What To Do When the Mainstream Yawns (and Spends): Pt 2

Often when talking to Seth Harwood (see last column) I’ve been struck (again) by the fact that  American writers are forced to adjust to a publishing industry that has removed authors from the top of the hierarchy and told them to be grateful to be stuck at the bottom.

I’m not talking about the small number of blockbuster authors who pay all the bills.

In fact, the few stars who remain on top seem to encourage publishing excesses like the shamefully overdone Random House book launch for Dan Brown in New York a while ago.

At that party, waiters bedecked in George Washington wigs served lobster BLTs and other expensive noshes to a few hundred guests while “theatrical lighting [was] rigged up under the massive ovoid dome of the former bank that now houses Gotham Hall,” observed New York magazine (see photo at right).

Surrounding this “most lavish publishing cocktail party in a long time” were signs about saving money, such as this wordy mouthful (quoted by the New York Observer): “There is no gain so sure as that which results from economizing what you have.”  (I see. Waiter, could I have another scallop?)

And this one: “Having little, you cannot risk loss; having much, you should the more carefully protect it.”

Protect it? Heavens, you could increase a thousand Random House advances by cutting out the gazpacho shooters alone.

Back to Seth Harwood

No, I’m talking about the talented unknowns and hardworking mid-range authors who need to be nurtured and given time to find their audience but are still getting low advances and dismissive  treatment.

(One has to ask, what are publishers thinking? It’s not healthy for the book industry when a writer who lucks out like Dan Brown is “the only guy who’s in the running,” as the Los Angeles Times observed. “The movie industry couldn’t survive on Meryl Streep alone; the publishing industry might benefit from nurturing more of its own demi-stars to fill out the program.”)

So I thought there was hope when I first heard about up-and-coming authors like  Seth Harwood, a writer with so many rejection slips from the New York mainstream that  he built an audience from zero readers to about 80,000 by podcasting his unpublished book, “Jack Wakes Up,”  with his own equipment in a closet at home — and giving it away free on iTunes.

When the tiny (now defunct) Breakneck Books picked up the rights for a limited run, Seth conspired with his fans to buy the book from Amazon at the same time on the same day so it would rocket up Amazon’s rankings. This drew the attention of a New York agent who sold the rights to an editor at Three Rivers, an imprint of Random House.

When the Author Pays a Price

Of course, Seth had to spend a good chunk of his advance to buy the rights back from Breakneck so RH could publish it, but he didn’t care: It was worth the money to get the book into Random House’s massive distribution system. Then he went on the road himself to visit mystery bookstores and other independents around the country, shore up media interviews and widen his already loyal following. Too bad that Random House couldn’t afford that kind of publicity (waiter,  another Bellini, please), but Seth was undaunted. He spent another chunk of his now-disappearing advance to finance the eight-city tour.

A person could write a whole column about Seth’s love for independent  booksellers, their ability to launch unknown authors and their gift for hand-selling the right book to the right customer at the right time.

He may be part of the new breed of whiz-kid authors who can race around online and exploit the Internet in every new way.  But he is also a reader and, as we will see next time, a serious author: His respect for literary discovery equal to his savvy for electronic marketing.

That ability to exist in two worlds could teach a great deal to the sluggish book industry, and yet publishers in dire need of new income streams seem to be stuck. It’s not just their usual inertia, the lousy economy or flat sales; it’s not even the quarterly deadlines demanding short-term profits, the recent  price wars  and that awful king-of-the-hill mentality among the chains, Amazon, Costco and Walmart.

Rather what’s holding publishers back is an increasing fatalism about all of it. Sales will never bounce back; we can’t fight the Internet; book review sections have deserted us and wah wah wah. There is the increasing dismissal of independents because it simply takes too much work to sell so few books in so short a time. And, having caved into Amazon years ago, book publishers are now so timid about pricing eBooks fairly and exploring  iPhone apps that you’d think they’ve forgotten the reader entirely.

I’m not saying up-and-coming authors like Seth are the answer — in fact, as we’ll see, the new breed may become a victim of all this — but I do know that unless publishers pick up on new authors’  enthusiasm, expertise and love of both Internet and bookselling, the future of publishing will end up in somebody else’s hands.

More soon.

What To Do When the Mainstream Yawns: Part 1

Seth Harwood is the kind of Internet techno-whiz that fuddy-duddy types like me are scared of.

He’s so knowledgeable about podcasting, video-posting, eBook-pricing,  iPhone-apping and what is now called (nostalgically by everyone but me) “the Amazon Rush” that I wanted to run the other way.

Then I read his fiction and became a Seth Harwood fan. Then I watched his video and became a Seth Harwood student.

You can see why Seth is in the vanguard of a new writers’ movement by taking a look at the instructive interim video he made some months ago (see it below on my very own blog! and thank you, Seth, for permission).

Here we learn that no matter how many rejections slips you’ve received or how unknown you are as a new writer, you can create that elusive “platform” that mainstream publishers (so cowardly!) insist authors must bring to the table. And you can build an audience that grows into the tens of thousands.

The first step, says Seth, is to make a podcast of your manuscript (before it’s ever published) and give it away. “Think of a podcast as a free, serialized audiobook,” he says.

With a minimum of equipment, a little music and a lotta passion (plus some blankets absorbing echo-chamber sounds in your closet), you can produce a quality narration that equals anything on Audible.com, and again, you do this long before your manuscript comes out in any kind of print version.

Seth did this one chapter at a time with his detective novel, “Jack Wakes Up,” which he followed by two other “Jack” books in the series. He placed each chapter as a freebie podcast on iTunes, thus tapping into an engaged audience that loves to hear edgy stuff and Tweet about it like mad.

What I appreciate most about Seth’s video is his ability to make sophisticated, low-cost technology look easy and his love for the open source movement, that learn-it/do-it/share-it approach to advancing new ideas that benefits everybody on the Internet.

Especially Seth. When you see the numbers that built up during Seth’s do-it-yourself career you’ll  see why individual writers today have a lot more power acting as their own independent contractors than as supplicants to a dismissive and sluggish (and arrogant) system. The question we’ll consider in Part II is, how can authors make these numbers work for every title?

Seth’s Story

Seth started out like many unknown writers. He piled up so many rejection slips and unanswered submissions that finally he said to heck with it and decided to go directly to his audience.

A fan of audiobooks, Seth believed what Steve Jobs (reportedly) said –  that nobody reads anymore, but a lot of people listen — to books on CDs and iPods in autos, in waiting rooms, on the jogging trail, in bed.  Seth figured people would love a good Raymond Chandleresque yarn with a fresh twist, narrated by his very own self and so full of sly humor and eccentric characters that listeners wouldn’t care if they got stuck on the freeway or waiting for the dentist.

So Seth set up his podcast equipment and began narrating a chapter every week, which he offered for free on his own website (http://sethharwood.com) and also listed as a free serialization on iTunes.

He used the introduction and the sign-off of each segment to plug his other fiction (beautifully written short stories, very sweet and tender, but more later on this, too), his discussions on Facebook and Twitter and his offer of free PDFs of each chapter (and later of the entire manuscript).

You may think that’s a lot of giveaways (Random House sure did later), but Seth saw it as great publicity, and boy, was he right. The podcast was downloaded to about 30,000 people and the PDF of the entire book over 80,000 times.

Along the way, Seth was trying to alert literary agents to this kind of high-voltage interest in “Jack Wakes Up,” but basically the mainstream didn’t understand what he was saying. So what if 30,000 wastrels download your novel for free, Seth was told. That’s what everybody says. When somebody actually buys the book, let us know.

The Amazon Rush

Enter Breakneck Books (now part of Variance), a small New Hampshire publisher of action and science fiction novels that published a small POD (print-on-demand) print run of “Jack Wakes Up.” Little did Breakneck know what Seth had up his sleeve.

