Category / Needless Intellectualizing

by DrMabuse

By the Page

Crazed Hypothesis Which Involves Momentary Shift From Lit-Loving Guy Into Silly Marketing Type (With Extraordinary, Speculative Overtures) And Mischeviously Suggesting That William Goldman’s “Nobody Knows Anything” Maxim Applies to the Publishing World: If a 300-page novel is, by Page 165, something you’re trying to finish reading so you can move on to the next one, can you conclude it’s a good novel (if you admire it in spurts)? Conversely, if it’s something you can’t put down, does it follow that the book is a great one, whether pop or literary?

Is Page 165 is the make it or break it point? Sure, there’s the possibility that the story or prose will pick up in 5-10 pages. But if the reader or critic is not mind-staggeringly drunk over the book by now, then the writer can kiss her shot at being short-listed or getting a rave review goodbye, or face being a literary mid-lister. In which case you hustle the people behind the Today Book Club.

Is this how the publishing world works? Chaos theory?

Here’s where a bit of extremely specious speculation into American lit comes into play. If we examine the last five years of winners by page count, we find the following:

Pulitzer Fiction Winners

1999: The Hours by Michael Cunningham (230 pages)
2000: The Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri (198 pages)
2001: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon (656 pages)
2002: Empire Falls by Richard Russo (496 pages)
2003: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (544 pages)

Average: 424.8 pages
Next Awards Ceremony: May 2004

Of the Pulitzer winners, only The Interpreter of Maladies and The Hours are less than the around-500 page mark. And that’s only because The Interpreter of Maladies is a short story collection. My guess is that The Hours‘s uber-homage to Virginia Woolf led the page count factor to be dismissed. But the Pulitzers seem to favor sprawling epics, whether a Greek family coming to Detroit, two Jewish emigres making a killing in the comic book industry, or Russo’s wide blue-collar swath.

National Book Award Winners

1999: Waiting by Ha Jin (320 pages)
2000: In America by Susan Sontag (400 pages)
2001: The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (592 pages)
2002: Three Junes by Julia Glass (368 pages)
2003: The Great Fire by Shirley Hazard (288 pages)

Average: 393.6 pages
Next Awards Ceremony: November 16, 2004

The National Book Award winners are more manageable reads, averaging out at the 350 page mark. But page count isn’t so much as a factor, as are consequences over time (World War II in The Great Fire, what happens to characters over a decade in The Three Junes, familial trappings in The Corrections).

The National Book Critics Circle Award

1998: The Love of a Good Woman by Alice Munro (352 pages)
1999: Motherless Brooklyn by Jonathan Lethem (336 pages)
2000: Being Dead by Jim Crace (208 pages)
2001: Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald (304 pages)
2002: Atonement by Ian McEwan (368 pages)

Average: 313.6 pages
Next Awards Ceremony: March 4, 2004

The odd one out here is The Love of a Good Woman, which is a collection of short stories. (And I’m discounting short story collections because, by definition, they’re harder sells than novels.) But it would appear that the National Book Critics prefer breezy, puncutated books with a more quirky style. Ian McEwan has a reputation for whittling his prose down to the bone. Austerlitz is “short,” but the conversations embedded within the novel require work to pick out, being separated by commas. Being Dead is, of course, the ultimate perspective novel in that it follows the disintegration of two corpses. And Motherless Brooklyn has the Tourette’s syndrome hook.

SILLY CONCLUSIONS:

The shorter your book, the more likely you’re going to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. But only if the prose is perspective-oriented and “challenging” enough to impress the critics.

If your novel is a little longer and your book is more centered around time and location, then you stand a shot at the National Book Award.

And if you have a sweeping epic, then the Pulitzer’s your best bet.

This leads me to wonder whether some publishers are more inclined to typeset their books to pander deliberately for specific awards, with abstruse cover art to match, and whether some editors, sensing that a prospective title has some literary merit (i.e., award-winning potential), will press the writer to tailor their books within these guidelines. (“No. Make it a little longer. And can we go off to Bavaria for a few chapters?”)

Of course, all of this is just extremely idle speculation on a rainy day. And I haven’t even taken a look at the finalists, or accounted for timed release dates. But being ill-informed on multiple levels about this sort of thing, I’d be extremely curious to hear from someone inside the publishing industry just how “pre-packaged” a particular book is for these three major awards. It certainly works that way with movies, and, since the risks are just as great (on a smaller financial scale) in fiction, it would seem to me that at least something along these lines would be in place in New York.

Just about every trade paperback edition that comes out has some kind of “Short-Listed” or “Finalist” nod on it, if it can include it. (Even a later edition of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius had “Pulitzer Finalist” on it when it already had a built-in audience, which mystified me.) You’ll recall that Jonathan Franzen got his panties in a bunch over advertising the Oprah Book Club selection on the first hardcover edition.

So the questions are: Are we seeing a shift towards award-conscious releases (even in first editions)? (The more awards, the merrier.) And, if so, how embedded is this within current publishing house policy? And by what factual criteria do they base these ebullient cover-laden interjections?

by DrMabuse

Quickies

The Guardian has an excerpt of Carol Shield’s unfinished novel, Segue, which she was working on at the time of her death.

