Novel covers: a gripe

Today I am mostly: irritated by book marketing. As in patronising, gendered, and belittling of women's work.

Let's examine a case study: 'The Sorrows of an American' by Siri Hustvedt. This is an important, elegant, intelligent literary novel whose scope includes the Scandinavian immigrant experience in early 20th Century America, the uses and limitations of psychoanalysis, stalking in its many forms, the love and silences between parents and children and brothers and sisters, art, photography, the cult of literary personality, and the ache of grief that comes with the loss of a parent or partner. It is brilliant, as is the other novel of hers I have read, 'What I Loved'. I have no idea why Siri Hustvedt is not on all those 'Great American novelist' lists with the likes of Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen.

Here is the jacket of The Sorrows of an American:



Pretty. Maybe slightly sinister, given facelessness of girl, and the serpentine seething at the bottom of her dress. Quite appealing.

But I don't think you'd guess from this cover that the narrator of the book is a tall, forty-something male Norwegian psychologist mourning the death of his father.

But wait! There are some female characters in the book! Maybe it is one of them? narrator's love interest - who is black, and has short hair? No. His sister - a serious academic writer, just shy of fifty, given to smart suits? No. His elderly mother? No. The strange, reclusive old lady who holds a secret about his father's past? No. The friendly, overweight undertaker who favours elasticated slacks? No.

No, it's just a pretty, or at least slim and flowing-haired, girl in a slightly strange but pretty dress who bears no relation to the novel whatsoever. But women like books with girls in pretty dresses on the front don't they? So it doesn't really matter, as long as women buy it?

Any more ideas as to why why Hustvedt isn't taken seriously as a great American novelist?

In which I am patronised by a soup

Good morning! Today I am mostly: annoyed by soup.

Now, when I buy soup (and I am aware that it would be cheaper and more fulfilling to make my own: this too is an annoyance, but not the main one) I only really need to know two things about it: what's in it, and how long it takes to heat it up in the microwave. Soups have been providing this information since time immemorial (or perhaps since the invention of the domestic microwave oven in 1967), and I'm not exactly sure when they got bored of providing it in the traditional manner. But they have.

Thus to today's soup, a Tuscan Chicken and Orzo from Glorious Soups. I'm not sure who you think the market is for a Tuscan Chicken and Orzo soup, but I suspect it is someone quite middle class and pretentious who likes to think they are eating a sophisticated soup tailored for their sophisticated palate. Me, in other words. I therefore am the target audience for the following:

I've been carefully checked for bones, but you might still find a few small ones

and

I contain celery and gluten. I've been known to hang around near nuts, peanuts and sesame seeds and I may contain them as well

and

Freezing me? best do it right now and eat me within a month

and most egregious of all

Ouch! My pot can get a bit wobbly when it's hot, so stand me on a plate when you're reheating and stirring, and mind your fingers when you pick me up

(although actually I am put off my soup even more by

Made in the UK with three spoonfuls of love and a pinch of gusto

but it doesn't count because it's not in the sodding first person. And how many calories in a spoonful of love, eh? Tell me that.)

I am 34 years old. I left nursery school 30 years ago and that was the last time anyone saw fit to speak to me in this stupid, affected, patronising voice. And on that occasion it was a human being, not a fucking soup.

A message to the people of Glorious soups: I want to EAT the soup, not make friends with it. And in any case, when I'm hanging out with my friends (or "chilling", as in Let's chill. Keep me in the fridge) they very rarely exhort me to take off my lid and stand me on a plate in the microwave and make sure I'm nice and hot before serving. Because that would be WRONG. And a bit kinky.

[UPDATE: The soup was delicious. I don't know if that makes it more annoying or less.]

All of which reminds me of that brilliant scene in Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by the late, great, and apparently prophetic, Douglas Adams, when Arthur Dent meets the cow that is soon going to be his dinner:

A large dairy animal approached Zaphod Beeblebrox's table, a large fat meaty quadruped of the bovine type with large watery eyes, small horns and what might almost have been an ingratiating smile on its lips.

"Good evening," it lowed and sat back heavily on its haunches, "I am the main Dish of the Day. May I interest you in parts of my body?" It harrumphed and gurgled a bit, wriggled its hind quarters into a more comfortable position and gazed peacefully at them.

Its gaze was met by looks of startled bewilderment from Arthur and Trillian, a resigned shrug from Ford Prefect and naked hunger from Zaphod Beeblebrox.

"Something off the shoulder perhaps?" suggested the animal, "Braised in a white wine sauce?"

"Er, your shoulder?" said Arthur in a horrified whisper.

