C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters – which consists of epistolary advice from the senior demon Screwtape to a junior demon Wormwood on the damnation of a human soul – is frequently described as a satire. But I don’t see any satire at all in The Screwtape Letters.
What I do see is a brilliant and generous exploration of human nature, a miniature portrait of Britain as the Phoney War comes to an end, and some of the most perfect prose you are going to find in English.
Satire uses exaggeration and intensification to criticize a person, idea, institution, or social convention that has power by making it look ridiculous. Satirizing demons is difficult because if you don’t believe in them as metaphysical beings (ie, you don’t believe they exist), then there is nothing to criticize.
If you do believe in devils, then you are likely to regard Lewis’ Screwtape as utterly convincing rather than ridiculous. Metaphysical evil is self-exaggerating and self-intensifying after all. And Screwtape’s bureaucracy and banality, twenty years before Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, offers readers who reached the age reason before the close of the twentieth century, a highly plausible picture of hell.
But The Screwtape Letters offers much more than an original demonic voice, satirized or not. Its greatest achievement – and I think, real purpose – is its comprehensive depiction of the human character in all aspects.
Screwtape is, of course, interested in exploiting human vice, vanity, and pettiness to achieve his goals, so these get full treatment. But he is also interested in neutralizing human virtues because these are weapons that counter the work of demons.
The emphasis is on religion and the work of religious devotion throughout, but Lewis’ insights are so universal they are likely to please readers of any religion or no religion at all – except for those diehards who are dissatisfied with any book that does not exactly confirm their particular convictions; and for such folks I recommend reading very few books or none at all. At best, you’ll be wasting ninety-five percent of your time. Why bother?
Screwtape considers the sources of domestic harmony and disharmony; sexuality, love, and married life; the foibles of social interactions in all its forms; the hybrid animal and spiritual nature of humans (under the theory of “undulation”); the character of Christianity and other trends of thought; the temptations of the world; and more.
Perhaps my favorite letter is on the nature of human laughter and joy because many good things in life, many pleasures, are gifts Lewis believes God wants us to embrace. In a few pages, Lewis explores, “Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy” with an economy and incisiveness that should provoke jealousy in any writer except that admiration overwhelms envy.
Lewis’ Screwtape associates Joy with Music and says “something like it occurs in Heaven – a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience” which he as a demon detests. Joy and laughter are “a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of Hell” according to Screwtape.
Toward the end of the book, World War II, which has always been hovering at the edges of The Screwtape Letters, comes to the forefront as the German bombing campaign of Britain begins and the unnamed young man who is the focus of Wormwood’s intentions joins the war effort. Here it was impossible for me to think Lewis’ wasn’t speaking from his own experiences fighting in the First World War, and he does a masterful job making us feel the quality of that time in England.
Finally, there is Lewis’ writing. I could praise it, but I will simply give you an example of Screwtape at his most caustic, and let you decide. Screwtape discovers that Wormwood has allowed his young man to fall in love with a Christian girl, and this is Screwtape’s reaction:
I have looked up this girl’s dossier and am horrified at what I find. Not only a Christian but such a Christian – a vile, sneaking, simpering, demure, monosyllabic, mouse-like, watery, insignificant, virginal, bread-and-butter miss. The little brute. She makes me vomit. She stinks and scalds through the very pages of the dossier. It drives me mad, the way the world has worsened. We’d have had her to the arena in the old days. That’s what her sort is made for. Not that she’d do much good there, either. A two-faced little cheat (I know the sort) who looks as if she’d faint at the sight of blood and then dies with a smile. A cheat every way. Looks as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth and yet has a satirical wit. The sort of creature who’d find ME funny!
I don’t have a dog in the fight between Amazon and big publishers over eBooks – I’m just an irrelevant bystander — but I do think I can tell when someone is trying to sell me a bill of goods.
At least that’s how I felt about parts of “The Seven Deadly Myths of Digital Publishing” by Bill McCoy, which appeared on the Publishers Weekly website today. However, I agreed with other points in Bill’s argument and overall found the article well worth reading. Here are my notes:
Tablets and Large Screen Smartphones Are Transforming Digital Publishing
McCoy says that new devices along with new universal coding standards will allow electronic publishing to offer “highly-designed illustrated and enhanced digital books” as well as greater reader interaction and social engagement. He also believes that the differences between reading content on an eReader, a mobile phone app, or a website will be reduced, where as currently they are distinct formats. All of this will allow the eBook’s success to expand beyond their current domains in “novels and linear non-fiction”.
All this is interesting and cool and thanks to Bill for sharing. My problem is that his article implies that Amazon (the monster elephant in the room he doesn’t name) is vulnerable because they are reliant on a proprietary and outdated E Ink platform: that is the Kindle.
Which would be true if Amazon hadn’t launched the Kindle Fire in September of 2011, and wasn’t continuing to roll out enhanced versions at a fraction of the cost of an iPad ever since.
