Editor’s note: On October 2—weeks after this story went to press—a former employee of Nicholas Sparks filed a federal lawsuit accusing Sparks of racism, religious discrimination, and homophobia. In the suit, Saul Hillel Benjamin, the former headmaster of the private school Sparks and his wife co-founded in their hometown of New Bern, North Carolina, characterizes the school’s work environment as a "veritable cauldron of bigotry toward individuals who are not traditionally Christian, and especially those who are non-white." Sparks vigorously denies the allegations. His entertainment lawyer, Scott Schwimer, has released the following statement: "As a gay, Jewish man who has represented Nick for almost 20 years I find these allegations completely ludicrous and offensive."
Nicholas Sparks recently put a beat-down on a man in Argentina.
Dig it: The so-called King of Hearts himself. Author of The Notebook and sundry other heartwarming love stories. The writer whose readers swoon as reliably as his critics dismiss his work as "knuckle-bitingly bad" and "shameless and stupefying." Took out a bandito half his age, one of two who "blitz attacked" a woman in Sparks’s traveling party and made off with her watch. Immobilized him until the policía arrived. Used only his bare hands. And the Israeli hand-to-hand combat art Krav Maga. Could have unleashed his Songahm Tae Kwon Do. Could have gone down that road. Didn’t.
Nicholas Sparks doesn’t want to discuss this incident. "I will talk about that off the record."
What? Why?
"It’s off-message."
Off-message? Nicholas Sparks rescues a woman from a pawing ruffian—eerily echoing the heroics of a ruggedly handsome bull rider in his latest book, The Longest Ride— and it’s off-message?
But the King of Hearts knows best. If ever a man was master of his own message, it’s Sparks. He’s spent much of this day proving this on an old plantation outside New Orleans. The Best of Me, the ninth film to be made from his seventeen novels, is being shot here. He’s on set to videotape shout-outs to German women’s mags and fan sites for the movie’s release there. Some twenty-five times in a row, he gazes into the camera and nails it: "Hey, I’m Nicholas Sparks, and I’m here to tell you that holding on to love isn’t always easy! There might be circumstances that make you feel like giving up. But if you fight for it, really fight, like Amanda and Dawson do in The Best of Me, based on my novel, you will experience all the joy that love can give! So I want to know: Do you have a person in your life that brings out the best in you? Tell us on Facebook!"
It’s giddy stuff, all the more so given Sparks’s upspeak-y elocution. Even so, his sincerity is dazzling. That’s not snark. Just a fact, as straight up as "Nicholas Sparks put a beat-down on a man in Argentina." He has uncanny eyes, large, wet, and feminine, and a tractor-beam gaze that can transform "sincerity" itself into a verb. Vampires "glamour" with their eyes; Sparks sinceres with his. This gaze, willful yet pleading, can sincere a man to jelly where he stands. It’s his gift, this will to sincerity. It makes him a plodding writer, even as it makes him, arguably, the most important storyteller in the culture—and at times something else. Something more. A figure of almost superheroic potency whose nonliterary triumphs match his book sales in their power to astonish.
"Hey," I say after yet another take, just to...see. "Do one for GQ."
Sparks never drops his smile, never diverts his eyes from the lens. Just waits for the cameraman’s prompt and begins. "Hey, GQ, I’m Nicholas Sparks, and I’m here to tell you that the movie The Best of Me, based on my book, is coming to theaters near you soon. Set aside a date night and take your girlfriend or your wife. Trust me. She’s going to love it—and love you for taking her." [For a short video of Sparks delivering an alternate take, click here.]
Message ON! Say what you will about Nicholas Sparks, the man knows his audiences. Both of them: the millions of American women who love his books and movies, and the millions of American men who are increasingly, inexorably, book by book and movie by movie, having their manhoods measured and molded by Nicholas Sparks and the code of morality, lovemaking, and letter writing his male heroes follow.
So who and what is the Nicholas Sparks Man? Semiotics aside, he’s neither complicated nor kinky. He is handsome! Specifically: He looks great in jeans. More specifically: He looks great in tight jeans. This seems to be a preoccupation of Sparks’s. Tight. Hot. Jeans. (A typical iteration: "As he worked, his jeans pulling tight as he bent over, Sophia felt the heat rise in her cheeks.") The Nicholas Sparks Man is rugged and good with his hands. He may have an improbable but sympathy-inducing tragedy in his past. Sometimes he speaks in simple declarative sentences so anodyne they actually seem nsinuating—sentences that, if given the gifts of bass-line thumps and rhythm-guitar waca-wacas, could pass as 1970s-era skin-flick dialogue:
"Would you like something to drink? I don't know about you, but I could really use a beer."
"Sounds great."
"I'll be back in a minute...."
