THE
PUFFY AWARDS 2001
Intro:
Now in their second year, the Puffies have established themselves as one of the world's
most popular low-budget literary awards.
And why not? As I mentioned last year,
dust-jacket puffery is the most essential of all contemporary literary
arts. What mere author today can hope to be as good as their press? And
after all, didn't many of our
most celebrated writers - Salman Rushdie, Don DeLillo, Elmore Leonard, to name
just a few - get their start writing ad-copy?
Might it not be the case for some that
the plug remains their true métier? Faye Weldon, herself a graduate of
British advertising, made headlines around the
world this year for writing a novel sponsored by the jeweler Bulgari (I took
notes here); but was
this return to her literary roots really such a radical step?
The Weldon-Bulgari controversy was, alas, only one of the
stories to shake the world of media puffery in 2001. In June it was
discovered that the man touting the latest Rob Schneider movie as "another winner!"
and Heath Ledger as "this year's hottest new
star!" didn't even exist. These promotional quotes came courtesy of one
"David Manning" of The Ridgefield Press. As things turned out, while
there really is a Ridgefield Press (circulation 6,500) nobody working there had ever heard of David Manning.
The reviews were being written by a pair of hacks in the publicity department
at Sony Pictures. What mystified everyone asked to comment on the story,
however, was why anyone at Sony would have bothered. This is the
sort of work you leave to the junket whores.
In most cases, it is work they are doing only too well. It is
easy to make fun of what the critical press in Iraq has said about the
novels of Saddam Hussein, but we should remember that these unhappy scribes
are writing with a gun to their heads. The efforts of our professional
propagandists are less excusable. Indeed, they might even make them legally liable. One
news report this year had a group of fans suing the movie
industry for using reviews obtained by bribery in their promotional material.
As their lawyer put it, "They were sick and tired of looking at movie ads
which say that Battlefield Earth is the greatest movie since Star
Wars." I have yet to hear what became of this.
In any event, what we have now is a bad case of critical
"grade inflation." Given the abundance of exaggerated claims coming from the
media hype machines, any modest, respectful response to an artist's work is a
sure ticket to oblivion. Damn those who would damn with faint praise! We are no
longer interested in writers who are merely great. We want the next Jonathan
Franzen!
Moving right along, I would like to say a few words about the rise in the amount of
"quid pro quo" puffery I saw this year. This concerns
me. A line needs to be drawn in the sand. What are we to think of
Zadie Smith calling Arthur Bradford's Dogwalker
"quite simply the mutt's nuts," and David Eggers (in his most
grating faux-naif style) praising Bradford's "perfect, perfect stories,"
when both Smith and Eggers are thanked by Bradford in his acknowledgments? Or what about David Sedaris telling us that "With
Fraud,
David Rakoff manages to pass himself off as the wittiest and most perceptive
man in the world." Cute - but not so cute when we turn to the acknowledgments and find Sedaris's
name, as well as that of David Eggers (again), who also contributes a dustjacket blurb.
I'm prepared to let Mr. Rakoff go on this one, since he does
manage to drop a whopping 119 names in his acknowledgments and it would
probably have been hard to leave anyone out (for the record, I don't even know
119 people). But this is still cheating, and sets a bad example for others. The time has come to crack down. Barring the removal
of acknowledgments from works of fiction (which I would love to see, but isn't going to happen), puff writers should be expected to adhere to conflict
of interest guidelines. Puffery needn't be without some integrity.
Finally (and I do appreciate your patience), there are two
species of puff that seemed to come up a lot this year. The first was the "combo
puff." I suspect this originated in the industry practice of pitching
film concepts as combinations of two previously successful movies (e.g.,
"It's like The Matrix meets Jaws!"). Or perhaps, not
content to simply describe a new writer as the next Faulkner, the true puff
artist now feels he has to go one further and say that Author X is "like
Faulkner and Pynchon rolled into one!" A good example of the kind of
thing I'm talking about can be found on the dustjacket of Douglas Coupland's All
Families Are Psychotic (it comes to us courtesy of the National Post):
Miss
Wyoming [Coupland's previous novel] is a kind of magic-surrealist love
story with enough missteps and near disasters to keep the mind's adrenaline
pumping. . . . It reads like Tom Robbins on designer drugs with a fine white
line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez thrown in for contrast. . . . Go buy this book.