Since the protagonist of the novel is named Jack Palms, Seth asked his supporters not to buy Breakneck’s edition until Palm Sunday, when he was certain the title would be listed on Amazon. And on that day, he wanted everybody to buy the book only from Amazon, hoping that the impact of a concentrated rush of sales would send the book’s ranking through the roof. Indeed it did: the book started out among the lowest of rankings (in the hundreds of thousands) and, as Seth’s followers feverishly bought the book from Amazon, the ranking soared past that of best-sellers and famous authors, finally tapping out at an astonishing 45 overall in the Books category and number one in Crime and Mystery.

Seth used this historic rise-out-nowhere to interest a literary agent, who submitted the book to mainstream houses (with a this-guy-is-hot proposal), and the next year, “Jack Wakes Up” was published as an original paperback with a sensational cover from Three Rivers Press, an imprint of Random House

So. Great story, right? Seth’s with a mainstream publisher now and all is well, yes?

Oh, dear. See you next time for Part II.

P.S. By now enough authors and small publishers have attempted the Amazon Rush that it’s old hat to the mainstream book industry, so if you’re an unknown author, the word is, don’t bother. In a way, I’m sorry to hear it.  If ever there were a means of demonstrating  audience interest (and the dreaded notion of “platform loyalty,” ick), that was it. Of course authors are creative enough to find new ways to move books into the mainstream, so I shouldn’t worry. But again, I’m the old fuddy duddy. I hate to see authors turning themselves into self-styled barkers! Here they are, the center of the book industry, having to hoodwink publishers just to get attention! Well, pardon. More in Part II.

So now: What can newspapers do to lure readers back to print?

As our quiz last week suggested,  after our 30-year honeymoon with computers, and 20 solid years on the Internet, people are getting tired of screens and starting to miss the newsprint experience.  It’s time for newspapers to earn their way back into readers’ minds and pocketbooks. Here are some suggestions:

Fight for Your Paper

Everybody’s waiting for publishers to do something — to, in the first place, define the benefits of newspapers that computers can’t offer. If you run a newspaper, the time has come to get out there and tell readers: Our paper publishes the kind of stories in print that you can’t find on the Internet.

This means that the newsprint version will be different from the website version, so you  have to believe in it. If you don’t think that newspapers are far ahead of the Internet in key ways, get outta the biz. 

Create an Aggressive Ad Campaign

Billboards, cable TV, talk radio, buses, cabs and yes. computer banners are waiting for newspapers to re-stake their claim.

Run the most simple kind of ad:

*a giant photo of the morning newspaper invitingly spread out on a kitchen counter or desk,  next to

*a cup of steaming coffee

*a blank computer screen.

*a headline like one of these:

GIVE YOUR EYES A BREAK

NO CLICKS, NO BANNERS, NO POP-UPS, NO NOISE

WE PUT  IT ALL ON THE TABLE

YOUR WRISTS, YOUR EYES, YOUR BACK WILL THANK YOU

TAKE A MINI-VACATION EVERY MORNING

WE PAY PEOPLE TO BRING YOU THE WORLD AT A GLANCE

Get Your Executives Behind It

Start right now to train your executive management to place this campain on a person-to-person level. Get your PR department to book these top guys on the media and lecture circuit. You should join them and speak to groups ranging from Rotary to Wiccan, Unitarian to Morman, book clubs to fight clubs and every school and library in town. (Take the Freedom of Speech-in-jeopardy angle and you’re in.)  Go on talk shows, start blogs, help with charities, sponsor events.

This old-fashioned passionate appeal 1) heightens morale, which is currently in the gutter because you’ve cut your staff to shreds and nobody knows who’ll be terminated next, and 2) it stops general readers from feeling sorry for newspapers as expendible dinosaurs and reestablishes high journalistic standards (and deliciously low entertainment values) that work best in newsprint and promise to enrich daily life.

Distinguish the Print Version from the Website Version

Maybe adjustments have been made inside newspaper offices all along, but we readers can’t see them. It’s as though newspaper publishers have given up on the print version, as though  they’re waiting for the day when advertising for the paper’s website covers the bills better than advertising for the print version. By the time they’ll have to close down the latter (with more  poor-us/not-our-fault press releases),  a world of innovations and ideas will have mowed them down.

But if you bring a new identity to the print version now; if you provide absolutely essential news in the morning paper that doesn’t exist on the website version (wait for a day or two; then post), you’ll have a fighting chance. And you have to believe in that chance to keep your present circulation and convince new readers to subscribe.

Make the Print Version Invaluable

Here are some examples: 

Invest in In-Depth Articles

Let’s admit it – computers have made us a nation of impatient readers. We  rarely finish lengthy pieces because of the pressure to scroll fast and click away to the next new thing.  Besides, nobody likes reading longish material on a screen  (with the exception of books on E-readers and iPhones; another story).

On the other hand, settling into a longer piece in the morning paper is a delicious prospect. It’s like reading the New Yorker when you give yourself some privacy and time away from noisy and invasive screens. Articles in the print version  don’t have to be very long – it’s just that they’re juicier, more thoughtful, more substantial, more knowlegable, even memorable.

(This is one of the things you’ll have to sell to younger readers who’ve never had the newspaper experience, but once they start looking forward to the originality and fresh writing of in-depth stories,  they’ll be hooked.)

So let the newspaper’s website handle the flow fast-breaking news and changing opinion. Publish the better written,  in-depth articles – undercover, investigative pieces are a natural — in the printed newspaper and let people savor the writing for a day or two. Then post it.

Return the At-a-Glance Feature

I can’t believe how often a fascinating chart or map appears on the Internet but is too big to fit on the computer screen. The only option is to explore it in sections, which the computer enlarges for you, but I’m always disappointed that I can’t see the big picture.

A recent example is the revealing illustration called “Big Bangs” that’s spread across page 71 of the July 2009 issue of Fast Company magazine. (That’s the issue with another I-look-like-an-alien-but-try-not-to-notice photo of Jeff Bezos on the cover).

This multi-branched family tree follows the first breakthroughs in communication from the “Primordial Ooze” at the bottom (e.g., Gutenberg, rotary phones, radios, etc.,)  through the branching out of subsets (8 tracks! PDAs! clamshell phones!) and the flowering of  present day electronics (iPhone, Kindle, Wii/Xbox, MacBook) in the leafy top.

“Big Bangs” is an ingenious way to see historical connections you might have missed otherwise, but there’s a huge disappointment for computer users: You can’t find it on the Internet!

Oh, parts are revealed, depending on what gadget your cursor touches, but you can’t see the whole mesmerizing vision at once because it’s too big for the screen. Even if  the illustrator tried to squeeze it all on, you’d strain your neck leaning forward to read the tiny labels, and then the experience wouldn’t be fun or informative. It would be work.

So this is one thing newspapers can do that the Internet can’t. Newspapers can spread out their great newsprint wings and give us the big picture of just about anything that matters. They can provide a single at-a-glance feature that tells us more in a few minutes about the way things work than a blog like mine can do (obviously) in the above six paragraphs.

Bridge the Gap to the Internet

An entire team of reporters should be exploring the Internet for little known, completely enthralling and absolutely indispensable websites serving every kind of interest. Nothing obvious here: These websites are so intriguing by themselves that a whole page of them will grab the reader’s attention and make life richer to boot.

Again you need the advantage of the in-print edition’s big fat physical pages; and you can incorporate the irreverence of Internet writing to kick a little s— around in the descriptions of each website, complete with accompanying screen grabs and maybe a customer quote or two. This kind of section can instantly become the One Thing Advertisers Adore: a page readers will cut out, save, discuss and return to for months.

Again, you can post the text in its many parts on the website version a few days later. But you start with the in-print version because every publication of, say, Can’t-Miss URLS is such a natural for the one- or two-page spreads only newsprint can provide.

Hire Local Bloggers

To cut costs, most newspapers have foolishly downsized their top writers and are now junking up the pages with wire service news and syndicated features. As a result, the newsprint paper becomes a joke by any journalistic standard, and subscribers cancel in droves.

As a former Writer’s Guild member, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but now that publishers have sabotaged the labor landscape, why not exploit the absolute treasure trove of independent contractors that exists all over the Internet?

I’m talking about the kind of gifted bloggers who would love to write for the in-print version, and for pennies, because it’s still true that the local newspaper, if it’s any good, sets the standard for everybody else. You want fresh and original material for the morning paper? These guys are already doing it. They’re available, adventurous and affordable.