"You were thinking about something."
He sighed. "I'm glad you decided to come today.... Because I'm having a great time...."
"It was rated a 'Best Buy' in Consumer Reports for safety, it's reliable, and we can get a warranty up to seventy thousand --miles...."
No, the Nicholas Sparks man is not verbal. Except—and it’s a tentacular exception—when he’s writing love letters. Which he does steroidogenically. One every day for a year! (The Notebook.) At which point, in rhetorical terms, any remaining thumps and waca-wacas drown in a tsunami of vanilla sugar ’n’ puppies: "When I sleep, I dream of you, and when I wake, I long to hold you in my arms. If anything, our time apart has only made me more certain that I want to spend my nights by your side, and my days with your heart...."
No matter how colorful he gets with his wordplay, the Nicholas Sparks Man does not curse. Ever. Nobody around him does, either. Even liquor-sopped, murderously vengeful ex-husbands talk clean. Sparks’s reasons for this speak to a literary universe whose arc bends toward optimism, earnestness, being nice, more than, well, reality. "It goes to the honesty and sincerity of my characters," he says. "[Profanity] can be an easy fix, a crutch used to express anger or frustration. Creating those emotions without bad language is much more effective. And challenging."
Say, does the Nicholas Sparks Man fuck? Are you kidding? He’s got no truck with the word, much less the deed. The NS Man first falls in love, and at first sight (one clue to this: the 2005 Nicholas Sparks novel At First Sight), performing all due diligence, and then, only then, makes love. Very gently. With (preferably "with," not "to") one, and only one, woman. For life.
"I don’t write about adultery," Sparks says. "I won’t. It’s been done. It’s too easy. In every sense. I’ve published eighteen books without taking that easy route. I don’t write about premarital sex between minors, either. I know it happens. But I also know it doesn’t happen, and I want to show that to people."
When Sparks speaks about his writing process, he speaks passionately—but not about the actual writing (which he does fast, averaging 2,000 words a day and a book a year since 1996). Instead, he speaks of the weeks and even months that precede the writing, during which he "meets" his characters. "Plot comes later. I begin with the characters, and the characters begin with honesty. You have to be honest when you’re writing fiction. You have to find a way to keep your characters honest to who they are, even when they’re behaving in ways that are out of the ordinary. How do I do that? Once I have a character, I sit there and ask a thousand questions: How would you behave in this situation? Or if someone said this? That’s how they become real to me and, I hope, other people."
Sparks’s characters are compelling. The book sales (97 million served) don’t lie. They just don’t. Yet as much as Sparks insists that they’re not devised or created but "found" and unto-themselves, his characters aren’t real. They just aren’t. It is fair play to wonder, What kind of imagined Rockwellian past does Sparks confuse the world for? Yet fair play also requires an acknowledgment that if these characters and the world they inhabit are born of a certain willful wistfulness, that’s interesting.
"I don’t need to 'buy into' Nicholas Sparks in order to, you know, go and buy Nicholas Sparks," says Anita Lisk, a Richmond, Virginia, church administrator. "But I like to." Echoing the sentiments of a dozen other dedicated Sparks fans, Lisk says, "There’s a comforting feeling you get reading a Nicholas Sparks novel, something apart from the characters getting together and experiencing true love. It’s that the world in which it happens, even if it’s not like the ’real world,’ makes sense. It’s a simpler world and it’s easy to understand—and something about that feels like rescue. Now, I don’t need a man to rescue me. I’ve worked and been on my own two feet all my life. But that feeling, or notion, of rescue that I get from a Nicholas Sparks book—once in a while, that’s just nice."
Sparks is aware of the way his books create a moral universe that makes sense and doesn’t change, where, as he writes in his latest novel, "moments of circumstance, when later combined with conscious decisions and actions and a boatload of hope, can eventually forge a future that seems predestined"—and that this is something his readers value greatly. "People kind of know what to expect in my stories. They’ll be in small towns in North Carolina. There will be characters and voices people know and can relate to. There will be moments of emotional intensity at certain points throughout the book."
Most novelists are driven by the imperative of self-expression; theirs is an inherently self-gratifying enterprise. Not so with Sparks, who, before he wrote 2009’s The Last Song, sold the "premise" to Disney as a Miley Cyrus vehicle, crafted the screenplay with her input, and then "used that as an outline to write my novel." He speaks of a moral and even fiduciary obligation to give his readers what they want. "I could, theoretically, do a novel set in the 1800s. But the last thing I want to do is a novel that not a lot of people may read, because it’s not what they expect. I don’t want to disappoint them if they bought my book on good faith, expecting one thing, only to discover I delivered something entirely different. Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t wealthy growing up, but when I ask people to take money they’ve earned working and support my career, I want to give them their money’s worth." Consider that: an author who respects his customers too much to give them art.