Terry Gross interviews Stephen King. Hearing Terry Gross describe the beginning of Gerald’s Game in such clinical intellectual terms (apparently, without irony) is pretty hilarious, as are the additional queries that jump from third-person to first-person (“Let’s get Stephen King to the kind of gore and terror and suspense that you create.”). But the second interview has King talking about his accident.

The Globe and Mail features a New Year’s-themed article on the description of drinking in literature that’s also unintentioanlly funny. Really, I couldn’t make this stuff up: “You can, with a little licence, trace an arc in 20th-century drinking literature that follows the act of drinking itself. In Hemingway’s work, the drinking was never-ending, and often celebratory when it wasn’t the weary duty of the lost generation. Hangovers were left largely undescribed, something that could be walked off in the clear air of the Pyrenees, or washed off in a fine and true Michigan trout stream.”

More fun from J.M. Coetzee in the latest NYRoB.

Speculation in the Age on 2004’s Australian heavy-hitters.

Tony Kushner gushes over Eugene O’Neill.

Biggest surprise: USA Today names both Living History and The Five People You Meet in Heaven as worst books of 2003.

Stavros has a translation of the Lost in Translation commercial scene that reveals (no surprise) remarkable caricatures.

And about 70 books on Mao were published in China this year. Perhaps because the 110th anniversary of Mao’s birth was yesterday.

by DrMabuse

Prisoner’s Dilemma

4,000 men were questioned in Britain. The results: Married men are more likely to suffer mental health problems than those who live with their partners. But the reverse holds true for married women. And women, in general, are actually better off without men. Meanwhile, single men are more likely to suffer from depresison.

So if you’re a man, you can remain single and depressed. Or you can get married and get depressed. But if you live with your partner sans commitment, you’ll be dandy.

And if you’re a woman, you can remain single and remain the happiest. Or you can get married and remain reasonably happy. But if you live with your partner sans commitment, you’ll be miserable.

Or to look at it another way:

Living Together Without Commitment: Man (Happiest) + Woman (Miserable)
Married: Man (Miserable) + Woman (Reasonably Happy)
Single: Man (Depressed) or Woman (Happiest)

In other words, what we have here is a startling development, should a woman need to be in a relationship. Relationships and marriages, it seems, are essentially exemplars for game theory. But the difference here is that the man alone is miserable and the woman, without any effort whatsoever, is happiest. A woman need not do anything to remain happy. Is this misery because men make most of the efforts in initiating a date or a meetup or is this misery extant within the Y chromosome? If the psychological hypothesis in these findings holds true, then what we have here is a clear biological indicator that women are the superior gender.

by DrMabuse

Dickens Not in Vogue

This morning, I was shocked to learn of the news that Charles Dickens is “not in vogue these days.” While Boston Globe reporter Sam Allis’s statement was brazen, it is, nevertheless, absolutely true. Unfortunately, a 2,000 word section that cited specific examples was cut by the Globe. One of my inside sources, referred to here as “Tina,” explained to me that a part-time copy editor opposed the section, believing that Mr. Allis was somehow channeling his subject. (“Tina” reports that Mr. Allis’s word rate is “unbelievably lucrative.”)

So what we received instead was an unsatisfactory generalization to back up Mr. Allis’s findings (“He is no longer the staple in humanities courses on this side of the Atlantic.”). However, “Tina” was kind enough to forward me a summary of what Mr. Allis’s original draft included:

1. Arthur Quilip, the little-known dwarf actor who was Verne Troyer’s stand-in in Bubble Boy, came very close to landing roles in Bad Santa and Carnivàle. However, he was narrowly beaten out by Tony Cox and Michael Anderson for the respective parts. The casting directors on both productions had read The Old Curiosity Shop and quipped to Quilp that he had, in the words of Oscar Wilde, “a heart of stone.”

2. Oliver Twists, once a popular cocktail at a Ramada Inn bar (“two for one Tuesdays!”) in Louisville, Kentucky, have declined in sales. Customers are now gravitating towards whiskey sours.

3. At an El Torito restaurant in Bridgeton, Missouri, a table for four, reserved in the name of Pickwick, was withheld at the request of the manager. Four elderly gentlemen were left to stand around while others enjoyed their “fine Mexican meals.” A few customers complained at the presence of these men, referring to them as “old, smelly and decidedly not in vogue,” and were thrown out of the restaurant by Boris, short-order cook and salsa preparer, with characteristic pugilism.

4. Back in September, a young boy by the name of David had walked hundreds of miles to Manhattan to escape an unfortunate domestic disturbance. Hoping to unwind his weary feet, and having been given a pass to the VIP room at Club Copacabana by a cheery busker, David showed up at the club and attempted to redeem the pass, only to be told by the bouncer, “No magicians in dis place.” David has since subsisted in a studio apartment that he shares with other orphans, but only by selling his own blood on a thrice-weekly basis.

5. Calvin Klein has called upon all of his underfed models to lead a public burning of the collected works of Charles Dickens. His circulars have had remarkable results. Kate Moss is said to keep her nose up in the air for at least four minutes when she hears the words, “Barnaby Rudge.” Naomi Campbell plans to take full-page ads in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal that read in part, “Thank god that son of a bitch didn’t finish Edwin Drood. Who needs him?”