story closes; the madness continues.”

“Our ending’s got to be the same way,” Twain said. “The protagonist walks into the next disaster already narrating it as triumph.”

“Already writing the email about how well it went,” Ephron said.

I asked about voice. The vernacular. How to blend Twain’s American colloquial with Ephron’s polished New York precision.

“Don’t blend them,” Twain said. “That’s soup. Nobody wants soup.”

“He’s right,” Ephron said. “You can’t average two voices. You need a voice that borrows from both without imitating either. Someone who tells you things plainly but with a certain self-consciousness about the plainness. Not a hick and not a sophisticate. Something in between. The kind of person who uses a ten-dollar word and then immediately apologizes for it, and the apology is funnier than the word.”

“The con man’s patter,” Twain said. “It always sounds like two things at once. It sounds smart when you’re dumb and dumb when you’re smart. The Duke could talk rings around a farmer but a city man would spot him in ten seconds. The voice you want is a voice that THINKS it’s Ephron but IS me.”

“Excuse me?” Ephron said.

“No offense intended. What I mean is — the protagonist thinks they’re witty and cosmopolitan, and the reader can hear the duct tape. The reader can hear the borrowed phrases, the slightly-wrong references, the vocabulary that’s a half-size too big. The gap between how they think they sound and how they actually sound — that’s where the comedy lives.”

Ephron was quiet for a moment. Then: “I hate to say it, but that’s good.”

“Don’t strain yourself.”

“No, it IS good. Because it solves the Quixote problem. Quixote’s delusion is about what he SEES — windmills as giants. Our protagonist’s delusion is about how they TELL. They don’t see the world wrong. They narrate it wrong. They see perfectly well that they just got fired. They just won’t tell you that. They’ll tell you they freed themselves. And the voice is the mechanism. The voice is where the delusion lives.”

“So the reader needs to read through the voice,” I said. “Like reading through frosted glass. You can see the shapes. You can see that the shape doesn’t match what the narrator says it is.”

“Don’t make it too frosted,” Twain said. “The reader should be ahead of the narrator but not by ten miles. A few steps. Enough to feel smart. Not enough to feel bored.”

“Half a page,” Ephron said. “The reader should figure out the truth about half a page before the narrator accidentally confirms it. That’s the comic rhythm. Dawning, dawning, dawning — oh, there it is.”

“There’s another thing,” I said. “The towns. Each episode has to satirize something different. It can’t just be three versions of the same joke.”

“Huck’s river did that naturally,” Twain said. “Every bend brought a new kind of foolishness. The Grangerfords and their feud. The camp meeting. The Royal Nonesuch. Each one was a different species of human stupidity. You need that variety.”

“Different species but the same genus,” Ephron said. “Each town should have its own particular vanity. One town pretending to be something it’s not. Another that’s given up pretending entirely. And our protagonist walks into each one believing she’s exactly what they need.”

“She?” I asked.

“She,” Ephron said firmly. “A woman doing this is different from a man doing it. A man driving through small towns dispensing unsolicited advice is a crank. A woman doing it is something more complicated. There’s a performance of competence involved — the blazer, the vocabulary, the business card — that’s specifically about being taken seriously in rooms that weren’t designed for you. The delusion isn’t just ‘I’m a genius.’ The delusion is ‘If I say it with enough confidence, in the right jargon, they’ll have to listen.’ And they don’t. And she doesn’t notice.”

Twain was nodding slowly. “A woman Duke. A duchess. Running the same grift but thinking it’s a calling.”

The food arrived. Twain’s steak was under a sprig of something decorative that he removed with two fingers and placed on the table like a dead mouse. Ephron ate her salad. I had ordered soup, which I now regretted.

“One more thing,” Ephron said. “The protagonist needs to be likable.”

“Likable,” Twain said, as though she’d said something obscene.

“Not likable the way studios mean it. Not nice. Likable the way you like someone at a party who’s clearly full of it but you don’t want them to leave. Likable the way you like a storyteller who’s making everything up and you know it and they know you know it, and somehow that’s the contract. You WANT to be lied to, because the lies are better than the truth.”

“That’s the whole American project right there,” Twain said.

“It’s the whole cocktail party project,” Ephron said.

“Same thing, smaller room.”

They looked at each other across the table, and for a moment neither of them was performing. Then Twain picked up the decorative sprig and twirled it between his fingers.

“All right,” he said. “A liar on a road. Telling you about the great things that happened that didn’t happen. With a voice that thinks it’s champagne and tastes like soda pop. Three stops. Each one worse. Each one narrated as a masterpiece. And at the end, they’re still lying, and we’re still listening. And somehow that’s not depressing, it’s — what?”

“American,” Ephron said.

“Funny,” I said.

“Both,” Twain said, and flagged down the waiter for more bourbon, and the waiter started to tell him about the distillery, and Twain said, “Son, just pour.”