Consider as well that Sex and the City is the mold from which almost all romantic and dramatic comedies of the past fifteen years have been cast. In the SATC mode, characters are sold to viewers on the basis of their timeliness. The main structural element, the obstacle(s) keeping the protagonists apart, is composed of the static of the now: consumerism, urban stress and status envy, speed-of-thought communication, the latest app, whatever’s trending. Characters are defined by the things they own and the things they want.
Sparks, on the other hand, dispenses not only with cities—Wilmington, North Carolina, population 112,000, is his most populated setting to date—but with stuff. His characters use their small-town public library to access the Internet. They rarely talk or text on cell phones. Some don’t even own cars. Instead, they live—and walk and ride their bikes—by the ocean, in a kind of unwired state of grace that could be 1934 as easily as 2014. The fairy-tale timelessness is intentional. Sparks may vary his narrative devices (a little), but this diaphanous perspective abides; events in his books are more often remembered than lived.
The foreverness, that’s the thing. Nicholas Sparks’s market share is the measure of his import. The import itself—his influence on the genre of the love story and, in turn, on what we talk about when we talk about love—is this: the involved depiction, rather than mere promise, of everlasting love. Where traditional romantic comedies and dramas end, with boy and girl having overcome all obstacles and fallen for each other, Sparks begins. He shows us (usually through flashback and the rereading of old love letters) that first kiss, that first "I love you," that first making of love—and then decades of contented PG-13 marriage. It’s not just the first kiss his readers anticipate, but also those (to Sparks, equally dreamy) passing decades.
"Nicholas Sparks," says Nicholas Sparks, "was always the marrying type."
"Write what you know"—that’s what they tell aspiring novelists, right? That this is the only way to achieve true-to-life characters that readers can relate to. Be sincere. But what if your life—"what you know"—happens to be operatic? Chock-full of the kinds of cataclysms and broad-stroke emotions that, if rendered as plot points, would make for melodrama?
Sparks bristles at being called a romance novelist. "Romance novels have a specific form, specific arcs and endings that the characters have to follow," he says. "The characters in my books begin and end with authenticity"—a word Sparks returns to frequently in our conversations—"which is the difference between drama and melodrama."
One can argue that fairy tales have their own authenticity and that, far from being debased, melodrama is a legitimate and historied genre. This much is beyond dispute: Nicholas Sparks novels traffic in the ridiculous. Ridiculous coincidences, revelations, and deaths occur in ridiculously dramatic fashion to characters of ridiculously heightened emotion. Judge that as you will, but know this: Nicholas Sparks’s life has been ridiculous, abrim with coincidences, revelations, and deaths that at the very least seem dramaturgical. That fella you meet in the pages of Nicholas Sparks books who can write a love letter and take a man out—maybe even at the same time—while looking just so in a pair of tight jeans? He is Nicholas Sparks.
Consider the plot points and character tropes.
The Childhood. Sparks grows up outside Sacramento "without two pennies to rub together." His older brother’s a natural. Things come easy to him. Sparks, on the other hand, comes to things. At them. And one at a time; he’s a natural monomaniac who waits for a thing, knows when he sees it—at first sight—that his wait is over, and then...marries it. Nobody commits like Sparks. In high school, he puts in thirty hours a week at an ice cream parlor, nabs valedictorian, dates one and only one girl. Lisa Mills. Her father, Billy, is a mythic figure, a reservation-raised Oglala Sioux orphan who won gold at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the greatest come-from-behind upset in 10,000-meter history. His life is literally a movie (1983’s Running Brave). With Mills as his track-and-field guru, young Sparks clocks 1:52 in the 800 meters—smokin’—and wins a full ride to Notre Dame, where as a freshman he runs on a relay team that sets a school record. And Lisa? Well, love isn’t always easy. "I really loved Lisa," Sparks tells her parents after it ends. "But I also love you guys, and I’m really sad I can’t ever talk to you again." Billy Mills just smiles. "Of course you can, Nicholas," he says. "We’re part of your life forever."
The Obstacle. An injury, a convalescent summer. "Don’t just sit there," his mom says, "do something." Like what? "Go write a book or something." Inexplicably, Sparks fails to write (1) what he knows or even (2) something nice, going instead with a Stephen King pastiche. Buried lede: 19-year-old business major writes a freaking 300-page novel. "The few who have read that manuscript were...very kind," Sparks says now.
The Sighting. Senior-year spring break, Florida. He sees her—Catherine—and he knows. It’s a Monday. On Tuesday he tells her: I will marry you. Back in Indiana, he sets his second, half-finished novel in a drawer and begins writing letters. "Between March, when we met, and May, when we graduated, I don’t know, a hundred love letters?" Sparks says now. "A hundred and fifty?"
