Ken Follett? Yet another hole in this reader’s experience.
(I’ll plug that later in this rumination. But first the facts.)
Let a late-summer lead piece in the Wall Street Journal’s
“Marketplace” section (Aug. 2) be your
tutor: “To increase sales of Pillars of the Earth, his latest novel in paperback, he agreed to be part
of the prize in a contest advertised in thousands of bookstores. Pillars
is about the building of a medieval
cathedral, and the winner of the contest will get a free trip to England and a
tour of Westminster Abbey guided by the author.
“And that’s not all: At his publisher’s request, Mr. Follett
wrote a romantic short story, ‘The Abiding Heart,’ that takes place in the
present but uses the same medieval cathedral as a backdrop. Good
Housekeeping magazine got the story free
for its current issues. In return, Follett’s publisher, a division of Penguin
USA, received two full pages advertising the Pillars contest just before the story.”
Contests? Spin-off short stories? Cathedral tours? It’s a
far piece from Matthew Arnold, a lot more advertising anarchy than literary
culture.
One wishes those well-paid Duke deconstructionists could do
a little demolition in the Follett’s folly sector. But they’re too busy putting
each other down, I suppose, to be concerned about the McDumbification of our
literary institutions.
But where do you draw the line? Or does it even matter? The
hustle is both endemic and protean. Arthur Hailey recently appeared on the J.C.
Penney TV Shopping Channel to flack his latest institutional, The Evening
News. Bottom line? The QVC book shopping
channel (format: the author and the host in a studio, extolling the latest
product) claims Rosamunde Pilcher sells 100 to 50 books a minute. Rosamunde
Who?
What greater love hath a writer than to flog him or herself
on behalf of the latest title? Joan Didion modeled a turtleneck for Gap
clothing stores. Even my hero Jimmy Carter confessed to the lustiness of his
book promotion when he took journalists on a fishing trip to promote his An
Outdoor Journal several hypeful seasons
back.
But the flog that’s most beguiling is Baltimore reporter
Leslie Walker going on a talk-show circuit with the brother of the murderer she
had profiled—until her fraternal evidence was himself jailed for murder. (Takes
one to sell one?)
Perhaps the distance we’ve traveled can be gauged by
contrasting octogenarian James Michener’s curt “It’s disgraceful” with
30-something Tama Janowitz (who touted Slaves of New York with a video of herself at parties with Andy Warhol):
“You do what you have to…and as long as someone is moved to read your book,
it’s worthwhile.”
The late Walker Percy refused, despite repeated entreaties,
to go on the Dick Cavett show, then considered the hottest medium for
book-publishers. Poor old-fashioned Dr. Percy believed his job was writing
them, not selling them.
Keen young Ken Follett (he’s just turned 40), on the other
hand, once took a course on how to do TV makeup and consulted a “color analyst”
so “I would wear colors that make me look attractive.” Yuck.
His first, best thriller, Eye of the Needle (Arbor House, 1978), is not an unintelligent exercise
as befits a philosophy major who learned to be demotic on the London
Evening News. “Timely,” too, in the sense
that a generation after World War II there were millions ready to take a
nostalgic look at a key incident preceding the D-Day invasion—whether the
Allies would enter France via Calais or Normandy, and how the German General
Staff would deploy its diminishing resources along the Channel.
The key player is a Nazi secret agent known at home as “Die
Nadel” (“The Needle”) for his penchant of dispatching those who get in his way
with the stiletto he keeps hidden in the sheath on his forearm. He must have
been doubly appealing to his British readers for his curmudgeonly oddball
contempt for Nazi authority.
The man who leads the British chase is a medieval historian
on loan to security services. The other principal is a beautiful wife of an RAF
Spitfire pilot whose legs (and chances for heroic war effort) were sheared off
in an auto smashup on their wedding day.
I really relish the cat-and-mouse details of the chase,
especially the Needle’s preternatural skills at anticipating the enemies’
moves. Surely, the pleasure Follett has given me in the reading earns him the
last word: “I’m sure there are things I wouldn’t do, like promoting cigarettes.
I understand there are writers who are deeply, deeply serious about the
creative work they do and who feel promoting themselves would sully that. But
it would be pretentious to feel that way about entertainment fiction. The way I
look at it, I’m an entertainer.”
Fair enough. But the Infotainment Era makes it harder and
harder for the bunch of us to think consecutively about social options or to
palaver with each other about what policies ought to come out of our palavers.
Maybe the mistake is believing that there’s any connection
between hard covers and hard thinking. Billions of books don’t necessarily add
up to sane and life-enhancing behavior. With or without color analysts.
From Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large, January 23, 1991
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