Plus, considering Amazon has a pretty decent on-demand video streaming service already live, I’d say they are thinking about how to deliver content through their own website.
Now this doesn’t mean that Amazon will be more successful seizing the opportunities of the future than big publishers; but I do think it shows that Amazon sees those opportunities as clearly as Bill does. And Amazon sure doesn’t look like it’s behind the curve.
Authors Still Need Publishers
On this one, I’d say Bill is on thin ice. If not swimming in open water. Anyhow, he makes several points. That writers will need publishers for their expertise in editing, cover design, typography, and marketing. That publishers can evolve into new roles as multi-media / multi-platform “producers” of content in collaboration with writers. And that publishers can find a role organizing communities around authors and readers interested in the same topics.
Well. Expertise is editing, cover design, typography, and marketing is not limited to publishers and there are an enormous number of experienced freelancers out there (many of whom used to work for the publishers’ until they were outsourced). Literary agents have marketing skills and are at least as well positioned, maybe better positioned, to be creative collaborators with writers, not mention their business managers. And none of these folks are going to demand 90% of a book’s net revenue as compensation.
As for community creation, is a publisher going to want create a community around a topic in which they aren’t the dominant publisher? And if they are the dominant publisher, are people going to believe that community ISN’T a form of advertising run by a big company for which they are working as unpaid copywriters?
I ain’t sure.
Now Bill is right that authors still need publishers. But the authors who need publishers most are the unknown ones – ie, the ones least likely to make them money. Will Stephen King still need a major imprint in five years? Maybe not.
And Let’s Not Forget About Amazon’s Huge Sales Pipe
Last summer, Forrester research stated that 30% of all online shoppers begin with Amazon to research products. Not Google. Not Bing-Yahoo. Amazon. Yikes.
Why? Well, people know they can find a lot of stuff they want to buy, at reasonable prices, with convenient shipping on Amazon. Getting them to change their habits and say, buy eBooks direct from a publisher platform, is going to take some major heavy lifting – most especially, offering some new product or service of such compelling value the people have a good selfish reason to switch.
Otherwise, publishers can innovate eBooks all they want. But they are still going to need to sell a lot of them through Amazon, because that’s where readers want to buy them right now.
And Let’s Not Forget About 70% Royalties and the Power of Social Media to Bypass All the Old Gatekeepers
And while I’m walloping away at Bill – who is doubtless a nice man and doesn’t deserve it – let’s not forget about 70% net royalties from eBooks published through Amazon versus 10% give or take from publishers for print books. With those numbers, authors could sell fewer total units of just eBooks at a lower cost through Amazon and still make more money. Ouch.
Plus, social media can be a highly effective way to market books, but publishers really can’t do it for authors. Who would you rather follow on Twitter? Dan Brown or the marketing assistant assigned to tweet about Dan Brown books at Doubleday?
So Pete, You’d Never Sign a Contract with a Traditional Publisher Then, Right?
Are you kidding? In a second. I am one of the unknowns in desperate need of their help. I love you, Doubleday, you big beautiful handsome company you. Call me!
Which are Nabokov’s best books? And which should you consider reading? Any ranking is subjective but the reasons behind a “best of” rank can help you decide. So here is my personal list of the eight “best” Nabokov books, which include six novels, one memoir, and one collection of interviews. Also see the Nabokov FAQs below these reviews.
1. Lolita (1955)
Lolita is Nabokov’s best novel because it is the book that best synthesizes all his major characteristics as a writer:
(1) A love of language
(2) Delight in word play, patterns, puzzles, and games
(3) A highly intelligent, narcissistic-sociopath narrator
(4) A resilient victim who is the center of Nabokov’s sympathy
(5) A preoccupation with perception, consciousness, time, and memory
(6) A belief in fate and the existence of a great design behind what seem to be the random and irrelevant facts of ordinary life
(7) The conviction that art is a refuge from the assault of death
In addition, Lolita is the disturbing story of a successful child rapist. It features brilliant miniature portraits of postwar America – almost Vermeer-like in their lucidity – as well as a phantasmagorical climax that takes place in a fairytale nightmare land. Lolita is funny, harrowing, heartbreaking, and transcendent. It caused a scandal, was a critical and then a popular success, and made Nabokov a mint of money. As art and cultural phenomenon, Lolita excels
2. Speak, Memory (1966)
Not a novel, but a memoir of Nabokov’s life from childhood to the moment he escapes France weeks before the 1940 German invasion – Speak, Memory is a classic of autobiography that leaves most of Nabokov’s story untold.
Instead, it focuses on Nabokov’s most cherished memories of his family and friends; his youth in Russia and his young adulthood in Western European exile; on the natural world and butterfly hunting; on a recital of the Nabokov family’s august history and their liberal politics; on stories of Vladimir’s education and tutors and governesses, including the famous “Mademoiselle O”; on poetry; and more.