And don’t re-run their blogs in your pages! You need a fresh take on everything in the newsprint editions. Establish new “beats,” explore neglected neighborhoods, investigate unheralded but worthy causes, profile City Hall eccentrics and, beef up the sports/business/arts section with differently gifted writers whose contributions cqn be vital.

Relish (Don’t Abandon) the Print Experience

My own paper (the San Francisco Chronicle) missed a huge opportunity by leaving a hole where its famous columnist, Herb Caen, wrote a daily column for about 60 years. Caen liked to bill himself “Mr. San Francisco” and appeared to be everywhere at once – at opera openings, baseball games, murder scenes, dinner parties, corporate boards and every closet you never wanted the world to know you were in. A lot of people didn’t like him but everybody read him, for one thing because he could be very funny and for another because he loved San Francisco so much that he made everybody teary whenever he wrote mawkishly about it.

Why the Chronicle didn’t try to fill that hole over the past dozen years since his death is a puzzle. I have a feeling editors said, Oh, no one can replace him, we can’t soil his memory, he was one-in-a-million, and so forth (all of which surely sent Caen rolling in his grave).

But while the appeal of “Mr. San Francisco” went out with Fred Astaire movies, the continuing wonder is that the function of a column like Herb Caen’s is timeless: Every item in celebrated the “only in San Francisco” phenomenon that drew every reader into the same socialized stew, as it were – that ongoing sense of community that you rarely feel for some reason (well, I don’t) on newspaper websites. (Interestingly you get it in spades on networking sites like Facebook and Tweeter.)

That’s what we would lose if we abandon the print experience as far as newspapers are concerned. When you live in a town, when you’re conscious of local issues, when you vote, when you learn about a new restaurant or theater or school in the neighborhood, you want a place that centralizes all that potboiling citizenry stuff and keeps serving it up afresh. Very often it takes a big, beautiful sheet of real estate called the morning newspaper to make sense of modern life, and that’s what newspaper publishers have got to reinvent, support with real money and believe in today.

One Last Example

It was nice to see that  N.w York Times article about a newspaper like the Seattle Times doing well, even if  “Resurgent as a Solo Act” meant the Times boost its circulation by gobbling up the competition. The question now is, will the Times remain worthy of those readers. Will it give them something extra, or even more important, something essential that they can’t get on the Internet? 

PART A: TAKE THE QUIZ

If I were a newspaper publisher, I’d be waiting for that great sea change that’s bound to come when people who use computers start pining for newsprint.

Think that’s never going to happen? Take this easy quiz and see:

Dear Reader:

1) Don’t you get tired of looking at screens all day? There’s your computer at work, your computer at home, your TV, your cell phone, your camera, iPod, e-Reader, camcorder, iPhone. That’s about 10 different screens hitting our eyeballs all day.

2) Aren’t you running out of patience with bloggers like me endlessly citing “facts” you have to go verify? Not to mention all the bad writing, poorly expressed opinion and empty blather that parades around as “the democratization of publishing” (still a good idea but perhaps only in theory)?

3) Don’t you find it a blessing to read news sources where people are paid to write responsibly, where facts are already checked for you, where good critical writing has little to do with passing fashion or personal rant?

4) Has your healthcare professional encouraged you to take frequent breaks from the keyboard-and-screen so you won’t get RSL, tension headaches, blurry vision, stiff necks and back pain from holding arms and head at unhealthy angles for hours at a time?

5) Instead of discovering minor (to you) news by accident while you’re streaking around the Internet researching major (to you) news, wouldn’t you like everything that matters laid out for you every day by veteran editors and trained writers who can give you the world at a glance?

One Last Question

If you answered yes to three out of five questions, you may be on your way to a rich cultural mix that didn’t seem possible only a year ago. Here’s one more:

Wouldn’t it be a relief to find a nice resting place for those tired eyes, let’s say a noninteractive print environment that’s easy to read with no pop-ups, videos, podcasts or cookies? Just you and a cup of coffee and the morning paper. The world at your fingertips as you turn each page, the news (truly) factual and intriguing, reviews well stated without the hint of harangue, editorials put together by actual boards of knowledgeable (also paid) people.

But here of course is where newspaper publishers have to be bold. If they’re going to lure people back to newsprint, they have to put something in the newspaper that you can’t find on the Internet.

More in Part B next time.

As mentioned last week, I don’t blame authors for blowing up at reviewers who spoil the ending or otherwise ruin the experience for the very readers they’re supposed to serve.

This is a time when newspapers are trying to win back readers by saying, “Don’t bother with those slovenly customer reviews on Amazon! We have professional reviewers for you. We pay them for their skills. You can trust what they say.”

Uh huh. That would be fine if  these same critics weren’t violating every rule in the criticism handbook (not that there is one) about, you know,  blabbing key details that happen midway or stepping in front of the material to point at themselves or digressing endlessly until the subject of review (could be a movie or play, too) dies on the vine of TMI (too much information).

Giving Away the Ending

Here’s the kind of language I hate: After a long and thoughtful review of a certain movie (I’m not going to mention titles),  the otherwise fastidious Andrew Sarris of the New York Observer gives the whole thing away by writing: “In the end, Maggie is reconciled with Tom as he and Sarah take their child away for further treatment.” That’s great Mr. Sarris: In one swoop of betrayal, you’ve just told us the battling couple gets back together, there’s hope for the child and there’s no reason for readers to stick around for the ending.

Or this: “When it ends, in shocking carnage, the teenage mind briefly and improbably makes perfect sense.” This from another writer yet, Chandra Prasad, giving thumbnail reviews of her favorite books to The Week magazine. Don’t you think in a 45-word review you could talk about something else you liked about this book?

This one kills me: “Mr. Hely doesn’t know how to end this book. In the final chapters he torpedoes Pete’s cynicism in ways that will disappoint anyone who was enjoying the jaundiced humor.” First of all, NYT reviewer Janet Maslin who should be ashamed,  it’s not the business of critics to guess what the author does or does not know how to do.Second, there’s nothing more deflating for the reader than to learn that all the humor leading up to the end is going to fall flat.

Even a hint at the way a story ends wrecks the entire experience. Readers find themselves anticipating what’s coming rather than enjoy what’s unfolding. As much as I admire the usually disciplined Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York times,  I could not believe her comment that a first novel is “flawed by a predictable and unsatisfying ending.” Oh, how ruinously hath the seed been planted!  It’s hard to get hooked on a novel knowing it’s going to be “unsatisfying” in the end!

Here’s Rule #1 of the (nonexistent) Critical Writing Handbook:  If you want to say something about an ending, or really anything that happens after the first chapter, don’t even allude to the part in the story where it occurs. Make your point but stay away from the timing. In the Prasad case, the critic might say, “the author is capable of shocking carnage, and ….” or in the Kakutani review, “the narrative can be predictable and sometimes unsatisfying, but overall…”

Ruining the Story

And what a let-down to say the least is Maria Russo’s Sunday NYTBR review of a collection of related stories about a couple’s relationship:  “When, in the collection’s last story … the lovers appear to have drifted back together, even the most hardened cynic might grant them a smile.” Why, you rat, thinks the reader. You want to see a “hardened cynic?” Keep writing.

And I don’t care if it’s a trade magazine like Publishers Weekly reviewing a passing romance by Danielle Steel. There’s something  criminal about a review that says the author  “offers a satisfying twist at book’s end that most readers won’t see coming.” Yeah, well, they will now.

Then there are reviewers like Rex Reed (such a veteran! what a pity!) who announce that they won’t give away the ending but proceed to do just that.    “No spoilers,” says  Reed in the Observer,  “but things take some tragic left turn and two lives are needlessly lost … ” Oh, Rex, honey, two people die in the end? Granted, it may happen that the story forecasts the two deaths early on, so it won’t be a surprise to the viewer. But Rex, you have to deal with the reader now. Even the appearance of spoiling the ending (two people dead, Rex!) spoils the review now.

