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Has book publishing fallen into a state of material and moral rot? Consider a few symptoms: Publishers' seasonal catalogs loaded with already-ripe-for-the-pulper schlock. Fat advances that are thinly disguised payoffs to prominent pols. "Authors" (athletes, porn stars, celebrity girlfriends) barely capable of penning a shopping list. Media conglomerates dependent on big-name writers, whose books get piled in giant stacks meant to stampede superstore customers. The list goes on.
Three new novels set in this world consider the ethics of writers and industry executives, and ponder the question of artistic production in an age of conglomerate ownership. The best of these is veteran book editor Tom Engelhardt's The Last Days of Publishing -- an engaging, at times bitterly funny lament for what he sees as an endangered industry. Martha Grimes's highly entertaining black comedy Foul Matter skewers venal execs and hands out just deserts all around. Least successful is publishing insider Arthur Reid's The Storyteller, a self-indulgent muddle of a suspense novel that considers the highly topical issue of plagiarism.
Art and commerce are often uneasy allies, and in The Last Days of Publishing (University of Massachusetts Press, 215 pp., $24.95), the two experience NATO-like strains. This book's central figure is Rick Koppes, a fiftyish editor at fictional Byzantium Press. The company has been swallowed up in two corporate takeovers, most recently by Multimedia Entertainment, a wing of a giant German media empire.
FULL-SPECTRUM BRANDING. Koppes' ex-wife is to become a top executive over him, and he realizes that the main reason he hasn't been shown the door is his relationship with a star pop-psychologist author, Walter Groth. Koppes, a '60s radical turned book-publishing traditionalist, suddenly finds himself a stranger on his home turf: "I stood as if on the lips of some Vesuvius, a tourist surveying a world I had inhabited but never quite seen."
In this altered environment, Koppes meets with the head of Multimedia, a "votary of a new faith" in a Phish T-shirt who wants to sell Groth "across a full spectrum," from print to video, and to "brand him awesomely." Slapstick tragedy ensues, in which Koppes sets fire to the executive's office. Later, over dinner in a tony Manhattan restaurant, his ex-wife enthuses over an e-book reader, the Q-Print, and envisions a future Middlemarch that's as stuffed with advertising as a 1990s Web site. Other chapters involve Koppes' encounters with laid-off fellow editors, promotion-hungry youthful assistants, powerhouse agents, and a burned-out Hunter Thompson-like author.
Amid antic doings, a certain melancholy envelopes Engelhardt's work. "Like light from a distant star," he reflects, a publisher's catalog describes books "signed up long ago by editors laid off by a management no longer in place for a house that, in all but name, may no longer exist." That's a sentiment one should expect from an author who, some years back, resigned his publishing job in protest during an infamous kerfuffle over editorial direction at Pantheon. But Engelhardt finds hope in the durability of the book, "an object that inspires such residual awe and resists so many reports of its own imminent demise."
WHACK A WRITER. Artistic integrity and business also clash in Foul Matter (Viking, 372 pp., $25.95). Martha Grimes generally alternates between police-procedural mysteries and literary fiction. In this Elmore Leonard-like thriller, best-selling author Paul Giverney sets the plot in motion by promising to sign with publisher Mackenzie-Haack -- so long as it agrees to dump another writer, the much-lauded but uncommercial Ned Isaly. Rather than break the author's contract and lose the valued editor who handles his books, company chief Bobby Mackenzie decides to hire two hit men to rub out Isaly.
Far-fetched? Of course -- and that's just the beginning. By the end, multiple hit men and bodyguards are stalking the oblivious Isaly, who's in a mental fog as he ponders his current novel.
Grimes's portrait of the book trade is even more damning than Engelhardt's. Foul Matter's publishing functionaries are more concerned with scoring a reservation at an exclusive restaurant than they are with literature. Few editors actually do any editing, and the heads of such enterprises as American Dreck Inc. or Queeg and Hyde are "greedy, grasping, immoral, and vicious."
FOUND TREASURE. More nuanced is Grimes's depiction of Isaly, the solitary writer struggling to conclude his novel. At one point, Isaly has to leave town because he can no longer face one of his fictional characters, Nathalie, who has become more real to him than the passersby on the street. He seems to hear her raging over the way the author has allowed a lover to abandon her: "You could at least let me get hold of a gun and shoot him." Isaly begins to grieve over their lost friendship -- and to fear that he may never encounter her again.
Reading The Storyteller (Doubleday, 266 pp., $23.95), you might think that plagiarism is becoming socially acceptable. The author hits a troubled stride right from the start by naming his main character Steven King, but he fails to do much with this coincidence. King is a little-published writer with great ambitions. When his friend, Ben Chambers, dies, King inherits a trove of unpublished, potentially best-selling novels. These he ushers into print under his own name -- and is quickly rewarded with fame, fortune, and regular spots on The New York Times best-seller list.
At this point, a batch of Chambers' former acquaintances show up, all of whom know King's secret and begin blackmailing him. One by one, they fall. And King? Let's just say he manages to live happily ever after.
A LITERARY LION? The Storyteller contains countless goofy, false notes. For example, a cop suspects King of murder -- but, being a fan, destroys the evidence. Before long, he's taking writing lessons from King.
Most bogus, though, is the book's denial of the divide that separates great literary writers from those who are merely commercial successes. Reid -- the pseudonym of "a longtime New York publishing executive," according to the book's cover -- sets King up as the kind of popular author who gets $6 million per book. Yet we're meant to believe that King is invited to appear on panels discussing the future of the novel, that he wins Literary Lion status from the New York Public Library, and that having him "at your dinner table was a way to show you were connected to what was absolutely au courant." Come on.
The very nature of these novels seems to confirm the negative diagnosis of book publishing. How else could it be that a turkey like The Storyteller would be picked up by Doubleday and get a nice-size print run of 25,000, not to mention the benefit of a muscular distribution apparatus, while the stimulating Last Days of Publishing finds a home only at a relatively weak university press and a print run of 4,000?
Still, there's Grimes's Foul Matter, a marketable project (its first printing is 50,000) with modest literary ambitions that does manage to be thoughtful. Among this small sample, it provides ample proof that commerce and creativity can still coexist.
Green is Books editor for BusinessWeek in New York
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Copyright 2003, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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