THE
PUFFY AWARDS 2003
Intro:
2003 was an odd year for puffery.
A lot of my research is done "in the field." I
patrol the long aisles of the local book barns, turning the new releases over
in my hands to see what treasures are printed on the jacket. (Sometimes I even
return them to the display turned backward. And yes I do get some funny, even
hostile, looks. Alas, I am entirely unapproachable.) I say 2003 was an odd year because many times I found myself reading blurbs that seemed to make no sense at
all. I felt in need of assistance. Perhaps the courteous staff . . . but this
would be asking quite a lot.
Call it puffery's "War Against Cliché." Things got
odd in an attempt to avoid the banal. Really, if you can't do any better than
to call a book a "page-turner" or say that you "couldn't put it
down" (and god did I read a lot of those), you shouldn't be
writing puffs at all. You have to say something different. Like James
Ellroy on John Burdett's Bangkok 8:
A novel so steeped in milieu that it feels as if you've
blasted to Mars in the grip of a demon who won't let you go.
Yes, it sounds good, but what does it mean? Why would a
demon be taking you to Mars anyway? Is that where the demons live?
This is the kind of thing I mean. I puzzled over this year's puffery. Granted that it's
part of the puffmaster's art to occasionally baffle, but I'm talking about
firing metaphysical blanks. Michael Dirda on Steven Millhauser: "A prose
that doesn't merely aspire to the condition of music but actually achieves
it." Actually. Actually, in trying to improve on Pater, Dirda has said
something that I don't think makes any sense. But at least I can see what
Dirda is getting at. When Lorna Crozier tells us that Florence Treadwell's Cleaving
"arrives like a blue sweater filling the doorway and nothing is the
same again" I pull a blank.
Or how about Bill Gaston on John Gould's Kilter:
John Gould's stories are
small in the way that nests are small. Or globes, or hearts, or irony.
Right.
Or the Toronto Star on Nancy Huston:
Huston's novel suspends you in an intricate, contradictory
swirl of contentment and existential awareness.
I am at a loss. Existentially un-aware.
Does it make you want to read the book? Perhaps a more direct
appeal is in order. Maybe you don't care about anything between the covers,
but just want to know if the author him/herself is sizzling:
Tama Janowitz has been on the cover of New York magazine,
on The Today Show, on the arm of Andy Warhol . . . Tama Janowitz is
sizzling.
And that's all (the ellipsis is in the original) The Dallas
Morning News has to say on Tama Janowitz's Peyton Amberg.
Of course trying to say something a little different can also
get you into trouble. Elle Canada, for example, thinks that Douglas
Coupland "writes as sweetly and cleanly as a vapour trail." When I
think of vapour trails I don't think of anything sweet or clean. I think of
pollution. Another gem of this sort comes courtesy of Mike Shea at the Austin
Chronicle:
Larry Brown's writing is beyond seductive - it's addictive
and nearly narcotic. His spare lines ring clear as single bell notes. Linked
together they are hypnotic and alluring.
Did you catch it? Do you think Mike Shea knows the meaning of
the word "narcotic"? Do Larry Brown's publishers? Do they
think you're praising someone's prose when you say it nearly put you to
sleep?
We live in strange days. In July there was a story by Sam
Leith in the London Telegraph that talked about the
"anti-puff."
The writer
and self-publicist Toby Young's memoir of New York, How To Lose Friends and
Alienate People, boasted the following quotes on the UK first edition.
"This man, Toby Young, is a rat and a snake and, to hear some tell it, also
a raccoon. He deserves all these nasty blurbs," wrote Dave Eggers. And,
more succinctly, Julie Burchill: "I'll rot in hell before I give that
little bastard a quote for his book." Both quotes were actually produced in
collaboration with the author. "I asked Julie for a negative quote, and we
bandied ideas back and forth between us," he says. "I had met Dave
Eggers in New York. I wanted him to come up with something ruder, but he toned
down what I wanted him to say, to make clear he wasn't being serious. Still,
most people seemed to think all these negative quotes were in
earnest.
"Both quotes were actually produced in collaboration with
the author." Dirty pool! Shame on Toby Young. And even more shame on those
who played along.
Ours is a great age of hype. You have only to witness the transformation of George W. Bush into
a "war-time president" on a par with Winston Churchill to get a sense
of the cultural drift. So let us hear no more of these anti-puffs in the
coming year. There are other people who are trying to get some serious work
done.
But I digress. And since this has gone on long enough I'll now hand out this year's award for .
. .
The Great Big Puffy!
Amy Tan, on Mitch Albom's The Five
People You Meet in Heaven:
"This is the fable you will devour when you fall in
love. This is the tale you will keep by your side when you are lost. This is
the story you will turn to again and again, because it possesses the rare
magic to let you see yourself and the world anew. This book is a gift to the
soul."
Now this, dear readers, really is the shit.
Nothing obscure or baffling about it. We, along with the rest
of Ms. Tan's target audience, know exactly what she is saying. Which is not to
say her puffery is without its own kind of poetry. That repetition (This is .
. . This is . . . This is . . . ) is known as anaphora, and it gives her blurb
quite a rhetorical punch. There is a bit of a slip into cliché with the
"rare magic" that lets you see the world anew, but I was impressed
by how Tan otherwise manages to elevate Albom's book into something like a
sacred text. Words like fable and tale share ground with the
archetypal conditions of being lost and falling in love. This is obviously not
some cheesy bit of faux-spiritual trash, on a level somewhere between
"the Maya Angelou Collection from Hallmark" and O Magazine.
Amy Tan's reputation as an important literary figure in her
own right is only added to with this performance - a puff that we might truly
describe as a gift to the soul. One thing is sure: With a Puffy now under her
belt we know she is capable of anything.
Who knows? She might even grace our
humble stage again.
That's it for this year, folks! Be sure to keep your eyes open in
2004 and
let me know what made you laugh (or cry). I will be back next December
to hand out some more prizes.