Here’s another I-promise-not-to-give-the-ending-away-until-I-decide-to-ruin-it review, this one from Ruthe Stein of the San Francisco Chronicle: “All that can be said about their sojourn without giving away too much is that Carlos brings out the recklessness in Jessie and that she is the only one who boards the next Trans-Siberian train ….” That’s a classic example of “giving away too much.”

The One-Eye-Closed Reading

Critics have become so irresponsible that I find myself looking at reviews with one eye closed. As soon as I see “When it ends,” or “Eventually,” or “The downturn begins,” or “In the end,” or even “Over the course of the book,” or “Midway through,” down goes the eyelid and skim goes the remaining eye skimming through the review while I find myself thinking, these guys should be shot.

For example, if you didn’t cover that eyeball, you’d have inadvertently zeroed in on a key detail that would poison the whole experience when Christopher Isherwood of all people (usually so meticulous!) wrote this paragraph in the New York Times:  “The play’s unconvincing conclusion, which finds the president agreeing to take the noble step of presiding over the marriage of his speechwriter …” And ploink, the knife was in! It doesn’t matter if the play was lousy! What matters is the readers’ experience, sitting in the theater  waiting for the president to make that decision from the rise of the curtain until the play’s “unconvincing” end.

You can’t even trust the venerable standard bearers of good critical writing, as for instance staff writers at the New Yorker. On a welcome-back sidebar to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” Richard Brody tells us that the James Stewart character meets a lookalike of the woman he thinks is dead, “dresses her up as the late object of his obsession, and then discovers that she’s the same woman.” No, man, NO. Don’t tell ‘em it’s not that Kim Novak can’t act! (Excuse me.) What a huge disservice to readers! I shouldn’t have to point out Rule #632(c), but there’s the chance that even one person out there hasn’t seen the movie, so you can’t give anything away!

I wonder too sometimes if some critics think the work under review is so dense that nothing spilled about key scenes will be remembered. Wrong, wrong wrong. Here is (again I’m sorry to say) a Michiko Kakutani piece that I call a “runaway review,” meaning she can’t help herself! She wants to show you how dense the writing can be so she just pours out the guts of the story:

“A boy and a girl…run away from home and for six years find refuge with a mannish pig rustler and her notorious husband. That boy’s granddaughter develops a wild crush on the local troublemaker, who will one day steal her great uncle’s magical fiddle, which appeared to him in a dream. A man assembles a world class stamp collection while living in the little town of Pluto, only to find that his obsession leads to his undoing. For years a judge carries on a passionate affair with an older woman, who ends up marrying a local developer, who buys the judge’s beloved house with the intention of stripping it bare. A charismatic boy becomes a dangerous cult leader, enslaving his wife, a snake handler, who plots to liberate herself and their children from his thrall.”

Gad, that’s unfair. This is the reviewer showing off. The eye glazes over and we think the book’s going to be a snore, despite the fact that MK is writing  an extremely favorable review. However if we do stay awake and we do follow the paragraph, important aspects of the story will be revealed that are going to drain the spirit and the enjoyment and the importance right out of the book.

The Me, Me, Me Review

Rule #326(p): Reviewing books is a service to the reader. We don’t write reviews for the publisher or author (god knows) or bookseller. We don’t write for posterity and we absolutely do not write to parade ourselves around in a diary or a confessional or a personal tell-all. The charge for daily and Sunday critics is to remember that we are on the front lines of the whole process of literary criticism. After our reviews have been published, these works are given lengthier and more considered  treatment in literary journals and academic  publications, and if they stand the test of time, in books and in classrooms, in discussion groups and at dinner tables right into eternity.

So what we must not do is waste the reader’s time by inserting ourselves into the process, as that in-print narcissist Ben Brantley repeatedly does with theater reviews for the New York Times. For example, in his  “review” of a play with Julia Roberts in a starring role, Brantley wastes much of the space being distracted by Julia Roberts’ fame and how “deeply, disturbingly beautiful” she is in person. Right there, you’re wasting (and ruining) our time, Ben: Not everyone feels how “deeply disturbingly beautiful” she is and, in fact, most people want to give her credit for taking this role in a live play and are trying not to be distracted by her fame. So we depend on you to stick to stay the critical course.

But no. That’s just the start of the reviewer’s need to step in the spotlight. He continues:

“I feel a strong need to confess something: My name is Ben, and I am a Juliaholic. Ms. Roberts, after all, is one of the few real movie stars — and I mean Movie Stars, like the kind MGM used to mint in the 1930s — to have come out of Hollywood in the last several decades. Lord knows, she isn’t a versatile film actress….” and he goes on about her “feral beauty,” her “Everywoman” character and her similarity to “a down-home Garbo.”

Even there I’d like to brain the guy (a “down-home Garbo,” ick. Save it for “My Best Friend’s Wedding.”) But lo, there is more. “While I blush to admit it, she is one of the few celebrities who occasionally show up (to my great annoyance) in cameo roles in my dreams.”

Your great annoyance? Honey, you should be sitting here.

Brantley’s point, as it turns out, is that Julia Roberts isn’t very good, in fact is terrible,  in the role, but it kills Brantley to let us in on the essential critical details. So he keeps trying to digress during the nuts and bolts of reviewing by dropping in asides like “Fellow Juliaholics can skip this part if they like.” (I’ll say.)  Brantley works so hard amidst his adoration (”ah, those cheekbones!”) to find the “few seconds” in Roberts’ acting that he can legitimately call “absolutely charming” that  all we ever learn is how infuriating a reviewer can be when he makes himself  the star of his review.

Generally, professional critics loathe the kind of customer reviews you find on Amazon and other Internet outlets because after all, these are amateurs; they don’t know the principles of critical writing, and they leave out important stuff. But the irony (aside from the fact that customer reviews are bubbling with the energy of critical writing that most professionals have turned into pedantry) is that people write customer reviews as though they’re talking to a dear friend. Most of them would never give away the ending or the salient parts of a book or movie because that would spoil the friend’s enjoyment of the story.

If reviewing is that simple (and it is), why do the so-called professionals ruin the experience for the rest of us?

1. How To Say ‘Up Yours’: Alice Hoffman

Well, if I were Alice Hoffman, I’d go bonkers myself over the way modern critics not only give away too much plot in the novels they review (and the movies, plays, etc.) but seem determined to spoil the ending.

Hoffman is in the news because she Twittered out her anger in 27 different Tweets about a mixed-to-negative Boston Globe review by Roberta Silman of her new book, “The Story Sisters” (Shaye Areheart/Crown; 325 pages; $25).

Granted, Hoffman got a bit carried away by calling Silman a “moron” and insisting that “any idiot can be a critic” (hey!), and she got a bit vindictive by giving out Silman’s private email and phone number so that readers can “tell her what u think of snarky critics.”

Hoffman has apologized for responding “strongly” in the “heat of the moment” and says she’s “sorry if I offended anyone,” which is the usual code for “my publisher won’t let me say ‘up yours.’ ”

But  I think we should listen to Hoffman’s more important and far-reaching statement — one that is true of way too many reviews these days — about being “dismayed” because  the review “gave away the plot of the novel.”

Two Reviewers Give It Away

Which many reviews today often do. Silman refers to “the secret that is the linchpin of the book” and then appears to disclose it. She describes key plot points in Part Two, which is way too far in the book to follow the heart of the novel’s story. She tells us how the book ends by naming the “only” character who “is given a chance to grow,” by revealing the two estranged characters whom we’re hoping will bond but find “no resolution,” and divulging the hero-turned-drug addict who’s institutionalized but “does bear a child and reform,” yet “never really matures.”

No wonder Hoffman went off her feed. I bet she was already smarting from a similar debacle at the Washington Post, where critic Wendy Smith not only follows the development of a key character far too long and with too much detail, she  then drops the bomb that the character is “responsible for a death that estranges her from the family, but a series of poignant scenes shows her tentative attempts to reconnect.” Smith spoils the end of the book by telling us about “this radiant finale” in which a wedding in Paris provides the sisters with “a tender opportunity to reconcile.”

