It’s been widely reported that publishers are going to stop asking their authors to get dust jacket blurbs from better-known authors. Why? Because there’s rampant over-use of terms like “brilliant” and “genius” to the point where the blurbs can’t be trusted.
It might also be time for book reviewers to think twice before wildly extravagant praise of new novels, piling on as if they have an oversupply of adjectives and need to do a word dump.
Case in point, a novel by Garth Greenwell published a few years ago. The panegyrics about What Belongs to You when it came out had put me off, but I decided to read it anyway when a creative writing student of mine told me he found it interesting.
The narrator was a gay American teacher in Bulgaria who got involved with an increasingly demanding hustler he met in a public toilet. One British reviewer said this novel actually made her tremble, while another hailed it as “incandescent.”
I thought it was for the most part a dud. Aside from listless prose, the major problem I had was the obnoxious, dishonest grifter. We were supposed to believe in the narrator’s intense attraction to this Mitko, yet his most distinguishing features were a chipped tooth and being well hung. The sex scenes were minimal and boring, which was problematic since the narrator’s sexual obsession seemed designed to drive the book forward.
While the novel’s framing sections were way too languid, the middle section worked best because the prose was more compelling. In those pages we experienced the narrator’s shameful memories of growing up with a brutal father and a treacherous, manipulative best friend.
I didn’t quiver reading that part of the book and my iPad screen didn’t glow, but I felt the author was more engaged. He spoiled it, though, when the narrator found a horse in a Bulgarian monastery at the end of that section. “It was tied up, I saw, it could have wandered off anytime it chose; but there was nowhere for it to go, of course, and the cart I supposed was heavy and there was something meager to be had there where it stood.”
Yes, dude. We totally got it. The narrator was trapped. Thanks for clarifying that. The lines were like one of those corny songs at the end of a movie whose lyrics explain what you just saw in case you were too dumb to understand the two hours you’d just sat through.
And this is the work of an author who’s been compared to Proust, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Henry James, Thomas Mann, and D.H. Lawrence.
To quote the movie Clueless, “As if!”
Image by Engin Akyurt from Pixabay
Blurbs are kind of a joke. But my little imprint is putting out a chapbook by an early-career poet this spring, and I thought it was fair to him if he/I asked for blurbs from other poets. Just for the sake of appearances. So we did. But I would be happy to see the practice end.
"to the point where the blurbs can’t be trusted" There's no point where blurbs could be trusted. Blurbs are advertising, nothing more.
I'd be surprised if blurbs vanish. Advertising on packaging works, whether books, cereal, electric razors, what have you.