"But naturally my shoulder, sir," mooed the animal contentedly, "nobody else's is mine to offer."

Zaphod leapt to his feet and started prodding and feeling the animal's shoulder appreciatively.

"Or the rump is very good," murmured the animal. "I've been exercising it and eating plenty of grain, so there's a lot of good meat there." It gave a mellow grunt, gurgled again and started to chew the cud. It swallowed the cud again.

"Or a casserole of me perhaps?" it added.

"You mean this animal actually wants us to eat it?" whispered Trillian to Ford.

"Me?" said Ford, with a glazed look in his eyes, "I don't mean anything."

"That's absolutely horrible," exclaimed Arthur, "the most revolting thing I've ever heard."

"What's the problem Earthman?" said Zaphod, now transferring his attention to the animal's enormous rump.

"I just don't want to eat an animal that's standing here inviting me to," said Arthur, "it's heartless."

"Better than eating an animal that doesn't want to be eaten," said Zaphod.

"That's not the point," Arthur protested. Then he thought about it for a moment. "Alright," he said, "maybe it is the point. I don't care, I'm not going to think about it now. I'll just ... er ..."

The Universe raged about him in its death throes.

"I think I'll just have a green salad," he muttered.

"May I urge you to consider my liver?" asked the animal, "it must be very rich and tender by now, I've been force-feeding myself for months."

"A green salad," said Arthur emphatically.

"A green salad?" said the animal, rolling his eyes disapprovingly at Arthur.

"Are you going to tell me," said Arthur, "that I shouldn't have green salad?"

"Well," said the animal, "I know many vegetables that are very clear on that point. Which is why it was eventually decided to cut through the whole tangled problem and breed an animal that actually wanted to be eaten and was capable of saying so clearly and distinctly. And here I am."

It managed a very slight bow.

"Glass of water please," said Arthur.

"Look," said Zaphod, "we want to eat, we don't want to make a meal of the issues. Four rare steaks please, and hurry. We haven't eaten in five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years."

The animal staggered to its feet. It gave a mellow gurgle.

"A very wise choice, sir, if I may say so. Very good," it said, "I'll just nip off and shoot myself."

He turned and gave a friendly wink to Arthur.

"Don't worry, sir," he said, "I'll be very humane."

Fuck You, Dixons

I hate this advert.

"Get really terrific service finding something you want, and then fuck the shop over because you can get it more cheaply on a website where they don't need to pay the overheads of shop rental, display items and helpful salespeople who know what they're talking about. Eventually the shop will close down and the helpful salesperson will lose his job, and your high street will be a desolate wasteland, and the only place left on earth to shop will be dixons.co.uk, and you'll be screwed because next time you want a TV there won't be a display item or a helpful salesperson, but who cares, because you got a cheap TV."

If you want to shop online, shop online, but don't use the real world to browse. You're only getting it cheaper because you're stealing expertise.

In which I bite the hand that feeds me

This makes me angry.

I don't have any kind of problem with Martine McCutcheon. If you look at the video of her talking about her novel she seems quite sweet (and it's hard to come across as anything other than idiotic and nauseous in those videos, I should know, I've done one, which you should feel under no obligation to watch. Ever.) Martine has every right to write a novel if she wants. She has every right to try to get it published. And she has every right to get it turned down, like every single other person on earth would if they submitted the chapter linked to above, and did not happen to be famous.

Publishing The Mistress is so unbelievably cynical it defies belief. I am, I admit, fairly naive, and I suppose there was some remaining part of me that thought that the point of the publishing industry was the publish books so that people could read and enjoy them. With the publication of The Mistress I have had to finally come to terms with the fact that the publishing industry exists to make money for the publishing industry, and if some good books make it out into the world as a result, then that's just gravy.

There is absolutely no way in hell that The Mistress has been published because somebody read it and thought: wow, that's a really good book. Nobody involved in the production of The Mistress (aside from, presumably, Ms McCutcheon) can in any way have done their job thinking that they were producing a book of benefit to anybody at all aside from the shareholders of Pan Macmillan. It's there to make money. That's all it exists for. And the people who will buy it and read it, admirers of celebrity culture and chicklit - fine by me - will waste their time on a book that will be so much less rewarding than a copy of Grazia or a piece of properly-written chicklit.

It is damn hard to earn a living as a writer. Most writers never will. It genuinely makes me sad to think of the ghostwriter who could have put dinner on the table by writing Martine McCutcheon's book for her. Or the decent chicklit author who could have had her book on the 3-for-2 table where Martine's will go. Somebody else could have got their book published instead of Martine. Somebody with talent. A writer. I don't expect to be offered a role on Eastenders just because I'm a successful author.