Let me just say, too, that it doesn’t matter if any of these salient details are provided at the beginning of the book. It is the reviewer’s charge never to even seem to give the book away, to step in front of the material, to plant a seed in the reader’s mind (she does “reform”) that will one day spoil a fresh reading of the text. (More about this next week.)

The Fall of Lit Crit

I have a theory that the standards of literary criticism have fallen in direct proportion to the “democratization” of publishing and blogging on the Internet. Stands to reason, no? Those first customer reviews on Amazon years ago weren’t (and for the most part still aren’t) notable for their professionalism, heaven knows. But  boy, did they have energy (still do) and how ebulliently they make themselves heard. Read four or five of ‘em and you glean enough about the book to know if it’s for you.  At the same time, these charged-up contributors feel they are part of a reading family and would never spoil the fun of others by giving away key aspects of a book. So you can scroll through customer reviews on just about any website without having to keep one eye closed, which I find myself doing with so-called professional criticism of everything from books to movies to theater.

2. Blogging for Revenge: Alain de Botton

In this case I have to say as a reader, what in heck was the New York Times Book Review thinking of last Sunday when a wretched piece of bad writing showed up disguised as a book review of “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” by Alain de Botton (Pantheon; 327 pages; $26)?

You’d think a book with a straightforward title like that would be easy to describe, but no. I read the full-page review by Caleb Crain three times and I still didn’t know what it was about. Crain accuses de Botton of mockery, condescension, mean-spiritedness, superficial judgment and spite, but he never tells us the “initial goal” of the book, except to say the author “has already lost track of (it)” by Chapter 3.

Of course if I were advising de Botton, I would have tied him to a chair before allowing him to write a vitriolic message to Crain for all on the Internet to see. This part especially is regrettable: “I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

But I would have spread out the red carpet for de Botton to say this: “I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon — so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer.”

Responsible Reviewing

Exactly. While embittered authors are hardly the first person the world attends when it comes to instruction about responsible book reviewing, hysterical former critics at least are louder, so tune in next week when we explore the dreaded but often amusing hilarities of lousy critical writing that junks up the litosphere so much these days.

And no, I haven’t read either of the book’s in question. I want to review the reviews, and ponder  why literary criticism, even at its most blunt and hurried form, as in a newspaper or blog (as opposed to a lengthy New Yorker piece or later academic journal) can be useful, relevant and valued by your everyday reader.

More next week.

P.S. and DRIB (don’t read if busy):

An example of responsible critical writing would be Sukhdev Sandhu’s coherent and engrossing review in The Daily Telegraph from England.

There we discover that de Botton is not just a “British essayist” as NYTBR reviewer Crain dismissively puts it (for crying out loud! readers will remember him as author of the elegant and delectably humorous “How Proust Can Change Your Life” and “The Consolations of Philosophy”! It’s the responsibility of the reviewer to point this out).

Nor is the book simply an extended essay.  De Botton “has set out,” as Sandhu puts it, “to write ‘a hymn to the intelligence, peculiarity, beauty and horror of the modern workplace and, not least, its extraordinary claim to be able to provide us, alongside love, with the principal source of life’s meaning.’ ” A hymn! One needn’t have read de Botton to adjust expectations and even thrill a little bit at the possibility of changing our lens on an often drab subject.

Sandhu — who, by the way, can be negatively critical about the book under review — also shows us that de Botton writes far more comprehensively and compassionately than Crane ever lets on, ranging in subject interest, for example, from accountants and rocket scientists to electricity installers, career counselors, entrepreneurs and many others from many different countries.

Sandhu not only “gets” de Botton as a critic is supposed to do – mostly his humor! the NYTBR critic repeatedly misses de Botton’s penchant for the wry, dry subtle aside!  — he backs up most of his assertions with evidence, meaning quotes from the book that are more than thoughtful, in de Botton’s way: they are intriguing, chewy, and re-readable.

Sandhu writes, “Of an outstandingly successful but abrasive and self-regarding industrialist, de Botton observes: ‘a certain kind of intelligence may at heart be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction.’ ”

(Although Hoffman has deleted her tweets, I’ve used various blog sources for the quotes including Edward Campion 6/28 and Galley Cat.)

I keep thinking about that delicious homophobic snafu that stuck it to Amazon last month and demonstrated the growing power of Twitter, however deliberately flash-in-the-pan it was.

The incident roared to life a month ago and died so fast that it didn’t seem important, but for me, something oddly familiar about it kept pinging away at the old postmenopausal memory. Finally I remembered an event 10 years ago in which Amazon behaved in an even more bizarre and homophobic manner that still has relevance today.

The Latest Episode 

Last month Amazon abruptly removed gay/lesbian-themed titles from its powerful sale ranking system. In a weekend, thousands of books were ineligible for certain title searches, best seller lists and other critical functions.

An author sent a query to Amazon’s customer-service department asking why the books were being removed. Ashley D of Amazon.com Member Services replied that “we exclude ‘adult’ material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.” 

Well, “adult” is hardly the category to dump an entire classification of books, since the term signifies “pornographic” (think: “adult’ bookstores).  But it is the correct term to use if Amazon officially believes that everything homosexual is offensive and needs to be removed from, you know, normal people’s eyes. 

(A thoughtful explanation of why a sales ranking on Amazon is so important, along with a list of explicitly sexual hetero books that were not censored and non-explicitly sexual gay books that were, can be found here.)

The First Irony

According to Lisa Derrick in the Huffington Post, after the purge, if you searched for books under the category of “homosexuality,” the first title to pop up was the anti-gay self-help book, “A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality.” This title (which teaches “gender esteem,” tee hee, what a concept) continued to have a sales ranking, while a long-established book for children about lesbians raising kids, “Heather Has Two Mommies,” was pulled from the ranking and search functions. This made Amazon look twice as bigoted (or dumb) as before.

(Go here for a lengthy list of LGBT books whose sales rankings were similarly removed.)

Enter Twitter

And just as suddenly an outpouring of outrage against perceived homophobia at Amazon flooded into Twitter so immediately and furiously (and delightfully) that Amazon felt pressed to make an official statement. Oh, it wasn’t just gay books that were affected, the company said – the problem “impacted 57,310 books in a number of broad categories.”  Amazon blamed the whole thing on a “glitch in our systems” and an “embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error.” 

Now wait, the Tweeters asked: Would a “glitch” understand the difference between a book that says homosexuality is good (”Heather Has Two Mommies”) and a book that says homosexuality is awful (”A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality”)? 

No, answereth the Tweeters, growing even more  appalled in new discussions with such wonderfully Twitter hashtags (discussion subjects) as “#glitchmyass,” “#apologyfail” and “#amazonfail.” 

The Boycott Virus

The gist of most responses was that Amazon got caught censoring gay books and betrayed customers by trying to lie its way out of the problem. More outrage erupted all over the Internet in which so many writers swore they would never use Amazon again that a “boycott virus” spread like, well, a disease.

Egad, not a boycott! responded Amazon as it scrambled to reposition all the books in question in a very short period of time. And that, the company thought, was the end of it.

Some discussions now say the Tweets overreacted because they’re all young, they want to rebel, they’ve confused gay marriage with gay anything and are looking for a parent figure to pull down. 

Or, as one thoughtful response suggested: This sort of confusion happens in large corporations all the time: A department at Amazon decided to defang sexually explicit books so they wouldn’t offend the general readership, but “the directive mutated from ‘let’s discreetly unrank the really raunchy stuff’ to ‘we’d better be careful to put an “adult” tag on anything that could imaginably offend anyone.’ “ 

That would mean it was a glitch in the system, but of the human kind, and nobody’s responsible because Amazon covered it up.

The Other Episode

For the last month, though, I’ve kept thinking about another occasion that occurred in 1999 when  Amazon legally, officially (and delightfully) embarrassed itself by deciding to “out” the co-owners of the Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis. 

You can read the deposition transcripts from one of my old columns here. 

