THE
PUFFY AWARDS 2000
Intro:
The Puffies are a special literary award, unique to
Goodreports.net, honouring that most essential of all
contemporary literary arts: the super-hyped ad-copy dustjacket puffery meant to
entice the unwary book buyer with specious claims of genius and instant-classic
immortality.
What turns a mere puff into a Puffy? After all, "exaggerated or
falsified praise" is what we expect to find on a dustjacket. It is only too
easy to make a facile comparison
between the latest hip young thing and Shakespeare. Unless a puff goes that extra mile it will never rise above the crowd.
Make no mistake: This
is not bad writing. What set this year's winners apart was the way they fulfilled the conventions of the form
while engaging with the product in a way that made selling the product seem an
honest art. More than mere celebrations of another's skill, they function as
both advertisement and advertisement for themselves.
As a prerequisite, the
puffs that made this year's shortlist all had to be of paragraph length.
Unfortunately this means that I have had to overlook the art of the one-line
zinger. How can I forget Michael Barone telling
me that "No one can understand our times without reading this book"?
(Alas, he was only referring to David Frum's How We Got Here: The 70s.)
Or what about Jerry Stahl's observation that "Eric Bogosian writes like an M-16 ripping through the brainpan
of Western civilization"? Perhaps next year I will include a prize for
one-liners. The material is certainly deserving of some recognition.
A final note of caution: One danger in
judging the Puffies is an awareness of the gap between puff and text.
An over-the-top bit of puffery might seem only slightly out of place on the dustjacket of a
good book. On a very bad book, however, the same puff becomes egregious. I can
only say that in my judgment it would be unfair to the puff artist to judge his or her work in
relation to the book they are puffing. The puff writer has no control over what
is inside the book. Indeed, in most cases I suspect they don't
even know what is inside, never having bothered to look. As much as possible, I
have attempted to overlook this "reality gap." Where I have reviewed
the book myself I have provided a link.
But enough talk. On to this year's honour roll!
Honour Roll
Bob Shacochis, on Robert Bingham's Lightning
on the Sun:
"Lightning on the Sun slammed into me like no other novel since
Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers, and no other expatriate fiction before that
time since Conrad's Heart of Darkness. It's as if Robert Bingham
swallowed the whole world and proceeded to sweat out its wickedness and moral
dissolution into literary perfection. In Mr. Bingham's whipsaw prose, the
underside of the empire that is us - America in the 90s - has finally found -
and just as quickly lost - its truest, most unforgiving voice. Hip, arrogant,
brilliantly successful, lethally nihilistic. This novel leaves me in permanent
awe, and permanent mourning."
This is good stuff, and works on several different levels. Of course there is
hyperbole (hip and arrogant! how's that for an improbable combination!), but there is
also gold in what is merely implied. Note, for example, how a whole generation
of expatriate American writers (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al) are
silently elided. First there was Conrad, then there was Stone, and now, bringing
the tradition to its fruition, Bingham. Also observe how it is only in the year 2000 that
90s America "finally found" its truest voice. Did you perhaps think
that ______ (fill in the blank) was the voice of 90s America? I'll admit it
wasn't much of a decade to be the voice of, but did you? Well, you were wrong.
Alice
Munro, on Carol Shields's Dressing Up for the Carnival:
"Carol
Shields's short stories have given me happiness, not just pleasure. They're
prismatic; they delight at first by the clear simple elegance with which they
are made, then there is something so bountiful and surprising, like beautiful
broken lights."
This one falls into the "uh-huh" or
metaphysical category of puff. While undeniably eloquent, it is hard to figure out exactly what,
if anything, is being said.
The distinction between happiness and pleasure is one I don't understand, at
least insofar as it relates to reading. I take it the broken lights are what come out of the prism, but
that is only a leap of interpretive faith on my part. My guess is that Munro doesn't mean broken Christmas tree lights,
because they don't work when they break. But while the coloured lights that come
out of a prism may be considered bountiful and surprising, how does the analogy
fit a
short story?
If the art of the puff consisted only of saying nothing
brilliantly, this might have been our winner.
Bret Easton Ellis, on Mark Z. Danielewski's House
of Leaves:
"A great novel. A phenomenal debut. Thrillingly alive, sublimely creepy,
distressingly scary, breathtakingly intelligent - it renders most other fiction
meaningless. One can imagine Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Stephen King, David
Foster Wallace, bowing at Danielewski's feet, choking with astonishment,
surprise, laughter, awe."
Whew! What more can you say? Only this: If I was a 100% sure that Ellis
actually meant it then I would have to give him the Great Big
Puffy. How could anyone hope to top this?
But I have my doubts. Ellis may be pulling our
leg (and frankly, I hope he is). Does he know that "sublimely creepy"
is a paradox? I have to wonder. There is a sense of parody here, as though our
writer is aware of the game. I like my puffery without the irony, thank you very much. The top prize belongs to someone who
takes their art more seriously.
And now, the moment you've all been waiting for . . .
The Great Big Puffy!
Dionne Brand, on Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost:
"Lightstreaked in tenderness, syntaxed with a radiant humanity,
Anil's
Ghost is a great book of our time. Ondaatje's characters, intimately drawn,
intricately gestured, navigate a world in which ultimately "only stone and
rock can hold one person's loss and another's beauty forever." His
imperishable words caress, and sing over bones. Bones wrapped in disappearances,
felt in haunting absences. As in a line Neruda once wrote, Ondaatje cups his
hands around the live coal of life."
After the enormous success of The English Patient
(first the movie, then the novel), one can only imagine the number of scribblers vying for an opportunity to get on the dustjacket of Ondaatje's next
novel. That Anil's Ghost was going to be well and truly puffed in all of
Canada's, and indeed the world's major media outlets was
never in any doubt. That Dionne Brand managed to stand out among such a
vast and glittering field is no small testament to her skill.
Where to begin? With the poetic license that treats "syntax"
as a verb? With the woozy effulgence of lightstreaked tenderness, radiant
humanity and haunting absences? This is all good, but there is so much more. We
might, for example, recoil at the staleness of characters who
"navigate" their world, but they are saved by their "intricately
gestured" characterization (an expression I can't even begin to figure
out). Meanwhile, the de rigueur claim for the work's status as a
classic is competently managed by the reference to Ondaatje's "imperishable
words" (that caress no less!), and the quoted material gives the
impression that the book, or at least part of it, has actually been read.
And Neruda. As in a line he once wrote. Did it have to be Neruda?
The
question can only make us smile. We are in the hands of a Master.
Brand hasn't missed a trick. This year's award, and all of the honour and
recognition it deserves, justly belong to her.
That's it for this year, folks! Be sure to keep your eyes open in 2001 and
let me know what made you laugh (or cry). I will be back next December
to hand out some more prizes.