I went to a talk the other day given by a panel of publishers who talked about how the days of any authors "thinking they have a right" to make a living from their work are numbered. At the time I thought it unfair that the only people in publishing who aren't expected to make a living from it are the people who actually produce the content of the books. Nobody says that publishers shouldn't "think they have a right" to earn their living from publishing. Nobody says that publishers should be happy with lower wages - £5000 for two years work, say, just like an author. And then publishers choose to take their time and their budgets and put them into a book like this that only the most uncritical of readers have the slightest hope of enjoying? Wrong.

Here's a thought: publishers rely on readers to buy their product. They rely on readers wanting to buy their product. They rely on readers liking reading. So instead of putting out any old rubbish with a celeb name on the front, they could try putting out books that readers might actually like, even love, and then they might find that the readers come back for more.

And so say all of us.

Here's something I hate: the use of the Royal We in reviews*. Take, for example, Sharon O'Connell's recent write-up of Antony and the Johnsons in Time Out:

"This may be verging on the sacrilegious, but we like the idea of AATJ rather more than we like their music and, if we focus too much on Hegarty's voice... its mannered wobble does our head in."

Who is this we? Ms O'Connell and the whole of the staff of Time Out? Ms O'Connell and her mates? Ms O'Connell and her dog? Ms O'Connell and the Queen? I think "we" should be told. In any case it's a bit weird that they only have the one head between them.

This is on my mind of late because the same Sharon O'Connell delivered a devastating attack on the Ting Tings back in January, which employed the same "we" tactic. At the time I had never heard the Ting Tings, but the viciousness of the review, coupled with the use of "we" implying the weight of multiple concurring opinions, caused me not to bother to listen to their album until I heard it at a friend's house and realised that it was, in fact, great. I had been so subconsciously convinced by the use of "we" in the review that everyone was on the same page about the shitness of the Ting Tings that I didn't even have the confidence to seek out my own opinion. Sad. Last Friday I went to their gig and absolutely loved it - they're brilliantly energetic live and push their album tracks up to the proverbial eleven. Had I not heard the album by chance, I wouldn't have had that great night out. And it was a great night out. Even if the mythical "they" disagree.

Ultimately using the "we" is a bit of a cheat, hiding your opinions in a group in order to make the reader feel like the left-out fool should he or she disagree. It totally defeats the notion of a review being just my opinion, no more valid than anyone else's. WE think so. Therefore YOU are wrong.

Special prize to the first person to comment saying that the Ting Tings really are shit**.

*Of course I have probably done it myself at some point. But we do love that David Tennant, now, don't we?

**Not really.

Spongebob Lunchbag

How ineffectual is the British Library bag search? You may be wondering why the British Library has a bag search at all. You might imagine that it is not exactly the number one target for terrorist attacks. Apparently, the reason for the bag search is that the library is in such close proximity to St Pancras station that it makes it the ideal place from which to detonate a really big bomb. That there are no other bag searches in any other buildings in close proximity to St Pancras station, that indeed there is no bag search to go into St Pancras station itself unless you are taking the Eurostar, is an irrelevance. Anyway, there is a bag search, which I suppose by the above logic would make the British Library the safest building in the King's Cross area, were the bag search of any use whatsoever. That it is in fact completely desultory is illustrated by the following: on the way into the library the other day I had my overnight bag with me, including a sponge bag full of toileteries. The security guard opened my overnight bag, felt the closed sponge bag without opening it, and said, "Lunch?"

LUNCH? Who carries their lunch in a sponge bag? A sponge bag that is in the same bag with a pair of pyjamas and some clean underwear? How unobservant is this security guard? How lacking in common sense, and even a basic bit of curiosity? When I said "Er, no", without elaborating on what was actually in the sponge bag, he just handed it back. He didn't even look inside to make sure that it wasn't lunch-shaped bomb-making equipment. If you're going to have a bag search, at least open the bags!

(It occurs to me as I write this that the secirity guard might have been asking me if I wanted to have lunch with him, but I don't want to eat meals with a security guard with no sense of security.)

Beyond A Joke

Last night I went to a comedy gig at a pub near where I live, a charity fundraiser for a local community garden. There were three comedians on the bill. I have forgotten the name of the first one, which is a mercy for him and for me, because it means I can slag him off with impunity. Very patchy, very smug, and lost all my goodwill with a "joke" about rape which almost exactly described the circumstances of my friend's rape, my friend who happened to also be in the audience. I think the punchline "what on earth were you wearing?" could best be described as ill-advised. Next up was Josie Long, who was lovely: very funny, completely charming, slightly bonkers, all of which is to the good.