In this case the co-owners of Amazon Bookstore, an independent feminist bookseller founded in 1970 (i.e., decades before Amazon.com came along), asserted that  their brick-and-mortar store had been losing money in the ’80s and ’90s because the online book retailer in Seattle had taken the Amazon name. Indeed, vendors, customers, reporters and online readers so often confused Amazon.com with Amazon Bookstore that the co-owners in Minneapolis spent as much time resolving mistakes as they did running their store.

Attempts  to find a peaceful solution through talks with Amazon.com were rebuffed, so the co-owners sued, citing trademark infringement.

The Second Irony

You’d think depositions in a case like this would focus on what happens when a new company takes on an existing company’s name, yes? Questions might be: Who was damaged and who should  be responsible when the established bookstore name gets confused with the new online name?

But no. Noting that Amazon Bookstore in Minneapolis identified itself as a feminist bookstore, lawyers for Amazon.com began asking the co-owners questions like this: 

Q: Have  you had any interest in promoting lesbian ideals in the community?

Q: I’ll ask you this, are you gay?

Q: In the email it states, all the owners at this time of Amazon Bookstore Cooperative and historically have been lesbians … Is that an accurate statement, to your knowledge?

Q: Are any of the employees at the Bookstore gay… ?

Q: Are any of the women at the bookstore married to a woman?

You can imagine the farcical tone of this scene. The lawyer for Amazon Bookstore was objecting vociferously but getting nowhere. The shocked co-owners  found themselves having to remind Amazon.com’s lawyer that “it’s not legal (for a woman) to be married to a woman.” (Remember this was 1999 when gay marriage wasn’t even a gleam in Gavin Newsom’s eye.) And the Amazon.com lawyer kept saying, well, if the women at Amazon Bookstore can’t marry,  “do they have [women] partners?” 

As to what sexual orientation had to do with trademark infringement, the Amazon.com lawyer said as far as he was concerned, being gay was as unimportant as the color of a person’s hair, but “obviously from the perspective of my client (italics mine),  we think [sexual orientation is] important to the case, the defense’s case, and that is one of the grounds for relevance.”

And why would it be relevant? I admit I had a little fun in my column imagining these attorneys planning their strategy before the trial. At some point the lightbulb went off and somebody said, “Wait a minute – these women are dykes! If we base our defense on proving they’re a bunch of lezbos,  we’ll walk away with the trial!”

But the irony was, the co-owners were too nice: Their lawyer half-humorously suggested that if Amazon.com could get away with harassing the Amazon Bookstore co-owners about whether they were lesbians, the co-owners should be allowed to ask Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos if he were gay. 

That would have been terrifically good copy for the media, but also a cheap shot, so Amazon Bookstore never sank to the level of Amazon.com. The co-owners did try to explain that Amazon.com sold many more gay books than Amazon Bookstore did and that Amazon Bookstore sold many more general books than gay books, but neither point made much impression. 

Eventually the co-owners settled for what I hoped was a thoroughly obscene amount of money (never disclosed), and bless ‘em, that bookstore has continued on its feminist way (see 2007 interview here). 

How Amazon Works

Why go through all this again? Well, first, to understand how Amazon.com worked 10 years ago. If the company thought it was playing hardball by disclosing the sexual identity  of the staff of Amazon Bookstore, we need to know.

We should know that the gay-themed questions were being asked not just by some attorney fishing for bait he could use later but “from the perspective of my client,” which is to say the people who own and operate Amazon.com. 

Is There a Pattern?

So our question today might be: Could those homophobic people still be calling the shots at Amazon after 10 years? Could they be setting policy? Are they  capable of screwing up the sales rankings for gay and lesbian books and using the term “adult,” i.e. porno, as a reason?

I think these two very bizarre episodes suggest a pattern inside Amazon of people acting negatively toward anything gay or lesbian (don’t even ask about transsexual or bi). 

And I wish that Bezos, who has made a career out of being jus’ folks in his “customer-centric” way, would have given an interview or answered the phone or come forward in some way to sort out the matter in person.

BRANDING OUR CHILDREN

Last week’s New York Times arts section had a story about a travel writer with an autistic son whose “wild temper tantrums” abated only when he was riding a horse.   

The travel writer had a bent for nonWestern medical traditions, so he and his wife took their son to Mongolia where shamans and horses helped the boy achieve “an amazing ‘recovery’ and ‘healing,’ ” or so the Times quotes the dad. He also said his son’s temper tantrums “all but disappeared” after the trip.

The story is meant to be inspiring, and it is, except for the many business deals that seem to trump and the son’s role in it all. For example:

1) the travel writer dad is well connected in NY, so before the trip he got a $1-million-plus advance from Little, Brown based on a 37-page proposal about the “prospective adventure.”  

2) Dad also took a filmmaker along to create a documentary. 

3) He made YouTube video of himself and his son riding a horse that “stoked interest” in the book’s auction. 

4) He optioned the feature film rights to the producers who made “Lord of the Rings” and “Golden Compass” — with himself as scriptwriter.

5) He says part of the advance is going to a ranch he’s founded to treat autistic kids who like horses. 

HOW THE BIG BOYS DO IT

I’m sure this travel writer dad started out with the idea of helping his son, and hey, maybe he needed to finance the trip so he started pulling deals together. It’s just worrisome to see every related industry kick in to make this a million-dollar sure thing with the boy as a much-scrutinized cog. Perhaps Dad realized he needed the PR value of creating the charity ranch in case somebody accuses him of exploiting both his son and autism. 

At the same time, the NYT article is written as a kind of a model scenario for writers. It says, This Is The Way the Big Boys Do It.  Don’t wait until you write the book or even know how your story ends. Build your power base now. Start the marketing process now. Remember Elizabeth Gilbert? She was writing magazine articles about exotic spas for the rich before jotting down a similar of “prospective adventure” submission, which earned her a sizeable advance that paid for an all-expenses trip around the world and resulted in “Eat Pray Love.”

A LESSON FROM “SIX FEET UNDER”

Let’s just hope the little boy appreciates all this and doesn’t, you know, mess things up. Remember the Rachel Griffiths character and her brother in the HBO series, “Six Feet Under” a while back? As the story unfolds, we learn that these two were the subject of a best-selling book by their psychologist parents who apparently told the world about every single foible, fear and dysfunction their  children experienced from birth. 

Now in their 30s when we meet them, the adult children not only have serious psychological problems, they can’t take a step without somebody recognizing their name and exclaiming, “Oh, it’s you! Did you ever get over that case of genital warts (or gambling addiction or dyslexia or whatever it was –pardon paraphrasing)?”Because of their parents’ book, their privacy has long been destroyed, and as a result they have no sense of identity, are filled with resentment and could blow up at any time (as the brother does). Meanwhile their parents have made a pile of money, enjoy immense fame and sympathy and blame the kids for not moving past the attention from the book that “spoiled” them in the first place.

A BANDWAGON APPROACH

I’m not saying the travel writer is using his son in the same way, but who knows what the long-term effect of this well-oiled marketing/publishing/documentary/YouTube/movie/charity ranch operation will be? He’s autistic, for heaven’s sake. He’s already isolated from our reality and not very trusting of adults, and who can blame him?  I can’t bring myself to mention his name for fear of contributing even slightly to a system that is grounding his experience into marketable hairballs that he’ll be pressured to cough up for the rest of his life. 

And it’s not as though dad and mom can take him to a place free commercial pressures or fans: Foreign rights alone have already been sold in 17 countries (and counting).

This is hardly the first time that merger mania of parent corporations ends up promoting this bandwagon approach to packaging a saleable product and/or  book. What I will never understand is how slavishly everybody working for those corporations mouths all the tidy platitudes that cover their bets.

Here for example is the head of Little, Brown explaining why his publishing house made the “rare” move of spending $1 million before the book was written  and ordering an even rarer first printing of 150,000 copies:

“It just touched so many points of interest – helping to heal an autistic child, traveling under difficult circumstances…(and) the chances you’ll take for love.” 

Translation: “It just touched so many points of interest –YouTube, Hollywood, the documentary, the charity ranch, soaring rates of autism….and the love of any book publisher for all the green-lighted systems that will do the work for us.”

“MARLEY AND ME”?

