I Can't Complain by Elinor Lipman Read Free Book Online Page B

wonderful books to enjoy, if only . . .” Am I truly this novelist’s favorite author? Did her book group really do
The Inn at Lake Devine
? Maybe not, but what gratifying editorial unctuousness.
    Cover-letter scholarship has made me didactic. When a dear friend’s novel was being sent to her A-list, I stepped in to preach. The cover letters needed to be enlivened, personalized, grovelized. Mention the deserving author’s worshipful admiration for the recipient of this letter. No form letters. No lifeless “I think you will agree that . . .”
    Will I blurb a book because its editor implores me charmingly? No. Will I take a stab at it? Yes. When do I decide? I read until something stops me: Clunky sentences. No life. No story. Too much story. Too many italics. Too earnest or pretentious or writerly.
    I generally give the promising stuff, the big-name stuff, and the friend of a friend’s stuff a fifty-page trial. That’s enough. If a few chapters don’t set my matchmaking antennae aquiver, if I’m not thinking,
I can’t wait to send this to ———. She’ll love it. Maybe she’ll blurb it, too,
I put it down.
    A manila file folder labeled TO BLURB OR NOT? holds the galleys’ cover letters, which I always mean to answer. Mostly I do; I e-mail the editor and make my excuse: “Thank you, but I’m judging a contest and therefore have cartons of novels to read over the next three months.” “I’m on deadline.” “I’m leaving soon for a book tour.” And the truest of all, “My name is on so many books this upcoming season that I fear it will render those endorsements meaningless.” (My computer stores this document under “blurb moratorium template.”)
    “I saw your name on a book,” people say. “Did you really like it, or were you being nice?”
    “I’m never nice,” I answer. “I never write something out of obligation.” The specter of the old Logrolling column in
Spy
magazine is a helpful tool. “Can’t do it,” I say. “He reviewed my third novel in the
Berkshire Eagle,
and we quoted it in the front matter.”
    I appreciate the sociology and transparency of blurbs: heads of MFA programs praising their darlings, editors turned novelists praising authors turned girlfriends. I will see a mentor thanked in the acknowledgments for his support, his faith, his in-law apartment. Then I turn to the back cover and see the acknowledgee declaring the book “huge, important, dazzling, incandescent.”
    I don’t think I’ve ever bought a book specifically because of a blurb, but I’ve returned a few to the shelf because of an overwrought rave from a pretentious jackass with whom I’ve had the misfortune to serve on a panel. Similarly, I’ve been put off by bombast, declaring this author the best of his generation, the heir apparent to . . . , the greatest living practitioner of . . .
    Not that I haven’t offered up a few overstatements in my day. I have gone on record predicting intimations of immortality and major prizes for books that were stillborn. On the other hand, I’ve been dropped from the jackets of second editions once the book hit the big time, and I’ve dismissed novels that Oprah went on to bless.
    Modesty and reason make me wonder if anyone will notice “Elinor Lipman” on four books or eight or ten in one year anyway. Just when I think it’s vainglorious to worry about overexposure, I receive something like reinforcement. “I saw your name on so-and-so’s advance reader’s copy,” a bookseller will write me. “We’re recommending it in our newsletter.”
    Perhaps I am too full of myself. When I feel a blurb coming on, I alert the editor that my seal of approval is on its way, as if it’s an emergency; as if she’s the answering service, and I am five centimeters dilated. Male editors are businesslike in their gratitude; female editors are more apt to be ebullient. One confided turning cartwheels in the corridors of Alfred A. Knopf. Can I believe them? I