I have to admit I find this offensive. Aside from the
expression "mind's adrenaline," which just strikes me as being wrong,
and the final exhortation to "Go buy this book," which are words no
review should ever include, the thought of "a fine white line of Gabriel
Garcia Marquez" contrasting with Tom Robbins on drugs strikes me as just
a lot of showy babble. I'm convinced that no one, not even the author,
understands what it means. I'm also pretty sure that this was the intent.
Also popular this year was the "tough guy" puff.
Here, for example, is Ken Burns on Stephen E. Ambrose's The
Wild Blue:
Ambrose's arsenal is imposing and effective; his pen
is a machine gun: detached, hot, and devastating.
Obviously Ambrose is not writing for sissies. Nor, according
to Frances Fyfield, is the mystery writer Minette Walters. "It grips like
steel," Fyfield says of The Echo (you'll find the full quote
reproduced on the dustjacket of Walters's latest): "Passion, compassion,
intelligence and romance is what Walters offers with no quarter for squeamish
cowards." Not to be outdone by a mere civ, Colonel David Hackworth (Ret.)
tells us that James Webb's Lost Soldiers "explodes like a hand
grenade," while Michael Crawley writes that David Wickes's Killing
Time is "plotted with the precision of a Remington bolt-action, [and]
written in prose that sings like a Samurai sword drawn from its
scabbard."
Now I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a good,
aggressive puff, but it's a little much to be told that the book we are about to
buy is going
to blow us to pieces. I'm afraid if Stephen Ambrose wants to kick my ass he's
going to have to come to my door and do it himself.
But enough of these
preliminaries. Let's get on to this year's big winner. It's a special award, saluting group achievement, so I have dispensed with the Honour Roll.
The Great Big Puffy!
The Globe and Mail
On Michael Redhill's Martin Sloane: "Art and
life collide in [an] explosive debut. . . . Redhill's language is masterful;
imagery and metaphor rise organically out of each event and picture. . . . The
pacing of the writing is marvelous, and conscious of the heaviness of
history."
On Evelyn Lau's Inside Out: "Lau blends
startling prose talent with a fierce determination to be true."
On Richard Ford's A Multitude of Sins: "Richard
Ford's stories, like Chekhov's, are unanalyzable, the result of a miraculous
alchemy of language, images and psychological insight . . . A wonderful
accomplishment."
On Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: "Brand has
two gifts that are incendiary in combination: a concise and intelligent grasp
of the subtleties of emotion and an apparently effortless facility with
the language. The result is an extraordinary ability to capture the flicker of
experience."
OK, I know I've been pretty rough on the Globe and Mail this past
year (see here), but
is it any wonder why? Consider this anthology of puff.
In the first place, none of it is saying anything. One gets the sense that
the books are being praised, but with formulas so generic the words seem
entirely without meaning. Imagery rising organically out of pictures? Where
did I leave that hand grenade . . .
But the really great thing about pap like this is that it can be endlessly recycled. You
have to ask yourself: If I had switched the quotes around so that they
were referring to different books, would there be any way to sort them out?
Couldn't we say that Evelyn Lau has "a concise and intelligent grasp of
the subtleties of emotion" (well I wouldn't say it, but you know
what I mean), or that Richard Ford "blends startling prose talent with a
fierce determination to be true"? They must have software that will write
this stuff.
Meanwhile, publishers just love being able to put the name of Toronto's
national newspaper beneath ad-copy every bit as banal as their own. Or should
I say, indistinguishable from their own? Note that first plug, the one
applauding Michael Redhill for his consciousness of the "heaviness of
history" in Martin Sloane. What immediately struck me as odd about
this is the fact that Martin Sloane is not really a historical
novel. You may imagine my surprise then on finding, in the publisher's own
prose, appearing on the same back cover, a reference to the "weight of
history" that Redhill evokes. Which came first, the heaviness or the
weight?
We may never know. The Globe and Mail's achievement this
year was all the more impressive for being anonymous and institutional. None of these blurbs
was
attributed to a reviewer, thus making them doubly generic. One has to wonder
if the Globe and
Mail is trying to set itself up as a brand name in puff. Will anyone be
able to stop them? We can only wait and see . .
.
That's it for this year, folks! Be sure to keep your eyes open in
2002 and
let me know what made you laugh (or cry). I will be back next December
to hand out some more prizes.