Then there’s the humor part. Little, Brown, sent out a brochure to booksellers describing “The Horse Boy” as combining “the adventure and optimism of ‘Three Cups of Tea’ with the powerful connection between man and animal that readers loved in ‘Marley and Me.’ “

“Marley and Me”? Wait a minute. I was sure the brochure was going to refer to Temple Grandin’s “Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior.” I mean, that’s really thoughtful and documented and moving — but no. Let’s not throw the wrench of something too complicated into this giant machine with its simple and  simplistic “high concept” story.

“Marley and Me,” after all, was a huge bestseller and a huge movie – another example of How the Big Boys Do It – and it concerned an enormously popular subject (dogs) that might, in the right context, slop over some of its fad appeal to the growing interest in alternative treatments of autism. 

Room for Love?

I’m not saying the shaman approach is wrong. In fact, I’m hoping  the documentary-maker and the YouTube video director and the Hollywood dealmakers all took a step back so this little boy could connect with somebody real – not only a shaman whose prayers might truly have a healing influence but someone [a parent?] who loved him unconditionally and stayed with him after the spotlight was removed. 

If the boy was jerked away from the shaman to be photographed on a horse with his dad in a mawkish picture (below) suitable in someone’s eyes for a jacket illustration, and then hustled off to the van so the travel party could get to the next shaman and the next horse and the next photo op, well, let’s hope the boy was truly on his way to “recovery” as his dad told the NY Times.

We learn that the author has recently carted his son, now 7, off to Namibia to meet with more shamans, so who knows? Maybe there’ll be a sequel.

I think what grates me the most is that New York Times article taking its place right on schedule by giving this multi-tentacled project its blessing. You want to know why newspapers are dying? Well, they aren’t trustworthy. They sound like Entertainment Tonight. They don’t probe enough. 

True, some evidence of journalistic principle does emerge. A mother and doctor/author (of “Autism’s False Prophets”) say they are skeptical of anecdotal evidence and warn that the son’s behavioral changes could be temporary. But overall, the tone of the piece is congratulatory, even cloying. Other doctors “who have worked with autistic patients say a child can make big leaps in development,” the article goes on vaguely, “and that stories like [this one] can provide inspiration to families.” Might as well have come off a press release.

Even the title of the book, “The Horse Boy,” has a phony ring to it.  Remember the last time a brief submission earned the author a $3.5 million advance from a publisher? Why, of course, that was “The Horse Whisperer,” and what a winning combo-title it was! Now “The Horse Boy” is here to ride on those very coat tails. They say publishing’s a crap shoot? They mean childhood, don’t they?

One of the best qualities of a good book is that it stays with you long after book’s end — and occasionally adds something to personal experience. “Tinkers” by Paul Harding (reviewed here, and with publisher’s terrific  background story here) keeps doing that and more.

I find myself  pondering one passage -  passed over at first reading -  in which a father who has severe dementia wanders away from his family home in rural Maine. 

His son has watched his father “receding from human circumstance” and sets out to find him. 

As the boy walks through a corn field, he imagines “breaking an ear from its stalk, peeling its husk, and finding my father’s teeth lining the cob. They were clean and white, but worn like his. Strands of my father’s hair encased the teeth instead of cornsilk.”

Later “as I hiked through the woods, I imagined peeling the bark from a birch tree, the outer layers supple, like skin… I would cut a seam in the wood, prying it open an inch at a time, and find a long bone encased in the middle of the trunk.”

The Opposite of Death

These images provide another example of  “the opposite of death,” Harding’s notion that our bodies  are reabsorbed by nature in such a wondrous exchange of matter that the human mind tends to glorify and even itemize the body’s contributions.

Granted,  the boy’s vision of his father’s bodily parts reorganized in nature seems a bit fantastic. But like so much of this extraordinary book, events in the characters’ lives have an unseen effect on readers’ lives.  

This past week I remembered having a similar experience going to the theater in New York after the death of my brother, who was for many years a stage manager, director and producer. He won a Tony for “La Cage Aux Folles,” but his lengthy climb to success had stretched through many plays and musicals up and down ol’ Broadway. 

For a long time after he died I would attend a play and not just imagine him in rehearsal but see his tall (6′4″) body embedded in the smooth wood of the stage, or stretched along the proscenium walls, or shining down from the ornate chandelier. If I went to a theater where he once had a production going, unless the drama onstage proved absolutely riveting, I’d find myself weeping  right in the middle of the play, even if it was a comedy. 

The sense that my brother was there surrounding me would become so intense that I had to open my mouth to let the tears stream in so that others in the audience – who may have been falling off their chairs laughing  – wouldn’t be alarmed by the wipings and snortings of this strange escapee in their midst.

A Stop, Not an End

Reading “Tinkers” gives us feeling that transformation is going on in varying cycles – sometimes so slowly it feels like permanence – all around us. In this context, death may be a stop, but it’s not an end, because the cycle always continues.  

What a surprise (or is it, I wondered), then, to come upon a similar discovery by Slate.com’s Meghan O’Rourke in a recent article on grief. 

After her mother’s death, O’Rourke finds herself drawn  to the desert to think about her mom in what she calls “a majesty outside of my comprehension.” Something about the sky and wind calls her attention. People talk about “finding a metaphor” for the passing of a loved one, and already Meghan has seen “a distinctly  maternal cast” to the way a tree shifts in the wind.

But in the desert, “I do not say to myself that my mother is like the wind,” she writes. “I think she is the wind. I feel her.” Then again at Joshua Tree National Park, she writes: “Being alone under the warm blue sky made me feel closer to my mother. I felt I could detect her in the haze at the horizons.”

I dunno. There’s a nerve “Tinkers”  strikes so deftly that scenes from the book – and parallel events from other contexts – keep coming back in a very Faulknerian way.  

It’s as though you read the words on the page, but they seem to go right past your eyes to an invisible core. From the author’s imagination to the reader’s mind, a thought travels through the ether of storytelling and bingo, something very literary and eternal happens.

Well, this is the most upbeat and inspiring story I’ve heard in a long time.

It came out in joyous original trade paperback last fall but somehow fell through the increasingly narrow slats of our distracted media (see *personal note below). Now there’s a chance of resurrecting it, but more about that later, too.

The book is “Ms. Cahill for Congress” (written with Linden Gross; Ballantine; 246 pages; $14), and here’s  how it starts:

In 1999, a  gifted teacher named Tierney Cahill was introducing the concept of democracy to her sixth-grade class in Reno, Nevada, when she pointed out that in America, anybody can run for office.

Nobody believed her.  “You can’t run for office in this country unless you’re a millionaire or you know a lot of millionaires,” one girl said.

Cahill tried again. “All citizens in our country have the right to run for office,” she said. “Would having a million dollars make things easier? I’m sure it would. But not having the money isn’t going to prevent someone from being able to run.”

And the class shot back. “Well, then, why don’t you prove it?” they asked. “Why don’t you run for office?”

*A Personal Note

It just kills me that during the presidential election,  Barack Obama stood for exactly what Cahill was telling her students – that anybody (even “a mutt like me,” as Obama half-jokingly to himself) can run for office and be taken seriously. Obama’s belief that the biggest lessons come to us from the ground up, not the top down, couldn’t find a better example than “Cahill for Congress.”

What stopped the media from seeing this book as a great story during and for the presidential campaign? Well, here is one idea: traditional media are failing because they’re  addicted to reporting ONE STORY ONLY – Olympics, Election, Super Bowl, 9/11, Oscars, Bank Disasters, War Hot Spots, or Environment [if fun, like electric cars for everyone]).

And newspapers have dropped to the lowest of the low, following rather than leading TV/radio  news. No wonder three more just failed. What newspapers have forgotten they do best is to give readers a feeling of community through stories all around us that we don’t know exist.  IF editors would get off their own addiction to the ONE LOCAL STORY (mayor, murders, teams, colleges, events, scandals) and assign some real reporting on long-unseen districts and neighborhoods, neglected arts and offbeat human interest features [plus wouldn't advertisers love to appear in a center spread with a hundred fascinating websites per day called NEWS FROM THE INTERNET], the print version no matter how brief might find a grateful audience returning.  It would be great to see newspapers launch a simple  campaign that shows people enjoying the morning paper with their coffee under a headline like AH, THE LUXURY OF DOTS ALREADY CONNECTED or some fun thing. Of course they have to connect those dots first.