Heartwarming Niceness Begotten of Improbable Tragedy. Seven weeks after Sparks, 23, weds Cathy, his mother falls off a horse and dies. A car accident kills his father just before The Notebook comes out. Brain cancer takes his sister a few years after that. Like his guru, Sparks is now parentless. The older man’s role as a father figure deepens; Billy and Pat Mills, the parents of his high school girlfriend, end up paying for Nicholas Sparks’s honeymoon.
Superheroic Parenting. Sparks’s second son, nearly 4, can’t talk. It’s 1996, and scientists still disagree about how to treat such disorders. Sparks undertakes the research, goes with a form of cognitive therapy pioneered at UCLA, then straps his little boy into his high chair—four hours a day for eighteen months—and teaches him to talk. ("We were told to put him in a home," Sparks says now. "Now he’s in college.") After, he feels the need to spend quality time with his other son. They take up Tae Kwon Do. Sparks ends up getting his black belt and placing third in the world championships. When his children take up running in earnest, Sparks spends nearly $1 million to replace the asphalt track at the local high school with state-of-the-art sponge. And becomes co-coach. New Bern (North Carolina) High School isn’t big, a student body of 1,700, but in 2009, when Sparks’s second son is a senior, its 4 x 400 and 800-meter-medley teams set several U.S. high school records. Then there’s the Christian school Sparks and his wife have created in New Bern with $10 million of their own money, and the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, dedicated to the eradication of rural poverty and... Eh, enough already, though it is worth noting that when Sparks speaks of coaching track, founding the school, running his foundation, he deals in the measurable and the macro: what the stopwatch said, what the infrastructure cost, what the policy states. Others around him speak to the palpable, if immeasurable, good he effects in the world: the boys with troubled backgrounds who ran track at New Bern High and came to know the Sparks home as a safe haven, always open for meals, academic tutoring, and even a place to stay; the scores of underprivileged kids who have traveled the world as part of the college-prep education offered by his school and foundation.
Sparks’s life provokes a few questions. When Noah writes Allie a letter a day for a year in The Notebook—do you buy that? If you came across that bit about Sparks’s honeymoon being paid for by his ex-girlfriend’s parents in a book or movie, would it pass your treacle test? Or if the protagonist was a best-selling writer whose son couldn’t comprehend what a word was—would the irony feel a little too too?
"You should design a uniform and start fighting crime already," I tell Sparks at one point. A kind-of joke. And then in earnest ask, "Have you ever had to deploy your kung fu?" When, eventually, he answers on the record (with a great first line for a book: "There was a man in Argentina..."), I find myself wondering: If a movie presented me with an unquenchably nice character named "Nicholas Sparks" who was capable of writing one hundred letters in so many days to a woman he’d just met and of going all Jet Li on a South American street punk, would I buy it? Would you?
It doesn’t matter; his hegemony grows. He’s a film producer now. In addition to putting his whole book-to-movie assembly line under one roof, Nicholas Sparks Productions will soon be bringing Spark-y fare—a Brian’s Song remake, for instance—to the small screen. There is even—prepare yourself—a Nicholas Sparks Foundation Jewelry Collection, boasting a "line of exclusive beads and beautiful keepsake bracelets themed with elements from The Notebook, The Guardian and The Longest Ride."
Asked if and how he’d like to be remembered in sixty years, Sparks makes a curious shift into the second-person, and an even curiouser shift away from the subject of writing. "You probably don’t think of it 99.9 percent of the time, but you do think about it in that .1 percent. Otherwise, why are you putting your name on a building? I’m trying to be very philanthropic at this stage of my life." As for the writing, "Yes, I’d like my stories to be remembered. It’s wonderful to think about that happening. But I ain’t gonna be around to enjoy it, so will it be wonderful?" He punctuates the thought with a loud, self-pleased bark of a laugh.
If you’re the kind of reader who obeys the Times Book Review, the prose of Nicholas Sparks will never strip your soul naked or bring the "shock of recognition" Melville said literary genius leaves in its wake. Sparks’s stuff goes down easy; that’s its nature. If you’re a modern self-supporting woman possessed of Sex and the City savvy, the shock of self-recognition may be the very last thing you want when you read. And if you’re a man dating or married to one of these women, you are in his thrall—that is, the romantic standard set by the Nicholas Sparks Man that you will never live up to. You may resent Sparks for this—and also because he’s rich, deft, super nice, can kick your ass, and pulls off tight jeans at 48 better than you did at 20—but you can’t resist him. You were his at first sight.
Andrew Corsello (@AndrewCorsello) is a GQ correspondent.