Through it all permeates the great Nabokovian pre-occupation and conviction that there is more than darkness before the beginning and after the end of life; that our living persists and this persistence is wonderful; and that the people we love won’t disappear into nothingness after death. You find this theme frequently in Nabokov, but its purest distillation is here in this great book.
3. Pnin (1957)
Professor Timofey Pnin is Nabokov’s most deeply comic and deeply human character, and his response to the incessant comic cruelty Cervantes inflicts on Don Quixote. The structure of the novel is slight and episodic (Pnin began life as serial pieces published in The New Yorker) and lacks the dazzling pyrotechnics of books like Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada. What Pnin offers instead is hilarity, enormous tenderness for the agonies of an ordinary life, and the danger of laughing at rather than laughing with Timofey; which is complicated by the fact that the arrogant narrator of this novel is not a Humbert Humbert or a Charles Kinbote, but Vladimir Nabokov himself.
4. Pale Fire (1962)
In terms of structure, technique, and pure virtuosity – and as a landmark of post-modern fiction – Pale Fire is Nabokov’s masterpiece. But it is a cold masterpiece.
The novel is constructed from a 999-line poem in rhyming couplets composed by one of the book’s characters (the Robert-Frost-like John Shade), with a forward, commentary, and index written by another (the extravagantly delusional Charles Kinbote).
The major conceit of Pale Fire is that Kinbote’s commentary has nothing to do with Shade’s poem, which creates a WTF experience for the unwarned first-time reader rivaled in English-language novels of the 20th century only by the “Benny” section of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury.
Nabokov’s prose in Pale Fire is brilliant; there is no better example of “the novel as chess problem” in his work; and Charles Kinbote is the craziest if not the most dangerous of Nabokov’s narrators (although it is difficult to tell what is “real” and what is imagination in his novels).
However, the human tenderness in Pale Fire – frequently buried in Nabokov’s major works – is particularly difficult to find here. It exists in Shade’s poem, which tells the story of his unhappy daughter’s suicide, and the long grief of Shade and his wife over their loss. But this is overwhelmed by Kinbote’s monumental self-absorption and the intricate innovation of Nabokov’s design. Nabokov’s supreme novel for the mind.
5. The Gift (1937)
The last and best of the novels Nabokov wrote in Russian, The Gift is a portrait of a young Russian writer, Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev, finding his way as an artist and falling in love with the woman who would become his wife.
Nabokov transforms this commonplace premise into a novel which is dense with detail, filled with examples of Godunov-Cherdyntsev’s writing, and convinced that fate is working secretly to assure the young writer’s happiness.
Nabokov’s powers of observation and description come to the forefront in The Gift, particularly since the novel, like many lives, is short on plot. This will please fans of modernism but there are metafictional touches as well.
The novel features a 90-page chapter entirely devoted to a book by Fyodor called The Life of Chernyshevski as well as a generous sample of hostile reviews of it. Most especially, at the end, you see Fyodor coming up with the idea to write a book that will become The Gift itself.
6. Ada (1969)
Ada is Nabokov’s Finnegan’s Wake. Meaning that you can see Ada as either the summation of Nabokov’s artistic vision which pushes to their limits his genius as an author, the form of the novel, and the abilities of the audience. Or you can see Ada as a deeply self-indulgent, over-intricate and deliberately obscure, reader-hostile mess.
I’m inclined to the former view, although I think Ada is a good example of the axiom that more is not always better, and even Nabokov fans will need to endure a fair amount of confusion, re-read the novel several times, or rely on expert help (such as Brian Boyd’s Nabokov’s Ada or the chapters in his biography of Vladimir).
Ada is occupied with the 80+ year love affair between Van and Ada Veen who are, as it turns out, brother and sister and which takes place on a parallel / alternative Earth sometimes called Anti Terra and sometimes Demonia. All seven of the Nabokov qualities are in evidence, plus a fair amount of literary parody as well as a few science fiction touches and other assorted material that will keep readers so inclined to puzzle out Ada happily at work. Matthew Hodgart’s 1969 review of “Ada” gets it right and is a hoot to read too.
7. Bend Sinister (1947)
Nabokov always insisted he was indifferent to politics, but Bend Sinister suggests he wasn’t indifferent to the cruelty governments inflict on individuals.
The novel takes place in the nightmare city of Padukgrad, run by the dictator Paduk and his “Party of the Average Man”. Paduk wants Adam Krug, a renowned philosopher, to give a speech in support of his government. When Krug refuses, Paduk threatens his son, and the bungling brutality of Paduk’s thugs leads to tragedy.
In Bend Sinister, Nabokov focuses on Adam Krug’s love for his son and his cheerful contempt for the dictator Paduk, a childhood acquaintance. Although the novel takes place in a fictitious country, and feels like other Nabokovian worlds, Bend Sinister is an accurate portrait of the dynamics of the total state. What is fantasy, and what gives the novel its final punch, is when Nabokov reaches into the novel and mercifully saves a character from the suffering that state inflicts. (For a longer discussion of Nabokov and totalitarianism, see my post Tyrants Destroyed: Politics in the Novels of Vladimir Nabokov.)