To make a long and delicious story short, that did it. In this often funny, always instructive and occasionally scalding memoir,  Cahill describes how she not only ran for Congress using her sixth-grade class to manage her campaign, she turned the race into a terrific civics lesson for students and general readers included.

Starting with an empty Folger’s coffee can (for initial fund-raising), a single phone, grand ideas for buttons (”we’re going to have to design stuff?”) and committees on everything from speechwriting, finance, media, and management, the kids and their teacher initially do everything wrong.

They don’t order posters from union printshops; they don’t know how to talk to the media; they approach state bigwigs who become “annoyed by our little class project,” and Cahill herself gets nauseated at the thought of speaking outside the classroom. (Her greatest accomplishment:  “I managed not to hurl” during her first big speech.)

Just getting the idea  past school authorities and parents in her very Republican district is a huge and intimidating task. Cahill, a Democrat, is already at odds with such Republican milestones as Bush’s No Child Left Behind program of  “teaching to test” rather than “teaching to learn.”

“Our vice principal brought us these disgusting practice test booklets and expected us to get the kids to regurgitate the answers, and then test them again and again. Where’s the growth in that? You’re simply testing kids to the point where they’re never going to think for themselves.” Don’t get her started on the “horrid” trick questions in multiple choice exams that only highlight students’ weaknesses.

Very soon the kids get so organized and streamlined that even reporters, fighting to get on her schedule, tell Cahill, “That child could work for me!” Getting her name on the ballot is an arduous but exhilarating effort, and readers get to cheer as well when some of the shy and learning-disabled students reluctantly enter the fray — and begin to thrive.

The fun of the book lies in Cahill’s love for teaching as an interactive experience. She tells us that only 20 percent of students learn “the traditional way” – study, get tested – so teaching is a matter of offering different means of access.  “I don’t consider myself a teacher as much as I do a facilitator,” she writes. “I guide them along the way by asking questions and demonstrating that it’s more important to be ‘passionately curious,’ as Einstein said about himself, than to have all the answers.”

She certainly makes us passionately curious about teaching this “lesson that never ends,” as one observer puts it,  while still running as a serious candidate. The fact that she’s not running for dog catcher or councilwoman but for national office means that if if she wins, her family will have to move to Washington D.C., a frightening yet increasingly tantalizing thought.

Meanwhile, though, Cahill, a single mother of three children, is working three jobs (teacher, waitress, realtor)  and still can’t make ends meet. In fact, she acknowledges how low teachers’ salaries can get by admitting that “my own children qualified for free and reduced lunches, which meant that we fell below the poverty line.”

Despite the fact she often can’t afford a quart of milk, Cahill becomes a knowledgeable and well-traveled candidate (and soon an excellent speaker), who also makes time for coaching volleyball and high school basketball, working as an eight-grade advisor, acting as the NEA (National Education Association) union rep and running the student store.

But the idea that anyone can throw in her hat and learn to be a good candidate is sorely tested with the book’s biggest eye-opener -  the dismissive and cruel snub by  the Democratic Party of one of their own.

“Is this a joke? Do you think this is funny?” says the executive director when Cahill and her class call the state Democratic office to introduce her candidacy. “I don’t appreciate this, and I don’t think the party is going to appreciate this. Have you talked to the movers and shakers in the North?”

Happily for readers, the madder Cahill gets, the funnier she becomes.

“Disgusted, I replied. ‘Who are they? Are they listed in the phone book under movers and shakers? You’re saying I have to ask permission to run for office? I don’t think so! Last time I checked, that’s my  right as a citizen…”

Hard to believe, but most of the Democrats she meets try to stop Cahill because she isn’t “anointed” and end up treating her like “a whack job.” We can’t blame her for feeling “insulted” and shocked, especially since she grew up loving the Democratic Party so much that she named one of her children Kennedy (after Bobby).

“I had been told my entire life that the Democrats were the white hats,” she writes, “the ones who saved the day, who fought against poverty and civil rights. Now all I could see was them fighting me.”

Increasingly, “Cahill for Congress” campaign materials are routinely lost by Party staffers (”Oh, we must have forgotten them at the office. Sorry,” says Shane Piccinini, head of Washoe County Democrats).  Cahill herself is given a dressing down by the East Coast Coordinator for the Gore campaign that is so condescending and snide, we know now why Bush stole the presidency.

“How many other candidates have they done this to? I wondered…Suddenly I realized why the Republicans have gained such a foothold. They do a great job with what amounts to farm teams. They bring a lot of their right-wing nut jobs up through the ranks in local government (and) wind up controlling everything…It made me sick.”

Since the back cover gives this away, I might as well say that halfway through, the impossible happens: Cahill whom the media is finally celebrating as “The Teacher [Who] Teaches Us a Lesson” wins the Democratic primary, and boy, do we cheer along with her students. . And yet except for one remarkable volunteer in Las Vegas, the Democrats still won’t help her campaign.

Aware of the irony – that she agreed to this campaign to prove to her students that anybody in America can run for office – Cahill tells a Democratic Party leader,  “Assuming  I was a lost cause because I didn’t have a million dollars to run a campaign is the exact reason so many Americas have become so cynical about our political system.”

Unexpected lessons emerge as the final election approaches and a whole new class of sixth graders take over (after semester break). I guessed what would happen but never expected the toll it would take on Cahill. It’s a credit to her candor as an author that she lets us see her isolation and despair, and her fight to regain resilience.

The book is so enlightening and easy to read for adults and young adults alike that I’m glad there’s still hope for national coverage. For one thing, a lecture agency has gotten hold of Tierney Cahill and is sending her around the nation to speak to business and political groups as well as to teachers and parents. She’s such a no-nonsense and unthreatening speaker that books sell out wherever she goes.

Schools are beginning to adopt the book as an easy-to-read primer for teachers and classes who want to pursue their own civic cause. You can find resources for teachers and schedule of Cahill’s appearances at http://www.mscahillforcongress.com/

And movie rights have been sold with Halle Barry to play Ms. Cahill, so you never know.

But I think the reason the book never really surfaced last October is that the media saw “Ms. Cahill for Congress” as a fluke.

Now in the Obama era, we can all see it as a promise.  I think I’m one of many who hopes Tierney Cahill will run again, so I called her in Reno and learned that she’s “still happy being a mom and a teacher.” And after the kids leave home? “Oh it’s definitely something I’ve thought about.”

*A Personal Note

It just kills me that during the presidential election,  Barack Obama stood for exactly what Cahill was telling her students – that anybody (even “a mutt like me,” as Obama half-jokingly to himself) can run for office and be taken seriously. Obama’s belief that the biggest lessons come to us from the ground up, not the top down, couldn’t find a better example than “Cahill for Congress.”

What stopped the media from seeing this book as a great story during and for the presidential campaign? Well, here is one idea: traditional media are failing because they’re  addicted to reporting ONE STORY ONLY – Olympics, Election, Super Bowl, 9/11, Oscars, Bank Disasters, War Hot Spots, or Environment [if fun, like electric cars for everyone]).

And newspapers have dropped to the lowest of the low, following rather than leading TV/radio  news. No wonder three more just failed. What newspapers have forgotten they do best is to give readers a feeling of community through stories all around us that we don’t know exist.  IF editors would get off their own addiction to the ONE LOCAL STORY (mayor, murders, teams, colleges, events, scandals) and assign some real reporting on long-unseen districts and neighborhoods, neglected arts and offbeat human interest features [plus wouldn't advertisers love to appear in a center spread with a hundred fascinating websites per day called NEWS FROM THE INTERNET], the print version no matter how brief might find a grateful audience returning.  It would be great to see newspapers launch a simple  campaign that shows people enjoying the morning paper with their coffee under a headline like AH, THE LUXURY OF DOTS ALREADY CONNECTED or some fun thing. Of course they have to connect those dots first.