THE
PUFFY AWARDS 2002
Intro:
2002 may be remembered as the year puffery came out of the closet.
Even mainstream publications started talking about the all-too-public love
that dares not speak its name. William F. Buckley
Jr. had a column about the practice of writing blurbs in the National Review (March
26), as did Elinor Lipman in the New York Times
(August 12). As a way of getting this year's ceremony started, here is a
bit of what Lipman had to say:
I appreciate the sociology and transparency of blurbs: heads of
M.F.A. programs praising their darlings, editors turned novelists praising
authors turned girlfriends. I will see a mentor thanked in the acknowledgments
for his support, his faith, his in-law apartment. Then I turn to the back cover
and see the acknowledgee declaring the book huge, important, dazzling,
incandescent.
This sort of "quid pro quo" puffery is something I
talked a bit about in the Introduction to the 2001
Awards, but it really came into its own in 2002. The most prominent, and
controversial, example of the "heads of M.F.A. programs praising their
darlings" arose when Jonathan Safran Foer's creative writing teachers
were caught puffing all over the dustjacket of Everything Is Illuminated.
In a similar vein, Quill and Quire ran a story ("Logrolling
101") wondering if the students in the creative writing program at the
University of British Columbia weren't also getting "a crash course in
the fine art of networking." Evidence was provided in the form of
"book-jacket bumph" by graduates such as Linda Svendsen on Kelli
Deeth ("How does Kelli Deeth do this? Make me love my own children - children
- more fiercely?"), and Zsuzsi Gartner on Annabel Lyon
("Lyon tattoos the page like a born wordsmith - in indelible ink, in
dizzying colours - leaving small beads of blood in her wake.").
In defence of this practice, it does seem to be getting harder to find anyone
who will actually read a new novel. Certainly agents, editors and prize juries
can't be bothered. But simply to rely on word-of-mouth without a buzz machine
would damn irredeemably mediocre writers with dangerously large contracts to obscurity. Who better to turn to for a blurb than a friend?
In a hype economy you expect to find puff appearing everywhere. BookWorld is no
exception. The Complete Review did some excellent investigative reporting this past year to turn up this
little gem (appearing in an advertisement that ran in the London Review of Books) from Jonathan Franzen on Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery:
"Inarguably great . . . her sentences are small miracles of
compression, tiny novels in themselves." This is a pretty stupid thing
to say, but it is of a piece with Mr. Franzen's over-the-top championing of Fox.
An earlier
quote from Franzen has Fox's Desperate Characters "obviously superior to any
novel by Fox's contemporaries John Updike, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow." Any
novel by those authors! And obviously superior too! This is truly puffery
without borders, and from the previous year's literary wunderkind
himself.
But writers who live by the hype die from its
absence, requiring these extra efforts. Who is Paula Fox anyway? Better ask who, in
2002, was Jonathan Franzen? Or Zadie Smith? In my own News
section I had occasion to speak out against the extravagance of Salon.com's
enthusiasm for Ms. Smith's stillborn second novel The Autograph Man (you can read all the
gory details here). My
only disappointment was that I couldn't include efforts like Franzen's and
Laura Miller's in the
competition, which is limited to material actually appearing on a cover or
dustjacket. But their work has not gone unnoticed.
But enough of these has-beens and wannabes vying for our attention with
their shameless hyperbole. On to this year's winners.
Honour Roll
Zingers:
The Edmonton Journal, appearing
on Tim Wynveen's Sweeter Life: "[Angel Falls]
lingers with you, like the sour-sweet memory of someone you once
loved."
Which is a good thing?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft, on V. S. Naipaul's The
Writer and the World: "If you had read nothing written
since September 11 and only Naipaul's books, you would surely be the
wiser."
Every time I read this I get more confused. You'll have to
supply your own paraphrase.
The Toronto Star, appearing on
Keith Maillard's The Clarinet Polka: "Behind each
word, each sentence, you can feel the blood coursing, the flesh breathing and
the sinews tensing."
Does "breathing flesh" mean that the book actually
sweats?
The Washington Post Book World,
appearing on Nick Tosches's In the Hand of Dante: "A
writer who sets his foot firmly on your throat from the start; he won't let up
and you won't want him to."
More "tough guy" stuff (see the Introduction to last
year's awards). This is another one of those books you don't want to mess
around with. In much the same vein, Kirkus Reviews had this to say about John
Connolly (appearing on The Killing Kind): "Connolly's honest but
brutal characterizations leave the reader with wounds that need
stitching." Please.