8. Strong Opinions (1973)
Readers of this collection of interviews, edited to the last comma by Nabokov himself, could be forgiven for concluding Vladimir was even more arrogant and imperious than his reputation.
Nabokov does spank the hell out of just about everyone in Strong Opinions: Freud; a long list of “second rate” writers including Balzac, Dostoevski, Lawrence, Camus, Sartre, and Faulkner; consumers of “poshlost” or cheap, vulgar sometimes popular and sometimes exalted culture; Westerners duped by Soviet propaganda; members of any literary, social, or political group; fans of “general ideas” and “everyday reality” and “social interest” and “moral messages” in novels; Edmund Wilson and his grasp of Russian. The spanking goes on.
Nabokov does condemn cruelty and brutality in all its forms. He expresses a great sunny and personal happiness. And he provides useful facts, such as the pronunciation of his last name (see my note below). As complete a portrait of the public Nabokov as Speak Memory is a portrait of the private.
Frequently Asked Questions about Vladimir Nabokov
What kinds of books did Nabokov write?
Nabokov wrote novels, poems, short stories, plays, and works of literary criticism in English and Russian. His novels in Russian include Mary (1926). King, Queen, Knave (1928). The Luzhin Defense or The Defense (1930). The Eye (1930). Glory (1932). Camera Obscura (1933). Laughter in the Dark (1938). Despair (1934). Invitation to a Beheading (1936). The Gift (1938). His novels in English include The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Bend Sinister (1947). Lolita (1955) Pnin (1957) Pale Fire (1962) Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969) Transparent Things (1972) Look at the Harlequins! (1974) The Original of Laura (fragment, 2009).
Nabokov’s wife Véra was his inspiration, first reader, business manager, and much more. All his novels were dedicated to her. Nabokov’s and Véra’s only child, Dmitri Vladimirovich Nabokov, helped translate many of his father’s books and oversaw his literary estate after his mother died in 1991. Dmitri had a career as a professional opera singer. For a few years in the 1960s, he raced cars professionally as well.
Did Nabokov study butterflies?
Nabokov was also famous for both his love of butterflies and his scientific study of them. Since Nabokov was a self-taught zoologist, most of the scientific community considered him a dilettante. As it turns out, one of Nabokov’s biggest theories about butterflies was correct.
Was Nabokov a Russian author or an American author?
This question is a perennial source of disagreement. Those who wish to go spelunking in Plato’s cave and come up with elaborate theories, aesthetic or otherwise, about the essence of the words “Russian” and “American” are free to do so. And doubtless you will too. For my part, I think the right way to answer the question is to ask Nabokov. And his answer goes like this. Nabokov is an American author because Nabokov chose to become an American citizen.
Nabokov was born in Russia, fled the revolution in 1917, and never returned. He went to university in England but did not become an English citizen. He lived in Germany but fled to France when Hitler rose to power. (Véra was a Jewish.) He fled France ahead of the German invasion in 1940. Nabokov lived in America for twenty years and became a citizen. In the early 1960s, he and Véra moved to Switzerland to be near Dmitri. Yet Nabokov always maintained his US citizenship, paying a great deal of American taxes for the privilege as he liked to point out. The Paris Review asked Nabokov in 1967 “Do you consider yourself an American?” This is how he answered:
Yes, I do. I am as American as April in Arizona…. I feel a suffusion of warm, lighthearted pride when I show my green USA passport at European frontiers. Crude criticism of American affairs offends and distresses me. In home politics, I am strongly anti-segregationist. In foreign affairs, I am definitely on the government’s side. And when in doubt, I always follow the simple method of choosing that line of conduct which may be the most displeasing to the Reds and the Russells.
I might also say there is something quintessentially American about Pnin and Lolita and Ada and Van Veen, but saying that I realize I’ve fallen back into Plato’s cave.
Those inclined toward reasoned compromise might gently suggest Nabokov is a “Russian-American” author but neither reason nor compromise exists these days so y’all gonna have to pick a tribe.
How do you pronounce Vladimir Nabokov’s name?
How to pronounce Nabokov’s name is another source of perennial disagreement. This is what Nabokov himself said in a 1965 interview with TV-13 in New York and even he doesn’t firmly answer the question:
As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open “o” as in “Knickerbocker”. My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle “o” of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful “Na-bah-kov” is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentally, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer — rhyming with “redeemer.”
Have movies been made of Lolita?
The most famous Nabokov movies are the two Lolita films: the 1962 version directed by Stanley Kubrick (Nabokov wrote the screenplay) and the 1997 version directed by Adrian Lyne. Lyne’s film is not a success aside from the opening credit sequence, featuring music by Ennio Morricone, which achieves a beauty and heartbreak the rest of the film conspicuously lacks.
Was Humbert Humbert a rapist?
