Editors: still not writers

I saw it first with Nan Talese of Doubleday; now I see it again with Kate Medina, Executive Vice President and Executive Editorial Director of Random House.  I quote in its entirety her little note at the beginning of the advance of Amy Bloom's Away:

Dear Reader:

Amy Bloom's Away is the kind of novel you dream about, a wonderful and wonderfully written book you can't put down—and that you never want to end! Like Come to Me and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Amy Bloom's two award-winning collections of short stories, Away startles and delights, through the power of Amy Bloom's irresistible writing and voice, and with its profound, funny, and moving portrait of the surprises of passion and love. Based on a real woman in history, Away takes us into the raunchy, desperate, fluid world of America in the 1920s, as Lillian's unforgettable story moves from New York's Lower East Side, across America, and on up into the Yukon. Please join us in discovering the remarkable pleasures of this book, Amy Bloom's Away.

All Best,

[signature]

Kate Medina

I appreciate that Kate Medina probably wants to use the author's name as frequently as possible so that Kate Medina's readers will remember it better, but Kate Medina should also be aware, I think, that the result sounds really weird and that anaphora is useful on occasion.  (And after all, we are holding the book in our hands; it's not as if it would be hard to determine the author's name.) The little comment set off with an em dash and ending with an exclamation point sounds totally artificial; the use of "startles" and "delights" without an object makes them sound as if they're to be taken in an iterative sense (even now the book is startling and delighting someone! It's in the habit!) and I suspect she only used them so as to avoid the adjectival, but much more natural, phrase "is startling and delightful"; the remainder of that sentence (from "through the power" on) is just godawful and horribly cliched.  A "portrait of the suprises of passion and love"?  Like, gag me with a spoon.  "Fluid", after the much more concrete "raunchy" and "desperate", sounds oddly sociological, and I don't really know what she means.  "A real woman in history" is just ridiculous. I also like how she tells us that the book concerns the "world of America", but the only two actual locations she can bring herself to mention are the London School of EconomicsLES and the Yukon; everything else is just, you know, America.  That broad blank expanse.  The repetition of the novelist's and the novel's names at the end of the sentence is just horribly stiff.  "Wonderful" evidently means something more than just "wonderfully written" (as it should; something can be well written but otherwise crap, for a suitably marshalled sense of writing well), but given that one precisification of the novel's wonderful nature is given, I am left curious about what else is wonderful about it.  Better just to leave it at "wonderful" simpliciter than to invite such confusions.

And so on, and, one imagines, so forth.  I reject you, Kate Medina, and all of your, Kate Medina's, embarrassing works.

Comments

[Bave Dee]

Nicely done, Ben.

But do you now silently correct "LSE"?

[ben wolfson]

Not silently, no.

Never silently.

[redfoxtailshrub]

Maybe Kate Medina is unsure of whether Amy Bloom is a man or a woman, and was too ashamed to ask anyone before the book went to press.

[Amelie]

Kate Medina is an editor, yes. A good one. Part of an editor's job is turning out copy like this for books she edits. Trust me, your writing would turn to slaw if you had her job. What counts is the quality of the books she edits.

[ben wolfson]

If I thought my writing would turn to slaw if I had her job, I would have someone look over my writing (a task the performance of which is, I understand, the way some people earn their bread) before sending it out to people whom I hoped to influence through that very writing.

[Witt]

A terrific post; I, myself, would have titled it "Marketers, Still Not Writers," although I can't defensibly say why.

Re: fluid, it seems to me that there are a few dozen words, regularly used in book blurbs and reviews, which have come to carry a different connotation than the standard M-W/OED definition. I'm thinking of fluid, profound, moving (and its cousin, deeply moving), muscular, messy, wise, knowing....

They seem to have an agreed-upon meaning for the NPR/Iowa Writers Workshop/NY Times culture, but I don't know how much wider you can cast the net.

[ben wolfson]

Most of those adjectives, and "fluid" as well, I suppose, generally precede the word "prose", though. If Kate Medina wanted to say that the novel's author wrote fluidly, it would still not be utterly clear what Kate Medina meant, but it would at least be the sort of thing that, as you say, readers of book reviews are accustomed to seeing. But instead Kate Medina writes that it's the "world of America in the 1920s" that's fluid.

Was there a flood?

[Witt]

Fair enough.

Maybe she meant "rapidly changing" world.

I stand by my contention that these are words chosen for a marketing purpose. Raunchy? Desperate? Think of the jacket copy for a cheap edition of The Great Gatsby, trying hard to make a 10th grader think that required reading is going to feel voluntary.