Of Blurbatology
"If you recant a blurb," asked Ron Hogan at GalleyCat last week, "does anybody really care?" My impression so far is, not really.
If there is nothing else to learn from the case of Houston Baker's dust-jacket encomium for Michael Eric Dyson -- and there isn't -- then at least this much is clear: If you are going to blurb a book you haven't actually paid much attention to, the important thing is to be consistent. Don't even look at the book again. If for some reason you happen to see it, don't read it. And if, perchance, you do read the book and realize it's terrible, just keep this belated realization to yourself. That's only being fair to everyone.
But in the meantime, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has started a thread inspired by some of the blurbs for War and Decision -- the new book by strategic genius Doug Feith about how necessary and well-thought-through the Iraq war was, all appearances to the contrary. The jacket features various luminaries using superlatives such as "controversial" and "readable," as well as "not nearly as delusional as you might suppose."
Okay, I made that last one up -- but it's more an exaggeration of the general drift than something spun out of thin air. "And these were the blurbs they chose to promote the book," as Henry points out.
But the Crooked Timber item is less a matter of discussing War and Decision than it is a pretext for encouraging readers to nominate other great moments in the history of dubious endorsements. A few are obviously snippets from reviews, rather than blurbs. The highlights:
"Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterrley’s Lover has just been reissued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-by-day life of an English gamekeeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional gamekeeper. Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion this book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeping.” -- Ed Zern
“I have been stunned and baffled by Roger Lewis’s vast biography of the stunningly baffling Anthony Burgess.” -- Jan Morris, author of The Meaning of Nowhere
On a volume about Social Security: “This is the type of book that, once you put it down, you will not be able to pick it up again.”
“The covers of this book are too far apart.” -- from a review by Ambrose Bierce.
And finally, The Irish Times on Iain Banks' The Wasp Factory: "It is a sick, sick world when the confidence and investment of an astute firm of publishers is justified by a work of unparallelled depravity. There is no denying the bizarre fertility of the author’s imagination: his brilliant dialogue, his cruel humour, his repellent inventiveness. The majority of the literate public, however, will be relieved that only reviewers are obliged to look at any of it."
As Henry Farrell then says: "How could you possibly, possibly refuse to buy a book with a blurb like that?"
Labels: Book Reviewing, Industry News, NBCC Dispatches
posted by Scott McLemee 2:12:00 PM
4 Comments:
In a story I wrote about book blurbs that ran in the Hartford Courant in 2004, Stewart O'Nan shared his favorite interpret-it-any-way-you-like blurb:
"No praise is too high for this book."
--Carole Goldberg, Books Editor, the Hartford Courant
Dare I reference Chip Kidd's The Cheese Monkeys, the paperback of which includes quote from several strongly negative reviews?
(Or, for that matter, Christopher Brookmyre, who loudly trumpets his pans on his website.)
Does Mr. McLemee actually read this stuff?
First of all, Caryl Phillips' "Dancing in the Dark," although nicely written, owes a lot to Michael Ondaatje's "Coming Through Slaughter," not just the pastiche of art and documents and the way the narrative voices change without warning, but the specific scenes that take place in the barbershops. In the Phillips book, Bert Williams' father, who is set up in the barber business by his son, goes crazy and slashes the customer he's shaving. I don't think there's much doubt that Phillips borrowed this from the Ondaatje novel, in which jazz trumpeter Buddy Bolden does the exact same thing. The difference is that Ondaatje, who, unlike Phillips, includes a bibliography at the end of his novel, knew at the time he was writing it that Donald Marquis (author of In Search of Buddy Bolden) had disproven the myth that Bolden worked as a barber (instead, he's believed to have been a plasterer) but Ondaatje decided to use it anyway.
But more importantly, the Phillips novel belongs to a style that National Book Award recipient Charles Johnson in "Being and Race: Black Writing Since 1970," describes as the "novel of outrage." Mr. McLemee's acceptance of Mr. Phillips' interpretation of minstrelsy as simply an outrage, ignores all the studies that have been done in this area of culture. Minstrelsy's legacy in American culture goes much deeper and is more profound than black greasepaint and gangster rap.
For example, Jeffrey Toobin tells us in "The Nine" that when George W. Bush denounced the Dred Scott decision in a 2004 presidential debate with John Kerry, he was actually speaking in coded language about abortion to his conservative base for whom Dred Scott is often compared to Roe v. Wade. According to Temple University history professor David Waldstreicher in "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution," the origins of minstrelsy can be found in the same kind of racial masquerade in political culture, beginning in 1723 when sixteen-year old Benjamin Franklin published commentary under the slave pseudonyms of "Dingo" and "Blackamore" in order to illustrate, for example, how ambition was penalized by the legal system, not in order to comment on the conditions of blacks under slavery. This helped inaugurate a tradition by which "oppressed" North Americans would don blackface in order to protest being treated as less than human, or "like slaves" by the government.
The book I would recommend is a Hurston-Wright Award finalist, Louis Chude-Sokei's "The Last Darky: Black-on-Black Minstrelsy and the African Diaspora." "Hip: The History" by John Leland also contains a good chapter about minstrelsy.
Although I haven't read the Baker book, I'll accept McLemee's opinion, however, I disagree with him on almost everything else. The group of people he identities as black "public" intellectuals - who are typically professors of law, religion, or English at Ivy League colleges - are nowadays more than just "public" or even "market" intellectuals who publish books and moonlight as political commentators on television, they've become, in many cases, black history and black culture entrepreneurs, trusted brand-names whose consensus opinion (Baker's point about unquestioned reciprocal blurbing sounds about right) is often regarded by the public as the official black position. It is not! But more importantly, some intellectuals represent a kind of black leadership that has deep roots in black political culture. The book to read is Norman Kelley's "The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics" (2004).
It's about more than just black and white, liberal and conservative. Irving Howe eviscerated Tom Hayden (who said publicly in 1968 that a vote for George Wallace would do more to further the radical cause than a vote for RFK) and he felt the same way about black radicals and the Marxists in English departments who viewed Austen and Dickens as mere instruments of class oppression.
That's what I'm talking about. The most trusted name in African American biography (who's not an African American) has managed in twenty years to attach his name to everything Richard Wright ever published (which will take years to undo) and then he comes out with a sensationalized biography of another major black writer that really distorts what he stood for (and privileges the positions of anyone black who ever criticized him.
When Stephen L. Carter and Henry Louis Gates buy summer homes on Martha's Vineyard (Oak Bluffs, I think it's called), it's no longer an occasion for derision as in Chicago School sociologist E. Franklin Frazier's classic study, The Black Bourgeoisie, it's now self-promoted as a little-known aspect of black culture, subject to novelization and TV specials.
I generally like what I've heard John McWhorter say about jazz, however, when he sat down at the piano and played Cole Porter's "Isn't It Romantic?" during his 3-hour "In Depth" special on Book TV, he was not playing anything vaguely resembling jazz -- he was playing a written piano arrangement that he had memorized! Jazz arrangements have long been available in degree of difficulty ranging from intermediate to note-to-note transcriptions of Bill Evans, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and Herbie Hancock.
Congratulations to Anonymous for proving, at length, that the 800 or so word review of a novel that I wrote for newspaper is not, in fact, a seminar paper for a course on the history of minstrelsy.
Of course it would be easy enough to list major references on that topic somehow left of out this catalog of stuff-Anonymous-happens-to-know. But really, why be pedantic?
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