Humbert Humbert is a serial rapist who monstrously abuses Lolita. (The beauty of the story is all on Humbert’s side. The real heartbreak belongs to Lolita alone even if you believe Humbert’s remorse over his treatment of Lolita is genuine.)
You could argue that Nabokov also fails to deal with Humbert as a serial rapist and monstrous abuser and to the extent that Lolita’s experience is all but obliterated from the novel, you are right. I can only say that the novel emphasizes those qualities which made it possible for Humbert to succeed as a rapist. His good looks and good manners and good education. His charm and most of all his dazzling narcissism and his titanic self-absorption. That Humbert abused Lolita because he failed to see her, and failed to see her because he could only see himself, is precisely the point in my reading.
Now, Nabokov himself is having none of this and Lionel Trilling is having much worse. At least in the filmed interview below.
Interview Videos: Here are the two parts of an interview with Nabokov about Lolita.
For a guy who writes mediocre poetry and has read one volume of Proust, I’ve always been pretty okay with capitalism. But the Fifty Shades of Grey Inner Goddess Journal (list price $16.99) is making me change my mind.
Before I saw the ad for this excellent product in The New York Times Book Review this morning, I regarded capitalism as not necessarily a good system, but the system which in practice has created the most wealth for the largest number of people so far.
Its dynamic of winners and losers was necessary to reward hard work, innovation, and risk-taking as well as to discourage free-riders (although I’m no free marketeer and I think the United States’ level of social protections is inadequate to ensure we get the most from all our people, not just those of privilege).
Capitalism certainly generates a large number of crappy products, but I’ve never been able to side with the critics who makes this point because (1) their definition of “crappy product” is “crap I don’t buy” and (2) they tend to talk as if they are the only ones who see through capitalism, while everyone else is its slave-drone-fool or an active participant in its malevolence.
But you know what. I was wrong.
It’s not just the breathtakingly cynical whoring after profit the Inner Goddess Journal represents that’s changed my mind because, honestly, you see whoring after profit going on all the time all over the place.
It’s that the Inner Goddess Journal includes “tips for writers” and plenty of blank pages for “aspiring writers” to “express their own Inner Goddess” according to the product description.
E.L. James offering tips for writers is like Genghis Khan handing out advice on how to live in peace with your neighbors.
Okay James wrote the books, and people liked them, and she made money, and everyone was happy. Fine. I’m okay with that. I read the first one. I thought it was hilariously awful. I moved on. It’s a free country. I’ll read the books I like. You read the books you like. God bless American. Amen.
But this. James wants to metastasize herself and Vintage Books is her enabler. Ladies, gentlemen, please. Write all the erotica you want. But don’t follow her advice. Because if you do, I’m going to have to move to a commune or see if the Pennsylvania Amish will take me in. And my wife won’t be very happy about that. I think.
The Beguines were trying to be modern women long before there were modern women.
Their communities appeared in the Low Countries during the early 1200s. The Beguines were expected to commit themselves to chastity, faith, and charitable service, although they were not nuns and took no vows. They were also expected to read, study, support themselves through profitable labor, and choose the rules they would follow in their communities.
The church and the men of the time didn’t like women outside their understanding or control, and sought to bring them under thumb, using tools that included prosecution for heresy and the stake.
So the Beguines were an early example of the great program of human freedom, agency, and independence which has been the work of the West, fitfully and all too imperfectly, for centuries as well as the inspiration for a typical opposition to that freedom.
As a young woman, Marcella Pattyn wanted to devote herself to the service of her Christian god, but no order of nuns would take her because she was nearly blind and the first Beguine community she tried sent her home after a week. The Economist reports Marcella still wept over these rejections in her old age. Some wounds are so deep we carry them for life.
But Marcella did find a Beguine community that accepted her, and there she showed an irresistible determination to pray, to be useful, to comfort the sick (which she often did by playing the banjo and accordion), and to live with an exuberance that did not consult the tastes or expectations or opinions of the world.
It seems to me Marcella’s wounds and her exuberance were paired; that her pain and joy were equal blessings, and that they must be praised and embraced equally or not at all.
At the end of her life, she was alone — a condition both emblematic and universal — although she was celebrated by the town in which she lived for being the last of her kind. Now she’s gone and Marcella lives only in memory. When those memories die, too, what will become of Marcella then?
Julie Bosman published an interesting article on the front page of the The New York Times yesterday about competing cover designs for two paperback editions of The Great Gatsby. (The article is here.) The first is a re-issue of the classic Gatsby cover familiar to readers old enough to have read Fitzgerald’s masterpiece in high school or college. The second is the tie-in edition for the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio and directed by that genius of brilliant excess — or hawker of wretched excess, take your pick — Baz Luhrmann.
Much of the article describes the different markets at which the two cover designs are targeted, and different sales strategies behind each. Readers already familiar with the novel are likely to choose the classic design, while readers just discovering the book are more likely to be attracted by the movie version.