Tariq Ali on Terry Eagleton's memoir The
Gatekeeper: "Impaled on a crucifix, Eagleton winks,
calmly removes the nails and steps down to shape his own history."
I honestly can't
figure out what this means (and I've quoted it in its entirety). "Impaled
on a crucifix" must be wrong. You can't be impaled on a cross, or nailed
to a crucifix. The rest may be some kind of in-joke which only makes sense to
someone who has already read the book. But what is it doing
on a dustjacket then?
Aimee Bender on Alice Sebold's The
Lovely Bones: "The Lovely Bones is the kind of
novel that, once you're done, you may go visit while wandering through a
bookstore and touch on the binding, just to remember the emotions you felt
while reading it."
The book as fetish object. This is one powerful puff. It also works
as a subtle commercial pitch: Go visit this book in a bookstore because
touching the binding in a library won't give you the same thrill. But why you
would want to visit The Lovely Bones in a bookstore when you presumably
have the copy you've just read sitting at home isn't clear.
Charlotte Stoker on Bram Stoker's Dracula:
"No book since Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein, or
indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality or terror - Poe is
nowhere . . . "
This blast from the past of puff comes to us from the Penguin Classics edition of Dracula, and was brought to my attention by
C. D. of Kingston, Ontario. I had to include it for several reasons. First
because it is a classic, and it's nice to see a reputable publisher like
Penguin sinking to this kind of grave-robbing. Then there is the puff's
wonderful provenance: Yes, that's Bram's mother blurbing her boy
on the back of his book! I also like the absolute nature of Mama Stoker's
convictions, the way no other book has come near Dracula. And finally
there is that gratuitous cut at the end, "Poe is nowhere." All in
all, this is a very satisfying bit of puffery indeed. It's a shame Penguin
didn't bother to include some of the rest of what Charlotte had to say:
"In its terrible excitement it should make a widespread reputation and
much money for you."
Nobuyuki Idei on Jack Welch's Jack:
Straight From the Gut: "Jack Welch, the brilliant business magician, has
finally disclosed his mysteries of management. Now we must accept the
generosity of his challenge and try to match or exceed him."
I include this for only one reason. One word really.
"Generosity." Going through this year's catalogue of blurb it soon
became clear that generosity was the buzz word for 2002. Authors
were generous with their characters and generous with their emotions and
even generous with their generosity. We were made to feel that, as readers, we
were somehow undeserving of these honours. And
here is Sony Corporation Chairman Nobuyuki Idei praising the generosity of
former General Electric Top Dog Jack Welch.
At least I think that's what he's saying. Whatever Idei's
point (I can understand having to accept a challenge, but what sort of
generosity is it that forces us to accept one?), it seems clear that he is praising
Welch for providing us the secrets behind his mysteries of management. And this
is being generous. So generous that his publisher only paid
him a $7 million advance.
Now that's generous! Thanks Jack!
The Great Big Puffy!
Richard Eder, on Alice McDermott's Child
of My Heart
"Her realism is so blazingly accurate that it hurts;
her doors catch our fingers, her food gives us heartburn. At the same time,
each distinct atom of reality splits under her artisan hammer and releases a
world of wild, lost particles: charm, for example, and others the physicists
have not invented, such as grief, comedy, even happiness."
This one really made me smile. I love the way Eder tries to
make the throwaway line about McDermott's "blazingly accurate"
realism into something concrete by suggesting that reading her descriptions of
food will
give us heartburn. This is (a) silly; and (b) hardly a recommendation. I would
say something similar about doors that catch fingers but I'm not sure what
it's referring to. A door being shut on our fingers? That sounds worse than
heartburn.
From
here we go into the "world of wild, lost particles." This is a metaphor
Mr. Eder refuses to drop. McDermott's writing is first
described as a process of splitting atoms (distinct atoms at that!).
Instead of releasing energy, a sliding word that might have worked as a
critical term, what results is an explosion of "particles." An
example of a particle is charm. But the book also contains other particles like grief, comedy
and "even happiness" (why even?)
that have not been
invented (as opposed to discovered?) by physicists.
I don't think there is any part of this that makes
sense. But as with any truly effective puff its greatest merit is that it
doesn't even try. Like all the best ad copy, it uses language that is without
content or meaning to evoke feelings through a process of free association. This
is the real artisan's hammer, the very poetry of puff. In every respect
it is worthy of this year's top award.
That's it for this year, folks! Be sure to keep your eyes open in
2003 and
let me know what made you laugh (or cry). I will be back next December
to hand out some more prizes.
