What's the Name of That Book??? discussion

Please help me with this. I'm writing my dissertation right now on the linguistics of humor and I'm racking my brain for examples in texts. I thought of a good one for a section on parody of a book a read several years ago, but I cannot remember what the book was called and it's driving me crazy!

Here's what I remember: It was a funny, sarcastic novel set in a New York publishing house; there was an old man, maybe a janitor or something who wrote headlines; someone discovers a new sonnet of Shakespeare's that proves that S was a homosexual; turns out to be faked by some guy, maybe someone that got fired? There also was some mention of buying your way to top seller lists, someone is stealing books from the firm and selling them to used bookstores or something, and there is some sort of vying for jobs going on among a copywriter (?) or editors. There might also be a beautiful woman involved as the love interest of the male main character.

That's all I got pretty much. The only other thing that I can think that might be useful is that I remember I read this book by chance because my then-boss saw some list of funniest books that came out and wanted three of them: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, some P.G. Wodehouse, and this book. I remeber that the first two books were easy for me to find, but I have some vague recollection of this one being hard to get, maybe it just arrived later in the mail than the others, but maybe it's a pretty under the radar book. Though if it was on a list like that, maybe not.

Any help would render me forever grateful. I've exhausted myself with putting "missing sonnet" "gay shakespeare" into Google -- you'd be amazed at what you can find out there, really.

Thank you!!! katy

Just an amendment - Thinking about it (all night), I don't think it was a publishing house, but a newspaper or magazine and the characters published the book review and best seller lists.

Cheers,
Katy

Argh, this is ringing a bell but I can't place it. Something by David Lodge maybe?

nope, unfortunately not David Lodge, since I'm reading his non-fiction right now like crazy, and it'd be quite ironic.

This is preoccupying me more than it should, I think.

It's not a publishing house, but are you thinking of The Book of Air and Shadows: A Novel, by Michael Gruber?

Woo-hoo! I think this is it.

What! Chicanery on the book pages? Can it be? The Belles Lettres Papers by Charles Simmons Macmillan, 175 pages, $19.50

BYLINE: by Ken Adachi Toronto Star

YOU WILL never be able to take a New York Times book review seriously again. Oh, the things that go on in the highly respected and inordinately influential weekly book section: the contorted ways in which books are selected for review, the office politics and backbiting among staff members, high-handed interference by the publisher, lowbrow editors who have no knowledge of or interest in books, the doctoring of the bestseller lists.

Actually, in this wonderfully entertaining and wickedly satiric novel, The Belles Lettres Papers, the review journal is not identified as the New York Times Book Review. But ever since 1982, when portions of the novel were first published under a pseudonym in the Nation and New Republic, literary gossips came to suspect that the author could only be an insider, Charles Simmons, a prize-winning novelist who was an editor for 33 years at the New York Times Book Review before he retired in 1984.


Of course, this being fiction, not everything is true. If some of the characters can be identified as real-life figures and the novel is partly a roman-a-clef, Simmons has his tongue stuck firmly in cheek. But if it is his comic intention to take the lid off the dark and sordid corners of the New York reviewing business, he is entirely successful.

The narrator of the story is Frank Page, Simmons' alter ego, who joins the staff fresh out of college. The journal is called Belles Lettres, his editor is Jonathan Margin, a man who actually is a literary bloke - unlike a few of his predecessors who were hired only to pump up circulation. One of them, Xavier Deckle by name, considered book reviewing "a mug's game when done regularly (but) sparingly it's a splendid way to lay waste an old friend or make a new enemy."

High praise

Margin is in trouble. He is seduced by his secretary, a woman who not only is endowed with Botticelli looks and Mount Rushmore breasts ("a very appealing combination of beauty and stupidity") but also has literary aspirations. That is to say, she wants to review - and not just an ordinary book but the new Graham Greene. Suffice it to say, she gets her wish. Her review is unpublishable, but another version, entirely written by Page under her byline, is published to great praise and even a letter of appreciation from Greene himself. She of course asks for the new John Updike!

Margin is further undermined by the discovery that his 46-year-old copy boy is earning $30,000 a year from selling review copies to bookstores. When faced with this scam, the cheeky rascal (who compiles the weekly reports) admits he's also been selling places on the bestseller chart at $5,000 to $10,000 per listing.

Clearly, Margin has to go. He's replaced by Newbold Press, a totally repellent, bullying and reptilian editor who immediately alienates his staff. Among other things, his underlings organize Operation Cold Shoulder, but it's a ploy that doesn't work because, as Page notes, "nobody wanted to talk to Press anyhow."

He's a complete heel, a splendidly evocative literary creation on Simmons' part. Ignorant of literature, "the lowest brow seen indoors," he is sanctimonious and oily and a monster of bad taste, interested only in "hot" bestselling authors. One of them, surely modelled after Norman Mailer, urinates on Press' coat and berates the amused staff members: "You call yourself adults? Why do you stay under the heel of this little thug? He'd stomp you bloody for a two-bit bonus."

He's ripe for a fall. The novel turns on Press' comeuppance when he foolishly publishes nine supposedly "lost" Shakespearean sonnets which, to him and two scholars, conclusively prove that Shakespeare was a homosexual. Press, of course, thinks this will be his entry into literary fame as a perceptive and ground-breaking editor. But he is undone when Page and Margin examine the sonnets line by line and unearth concealed puns that show the presence of well-known homosexuals who lived long after Shakespeare was dead. (Simmons does not reveal their names immediately, so readers will have a good time trying to identify them).

'Soft' reviewer

Indeed, the book is filled with amusing perceptions and characters. Sloth, jealousy and spite fuel the weekly staff meetings. John Hershey is asked to review a chocolate cookbook. Kurt Vonnegut, it is said, won't write reviews for Belles Lettres because the journal once ran a negative review. Certainly, he's not a candidate to review Norman Mailer's Ancient Evenings; neither, so it is decided, are Joyce Carol Oates or V.S. Pritchett. John Simon would be too savage; Anthony Burgess is finally chosen because he writes "soft" reviews and, whenever he is faced with a fake masterpiece, he doesn't say they're fake but uses a fake voice.

Then there's the portrait of Chuckle Faircopy who spends his entire days writing headlines for the reviews. "The way he arched over his typewriter, suddenly pouncing into composition," Page observes, "I was sure he was up to more than headlines." His work sheets contain 20 pages for one headline, the final version often coming to him in a dream at home when he wakes up, writes it down and can't get back to sleep from the sheer excitement of it. Example: "New York Was Like That" for a review of a history of New York City.

The scenario of The Belles Lettres Papers, however, has no resemblance in fact or fancy to what happens in the book section of any newspaper I know. Publicity girls, and boys - so Simmons has one character say - will offer "lunches, dinners, weekends in the country, their very persons, to see that their authors prevail." Lunches, yes, but their very persons?

Emily, bless you!

If I am ever in Mass., I owe you a drink!

Thank you so much, that is it! That's wonderful. Now I can live a normal life again.

Cheers!