Behind one of these strategies, however, are certain attitudes toward literature which I find — well, let me be gentle in my expressions here — contemptible. Allow me to explain:
How does the cover design of The Great Gatsby change the novel? (Hint: It doesn’t.)
Assuming that texts in today’s competing versions of The Great Gatsby are identical, how do the differing cover designs affect the experience of reading the novel?
The answer is they don’t. Just like reading Gatsby on a tablet rather than on paper doesn’t change the experience, as long as you think what is essential about a novel is reading the text. Is engaging the words on the page. Is entering into a conversation with the author as you read the book.
Now, the cover design can influence your expectations of a novel you haven’t read. And if those expectations are different than your reading experience, you may come to a different conclusion about the book than you might have otherwise. But all sorts of things influence our expectations of a book. Its status in the canon. The opinions of reviewers and friends. Advertising. Our mood and experiences. Our age.
But once you’ve read a book, how does anything other than having read it affect your expectations on re-reading it? Especially a novel like The Great Gatsby, which a lot of people have read. Or put another way…
If the cover design of The Great Gatsby doesn’t matter, why does anyone care?
Because people do care. Or at least we know for certain that one SoHo bookseller quoted in the article cares, because he says so. “It’s just God-awful,” he says, referring to the movie tie-in version. (I agree, by the way. It is pretty bad.)
But it doesn’t sound like this bookseller objects to the fact the cover design is ugly. Allow me to quote the article.
As to whether the new, DiCaprio-ed edition of “Gatsby” would be socially acceptable to carry around in public, [I’ve withheld the name, you can find it in the article] offered a firm no. “I think it would bring shame,” he said, “to anyone trying to read that book on the subway.”
Shame. Really. Why? Is it because the important thing about The Great Gatsby is not reading The Great Gatsby but being seen reading The Great Gatsby — especially being seen reading an edition of The Great Gatsby which signifies that you aren’t some hick coming late to the art party?
I realize I’m speculating aggressively here, with a certain amount of snark, but it’s hard to think what else our bookseller friend might have meant.
Also, while I’m at it, why the hell would you care what strangers in a city of 8.3 million people think of you? Are you likely to ever see them again? What’s the point of trying to impress people you don’t know?
Also, while I’m at it, shouldn’t we be happy if a person decides to read The Great Gatsby because the movie-cover persuaded him to pick it up? Shouldn’t we hope more people will read the books we like? I would think the answer to these questions is “yes”.
Unless of course the point of great novels is not to read them or share them, but to use these books to create an exclusive club that allows us to feel special and look down on everyone else.
Allow me to be blunt. If I haven’t been already. People who use art to bolster their social status or personal vanity are philistines. They don’t care about art. For them, it’s just another accessory to flash, like a fancy watch or a cocktail made with a certain brand of liquor.
And people who use art to exclude or denigrate others are the mortal enemies of art; enemies because the purpose of art is to connect and communicate, to inspire and delight, to comfort and challenge, to upset and exhaust, but always to leave us with a deeper experience of the life and consciousness and creation we share.
There is no connecting in an exclusive club, just arrogance and self-congratulation and rigid insularity and pettiness. These are pretty contemptible qualities.
I think I’ll pass on the opportunity to join and go get the new ugly Gatsby instead. I hear it’s available at Walmart.
Somewhat Related Content
Here’s a post on the aura of art that got started by a discussion in the comment section below.
In The New York Times this week, Scott Turow published an op-ed on publishing and eBooks titled “The Slow Death of the American Author”.
Following my habit, I won’t summarize the piece (since you can read Turow’s thoughts here). But I will throw out a few more-or-less random notes. Here we go.
Publishers Put the Screws to Authors on eBook Royalties
Turow says in the piece that publishers limit “e-book royalties to 25 percent of net receipts. That is roughly half of a traditional hardcover royalty.”
My first reaction to this is “huh?” because it sounds like Turow is saying that authors often get royalties of 50 percent of net receipts on hard covers. Unless publishers subtract their costs from this net before calculating the royalty, or unless Turow means the actual dollars paid are roughly double, this sounds very high and totally sweet.
Now, I have to admit I haven’t seen many book contracts in a while, and none of them for general fiction. So I’d be happy for information from someone with current experience in the industry. Also, if any publisher would like to provide a sample contract – perhaps with my name on it? – that would be okay-dokay too.
Anyhow, as for the complaint that publishers put the screws to authors, all I can say is, “What else is new? It’s a business. The point is to buy low, sell high, and sleep on a pile of money.” At least publishers are willing to pay authors something, even if the word “pittance” is germane. As opposed to these folks.
Pirating of E-Books Are a Threat to E-Books
This is a different problem and one about which I can’t be as flip. Many eBooks authors are finding the best way to combat getting screwed (or ignored) by publishers is to sell directly to the reader.
As you may know from my other posts, I am quite keen on this model, although I don’t think it is the utopian revolution described by some of its more enthusiastic boosters.
