"In the blurbosphere," says Charles McGrath, recent editor of the New York Times Book Review, "has there ever been a book that wasn't acclaimed?" He considers that indispensable adjective of praise -- rooted in the Latin clamare, "to shout," also the root of "clamor" -- to be the key word in the publishing world's "language of hagiography."
Let's parse that. I define McGrath's blurbosphere as "the throbbing universe of book promotion," coined on the analogy of blogosphere, "the galaxy of Weblog commentators." Hagiography (not, as I first thought, the bio of Al Haig) is "writings about the lives of saints." Thus, in the straining-to-sell world of book marketing, we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame.
Acclaimed, in this fulsome lingo of book ads and catalogs, now means merely "the author received at least one good review." Widely acclaimed means "two or more, plus a cable-TV plug." Critically acclaimed means "it was decently reviewed in a specialized publication but didn't sell."
Long- is a beloved half-word adverb in the blurbosphere. The letters of Lytton Strachey, advertises Farrar, Straus & Giroux, regarded as one of the classiest publishers, is "a long-overdue collection." Whenever a writer has had a dry spell and taken forever to deliver, his book is hawked as long-awaited. On the other hand, if the author has a hot hand and sold well last time out, the adverb is switched and his work becomes eagerly awaited.
Sales problem: How do you blurb a dull book? Meticulously researched, or if you're really in trouble, definitive, exhaustive, spiced with profoundly insightful. Whatever covers a lot of ground and spans the millennia is a sweeping epic, which could soon be a major motion picture about three generations of janitors.
Brilliant, through overuse, has lost its sparkle. Fascinating has lost its charm, powerful is impotent and even towering achievement is getting shaky. Liberals go for heart-shattering and deeply empathetic while conservatives are attracted to gripping and the hard-driving compelling.
For adventure novels, riveting is getting a rosy run, along with the hypnotic mesmerizing and the noun page turner. For novels in which characters determine the plot, San Francisco likes absorbing and satisfying, and New York pushes moving and masterly. Upbeat women's books take triple adjectives, with an adverb rhythmically punching the third: "Funny, ferocious, intensely likable" and "Droll, shrewd, irresistibly entertaining" describe the same Random House novel.
Originality rears its head: "a boggle-the-mind experience" propels one Booker Prize winner; "stampede reading" invites an all-nighter, and "at once realistic and phantasmagorical" appeals to the oxymoronic.
Desperate copywriters use the "in the tradition of" device, piggybacking on another writer's fame. This says "if you liked that best seller, you'll automatically love this," a marketing idea Amazon seized upon. In fact, it signals "we're using this best-selling name without permission to attract your attention because that author would never stoop to blurb this."
Literary editors have learned to be suspicious of all endorsements. Sam Tanenhaus, the current editor of the Times Book Review, says, "You're never sure what debts are being paid and what logs are being rolled." For years, the Times has forbidden all its writers from giving blurbs, a barrier that's sometimes a blessing because it's tough to turn down a pal.
How can a kindly person praise a friend's fairly good work without leaping overboard into the prepublication pool of prevarication?
Saul Bellow, Nobel laureate and surely one of the 20th century's greatest writers, who died last month at 89, showed me the way. A decade ago, a cloak-and-dagger novel of mine was roundly panned in the daily Times. (I did not wince nor cry aloud; in fact, when my espionage tradecraft was critiqued in another review by the incarcerated Soviet spy, Aldrich Ames, sales received a boost.)
Bellow, master of the art of fiction, sent me a note calling the review "offensive" and cheered me up with: "I thought your book was ingenious, diverting and even instructive. Nietzsche wrote somewhere that when you show people something true they sometimes behave as if it were old hat -- vieux jeu -- and accuse you of peddling platitudes."
That was a morale picker-upper, all right, not least because the adjectives he chose with his usual care to describe my book were neither excessive nor condescending. Ingenious dealt only with its complicated plot; diverting evoked a spirit of amusement about a work not to be taken seriously; and instructive described the informational use of spooky tradecraft. Each adjective showed restraint in friendly comment, and in a private note not to be exploited. But taken together -- and with that Nietzsche allusion as well as a French vernacular version of "old hat" casually tossed in -- it was the most generous "acclaim" a journeyman novelist could hope for.
Speaking of Bellow, some years back I performed an exegesis in this space on a beautiful extended metaphor the novelist used in one of his rare Op-Ed essays. Snowbound in Boston, he wrote: "Let the pure snows cool these overheated minds and dilute the toxins which have infected our judgments."
In case anyone complained about his use of "the toxins which" instead of that introducing the restrictive clause "that have infected our judgments," I noted that "you get Nobel prizes for literature, not grammar." Bellow promptly responded: "I'm only fair at relative pronouns. I do know the restrictive from the nonrestrictive. `Which' sounded better than `that,' and I do go by sounds as well as by grammar."
That I took as a lesson for the overheated minds in the endless struggle of Language Snobs against Language Slobs. Good writers are free to break the rules of grammar, but their freedom gains meaning when they know the rules and overrule them only for an artistic or polemical reason.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs