March 31, 2006

Swimming through the Currents

Here is something of the mystery and alchemy — and the real economic danger — of literary publishing.

Awhile back we received an email from a friend of the press who had read one of our recent titles — I think I shouldn’t name the book here. Not many folks had read it at that time. And so we had asked this life-long reader to give us his personal reaction. His response was gentle and as generous as he felt he could be. He thought the book was pretty good, he said. But the reading experience? Well, it was “grueling.”

A few days later, that same book received a starred review in a trade publication. The reviewer called the book “enchanting” and “remarkable.” He said it would cause readers to “marvel.”

Such is the vagary of responses to literary fiction. They’re all personal to the reader.

We never know how a book we publish will land, how most readers will respond to it — even though Greg and I believe in the value of every manuscript we take on. Indeed, we enter the publishing process with the conviction that each book we love will meet a sizable admiring readership who will agree with us. But we never really know.

There are history and surface speed and flavor and wind-direction in the decision to publish — or not to publish — a book.

And so from time to time, while evaluating a manuscript, we talk about the potential it might have for encountering a widely varied response when it reaches the marketplace. This may be a problem that is specific to publishers of non-genre fiction. Working within a genre, an author either delivers freshly to the form or fails to. And an editor should be able to see that as well as the book’s end readers can. But a non-genre novel faces an unforeseeable response. And this ultimately cannot be mitigated or even fully addressed by any edit, or by any marketing strategy or publicity campaign.

The unknowable reality here is whether fiction readers will be willing to invest, not just their money, but their aesthetic and intellectual energies into the unfamiliarity that is any particular literary novel.

An author who doesn’t work within a form asks readers to give themselves over for a time to a particular voice, style, and purpose, to throw themselves into a palpable current of words. I often hear that the books that Greg and I publish require an investment from readers. Sometimes this is said as a compliment; sometimes it’s not. But it’s true: The authors we are most interested in publishing all tend to write from the conviction that every now and then beauty has a chance to yield up truth. And that means they’re going to lead us into the currents of beauty, which are often treacherous.

Of course, we know full well that books written with such a conviction quite often fall short of the sales levels a commercial house looks for. But we also know that sometimes they do reach those levels. They do so whenever they strike an emotional chord in the public.

Even when that doesn’t happen, the conviction that beauty and truth are tied together can offer us with an attractive act of faith. And it is, admittedly, hard for me to see that this offering just might not be attractive to a reader. But it isn’t always. Why is that?

Recently, while trying to read a novel that had graced the independent best-seller lists for several weeks, I came to the realization that a great many readers (enough to cause that book to hit those lists) are apparently perfectly willing to muscle their way through a kind of narrative clumsiness, through some simple repetitiveness and quiet familiarity, and really through an inattention to language and to the emotions that are tied to language.

I suppose readers are willing to do this because they have before them the promise that the story alone will entertain them. But pushing myself through the narrative sluggishness that I thought I’d found in that — perhaps entertaining — book seemed to me something like moving through the Slough of Despond. And it wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way about a book that was apparently selling well.

Certainly reading such pages takes an investment of aesthetic and intellectual energy. Or do frequent readers of such novels simply skim forward from the moment they know their characters all the way through to the neatly resolved ending?

Maybe every popular novel is only skimmed.

Suddenly, that seems feasible.

But it doesn’t seem likely.

So here’s my question: Why does it seem that the publishing industry can gainfully expect fiction readers to muscle their way through a slough of artlessness to get to the heart of a story but rarely believes that readers will be willing to slip into the currents of an artful telling to get there?

And why do so many reviewers seem so often to think about readers in the same way?

Whatever the answers, I figure they aren’t as simple as we’d first expect them to be — not when we think about how entertainment actually works.

Fred Ramey

Posted in: Publishers Blog, | Keywords: publishers blog

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Comments

I admire your stance and your question is certainly valid.Many literary books are too self-indulgent and self-consciously ‘serious’. But the good news is that there is a middle ground: good writing <span class=“caps”>AND</span> good story-telling. This is particularly true of TV e.g Seinfeld and Hill Street Blues that broke all the rules. People do appreciate truth and beauty as long as it is delivered in a non-preachy way. It is the mode of delivery that matters. I’ve been trying to do it for years.

Keep up the good work.

Regards

Mike Casey

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Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 03/31 08:14 PM

Thanks for taking the time to post such a detailed and informative article. It has given me a lot of inspiration and I look forward to more like this in the future.
Regards,

Posted by share your option 07/13 03:51 PM

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