However, if e-Book piracy becomes as endemic as other forms of media piracy, then the model breaks down. And leads to this question: What reason will writers have to create good work?
Writers Should Write for the Love of Writing
Yeah, that sounds nice, and to a large – but not absolute – degree, it’s true. All good writing starts with enthusiasm and love, I agree.
But that doesn’t mean the only reward for writers should be personal satisfaction; and the folks who claim otherwise are either individuals eager to read books for free or companies that have business models which substantially depend on the enormous amount of free content on the web. (A big piece of the value electronic device manufacturers and internet service providers offer to their customers is access to free content. Pirate sites monetize their piracy by selling advertising, much of it through our giant friend on the internet, Google.)
Also, to paraphrase Turow, and to borrow from King Lear’s advice to Cordelia, writers who get nothing for their writing will eventually write … nothing. Or more accurately, writers will write less, and the quality of their writing will decline, if they can’t get paid for their work.
Those at most risk are the mid-list, middle-brow authors. Successful genre writers are likely to always make enough money to keep writing about vampires or serial killers, particularly it they can sell rights to movie or television producers. Writers with real artistic talent will find a perch in a college or university that is happy to pay them hard cash for the prestige of their name and a light teaching load.
Everyone else? I hope they make a beautiful corpse.
Evan Hughes has written an interesting piece on eBooks, the publishing industry, self-publishing, and the future of writers and readers for wired.com
I won’t summarize the article (since you can read it here) which nicely describes many trends reported elsewhere in the recent past; but I will make a few observations about points that particularly struck me. Here they are:
Successful Self-Published eBooks Are Serials Written in Pulp Genres
The writers who’ve had success self-publishing eBooks seem to work largely in traditional pulp genres like science fiction, crime, horror, romance, and erotica. These writers produce books in series, each of which creates an intense desire to read the next, just like one tasty potato chip makes you desperate to eat another. The digital format lets you satisfy that desire instantaneously and buy the next volume, from any place at any time.
As a bonus, you don’t have to figure out how to get rid of the damn thing once you’ve finished it. The pleasure in pulps is all about reading the next one, not re-reading the ones you already own, which tend to lie around the house and glare at you reproachfully for having paid $30.00 for the hard cover. Passionate fans are excepted from this problem.
All of which makes me feel better about my own lack of self-publishing success with Queenof the Nude since my mistake was not following this model. (I’m rationalizing because I’m feeling vulnerable today.)
I seem to have written erotica. Good! But I’ve actually written a commercial fiction / literary fiction hybrid. Bad! And it is not the first in a series. Bad! And I pretty much wrap everything up on the last page. Bad! I’m doomed. Okay, enough whining.
Only Writers Who Aren’t Yet Successful Need Publishers
Traditional publishers offer writers only two services of any real value today: some modest – but highly unreliable – assurance of quality and marketing muscle which they may or may not flex. (Big guaranteed advances also count as a service, if you can get one.)
These services are useful primarily to writers who might deserve an audience but don’t have one. Successful authors, self-published or otherwise, don’t need help building an audience, and these audiences generally don’t need an assurance of quality because they have already have a decent idea of what they will get.
This means, right now, traditional publishers only offer compelling value to those writers least likely to make them money. And these companies have got to be sweating blood at the thought of the moment when eBooks capture a great enough percentage of all book sales that writers like Stephen King decide they can make more coin without them.
Because when this happens – and I don’t usually pretend I can predict the future, but I think it is a when – the traditional publishing industry will need to find new ways to offer writers and readers value. Or cease to exist.
Books Still Need Paper Copies to Sell Books?
This is an intriguing assertion. According to Hughes, lots of data suggests that while people like to buy books online, they still like to discover these books in stores. So books published on paper and sold in bricks-and-mortar stores will always be essential to publishing.
I’m not sure this is true, however. People discover books many ways, particularly from friends, reviews, and social media as well as advertising.
I enjoy browsing in bookstores and buying books from them (one of the few forms of shopping I actually like), but I’m hard pressed to think of an occasion when I have ever bought a book I had wholly discovered in a store.
Like traditional publishers, bookstores are going to need more new ideas to survive. I don’t believe either is fated to go extinct. But I don’t see a solution to their problems, either.
In My Mother’s House, the French author Colette has pulled off one of the most difficult tricks in literature: she’s written a compelling memoir without having a compelling story to tell.
Colette offers readers no major events in My Mother’s House – no plot, no drama, and very little conflict. Instead, she presents a kaleidoscope of memories about her family, pets, neighbors, and the French village in which they lived.
Occasionally, she will relate an important family story. For example, Colette tells how her older sister abandons their family after her marriage and leaves their mother to stand in helpless agony outside of the house in which her estranged daughter has gone into labor with her first child.
But for the most part, Colette fills the book with incidental events and small details, such as how her father offered to teach a neighborhood woman the meaning of love for “six pence and a packet of tobacco” and how her mother intentionally distracted the local priest during his sermon “by swing[ing] her watch ostentatiously at the end of its chain”.