And then came the headliner: Simon Amstell For the Canadians (and other foreigners, I know I get other foreigners, make my book number one in your country and I might mention you by name too), Simon Amstell is a very famous, very successful comedian in Britain, who presents a prime time BBC2 comedy show and has won awards for his stand up. He doesn't need to go to a pub and do the whole of his Edinburgh set for no money. It was clearly a big favour to the organisers, and judging by size of pub / number of punters, he'll have made thousands for them. And he was hilarious: I absolutely love him on TV, but this was better - intelligent, self-deprecating, sharp, and managed to make jokes about rape that were actually jokes and didn't offfend my friend at all. (The quality of rape jokes is not how I judge a comedian I promise, but it was an interesting point of comparison and does show what a skilled comedian Amstell is.)

And the audience were vile. It was baffling. Not the whole audience to be fair - most of us were laughing and clapping and having a great time - but the front row seemed to be entirely taken up of drunk hecklers who wouldn't stop interrupting the show, over and over again. Possibly the fact that the gig was in a tiny pub with a foot-high stage made it too intimate and people felt they could say what they liked; I was standing by the bar, about three feet from Amstell on eye level, which isn't how I usually experience comedy (except, you know, in real life conversation) and at times it did feel like we were just chattting. Chatting without me speaking though, because HE was performing and I was NOT. But it wasn't just the size of the place, because the same people didn't heckle the first two acts, not even the first one, who kind of deserved it. But they were unbelievably aggressive with Amstell. At a charity gig. Which he was doing for free. And in which he was brilliant. Why?

The comedy and heckling thing is weird. I was talking to another professional comedian recently who told me that he thinks the hecklers reckon they are helping the comedian: they heckle, he coems up with a brilliant put-down which gets the biggest laugh of the night. But comedians don't want to get their laughs from putting down hecklers, they just want to do their show. And people don't really heckle anywhere else. If you're watching a play and you come up with a witty riposte to what's going on on-stage, you don't shout it out. (Actually I went to the cinema in New York once and the audience were heckling the action, which was astonishing to me, not least because the actors on screen can't answer back.) I absolutely loathe heckling, it always spoils my night and I just wish people wouldn't do it. I have paid to see the comic, not some drunk loser in the audience. After the show Simon Amstell walked past my table and I nearly apologised to him for the audience but I didn't, because it would have been idiotic, and also because he was so good I didn't want him to think it had spoilt the night, even though, to a certain extent, it had.

The only equivalent I can think of to heckling at comedy is this bizarre notion that it is perfectly OK to talk all the way through music gigs. A while ago I went to see Jill Scott and all I can remember of the night was the long, loud conversation the two girls next to me were having about allergies. Surely if someone is performing for you it is polite to listen? And even if you are not interested in politeness, if you have paid to be there, wouldn't you want to listen? If not, you could just stay at home and listen to the CD: way cheaper.

I may officially be the Woman Who Talked Too Much but I do know when to shut up. And if any of you are coming to my reading tomorrow (Warwick, Northgate Methodist Church, 2pm, £8.50 including afternoon tea, plug fans!) and you start to heckle, watch out: I will be very cross and not in the least bit funny about it.

A Grumpy Question

My letterbox is made of metal and makes a loud clunking sound whenever anything is pushed through it. Why is it, then, that on Mondays to Fridays, my post is delivered at about 11.30, when I have been up and working for ages, but on Saturdays, when I'd like to sleep in, it comes at around 8.00 and wakes me up every single week?

The Ascent Of Woman

In this week's Time Out, they have a special on the body, illustrated by one of those 'Ascent of Man' pictures where you start on the left at the least evolved and go through to the present day on the right. (A bit like, though not, the one above.)

Now, I studied Archaeology and Anthropology as an undergraduate, so I have seen a lot of these drawings in textbooks, articles and so on, and I have never, ever, EVER seen one where the evolving figure was female*. I am led to the conclusion that women didn't evolve, we are just the same base ape creatures that we have been since the dawn of time. Either that or we came out of the primordial ooze perfect, stopping only to smear it on our faces as an exfoliating masque.

Why is the male the default? Why do we always have to learn about the history of our species entirely through the changes in men? Why are we still living by the notion that what is male is normal and what is female is different? We are the majority, remember, not you, you weird, hairy, penisy, breastless, low-voiced, non-menstruating freaks.

*I will grant you that the third figure from the left is sporting some impressive breasts but I think that they are just ape-man-boobs.