What makes the book more than a collection of brilliantly realized sketches, however, is its organization around the themes of love and death. My Mother’s House is infused with the knowledge that everything Colette loved from her childhood – her mother, her father, her brother, the beauty of her mother’s garden – have passed away.
In the chapter titled “Laughter,” Colette’s mother warns her husband not to try to die before her. Instead, Colette writes…
He did try, and succeeded at the first attempt. He died in his seventy-fourth year, holding the hands of his beloved, and fixing on her weeping eyes a gaze that gradually lost its colour, turned milky blue, and faded like a sky veiled in mist.
Colette’s mother follows her husband into death and Colette experiences other losses as well. She tells how the beauty of nature has ceased to move her the way it moved her as a child, and Colette describes how her own daughter, at the age of nine, will soon lose her sense of childhood wonder.
My Mother’s House gains much of its power from the force, clarity, and simplicity of Colette’s writing, which reads like the work of a master of English prose even though its translated from the French. Colette’s book also gains power from the passion that lies beneath her descriptions. Literature can be a furious bulwark against death, in which the writer refuses to accept that all she loves best in life – her mother, her family, the richness of her consciousness – will disappear.
In My Mother’s House, Colette has ensured they won’t. They remain vibrantly alive in its pages, which is perhaps the greatest accomplishment any writer can hope to achieve.
Notes on the Author. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, one of France’s most respected writers, was born in Burgundy in 1873 and died in Paris in 1954. She wrote dozens of books, including the novels Cheri and Gigi; was elected to the Academie Goncourt; and was the second woman to become a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor.
Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange succeeds purely on the strength of its narrator’s voice – but what a voice!
The novel’s story is told by 15-year-old Alex who lives in a vaguely dystopian, vaguely futuristic country that seems to be Britain. Alex can check off every item under the DSM definition of sociopath. He bullies his parents and friends. He brutally assaults people at random. He gang-rapes a woman, rapes two young girls, and kills an old woman while trying to burglar her house. Alex regards this as all good youthful fun. When confronted by authorities, he knows how to pantomime innocence or remorse. When punished, he laments that no one cares or feels sorry for poor Alex.
All this promises to make Alex pretty ugly company, but sociopaths are often noted for their charm and wit, and Alex has these in aplenty – not to mention exuberance, intelligence, formidable powers of observation, and a passionate love of classic music.
He also has the advantage of “nadsat,” the famous Russian-influence English slang Burgess invented for Alex, which puts the violence Alex commits at a remove from the reader and lends it a fantastical, almost fairy-tale quality.
Burgess described A Clockwork Orange as a “jeu d’esprit” that he wrote in three weeks, and it certainly feels like a book created in a burst of white-hot inspiration and imagination.
And it is a good thing, too. Because the “philosophical” parts of the novel, for which A Clockwork Orange is often complimented, strike me as (at best) heavy-handed and (at worst) laughably obvious.
So the philosophical meditation part of A Clockwork Orange goes like this.
First, Alex runs around assaulting, raping, and murdering. Then he is sent to prison where he is subjected to behavior modification that physically incapacitates him any time he thinks about committing violence. Then he un-behavior modifies himself by jumping out a window. Then he decides it’s time to grow up, find a nice wife, and have a cute baby.
Get it?
In case you don’t, Burgess sprinkles handy hints throughout the novel. So there is a book within a book, also titled “A Clockwork Orange,” from which Alex helpfully reads a summary passage on how you shouldn’t turn men into mindless machines. There is also the prison chaplain, just before Alex goes for his behavior modification therapy, worrying out loud to the young man:
Does God want goodness or the choice of goodness? Is a man who chooses the bad perhaps in some way better than a man who has the good imposed upon him?
Burgess leaves us in no doubt of the answer to this question, and since he has created the world in which the question is asked, he gets to arrange his “facts” and “reality” to support his talking points. (Ayn Rand was a great one for doing that too.)
A Clockwork Orange is also noted for its satirical elements, and these were better than the philosophy, but not exactly revelatory. The police, politicians, Christianity, and what look like Communist intellectuals all get a good bracing spank and that was fine.
For me, one of the interesting things about reading A Clockwork Orange was how it compared and contrasted to Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock.
Greene’s novel features Pinkie, another murderous teenage British sociopath at the center of another “novel as meditation” – this time on the nature of sin and morality. Greene’s novel doesn’t deliver the same jolt of pure linguistic bliss as A Clockwork Orange, but it doesn’t bludgeon you with its themes either. It’s a close call, but I like Greene’s book a little better. I would fully recommend reading both, however.
C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters – which consists of epistolary advice from the senior demon Screwtape to a junior demon Wormwood on the damnation of a human soul – is frequently described as a satire. But I don’t see any satire at all in The Screwtape Letters.
Peter Galen Massey 