When’s the last time you called something “luminous”? Or said that a certain experience “destroyed” you, and you meant it in a good way? Have you ever described any piece of art to any real person as “unputdownable”, as “urgent and raw”, or as “necessary”? Have you ever praised anything on grounds of being “spellbinding”, or any author as “whip-smart”?
Of course you haven’t, because nobody in the entire history of human civilisation has ever talked like this. Unless, that is, you are a famous author who has been bartered, begged or blackmailed into giving some less-famous author a book blurb – that is, a promotional quote for their front cover and marketing materials.
Let me be clear: The book blurb has to go. It is an insult to language, a flick of the bird to good taste. At best it is marketing puffery; at worst it is one more devious hurdle designed to keep the insiders in and the outsiders out. Consider, first, the language. Blurbs are some of the worst-written pieces of English on the planet. Nowadays a popular novel’s front cover is an absolute ratking of clichés and tired little phrases (tour de force) that basically only exist for this purpose. A cult of exaggeration, meanwhile, means everything gets inflated and melodramatised into the most urgent, indispensable, and timelier than ever product on the market. (Call me a coward, but when I read something advertised with This destroyed me! or whatever, I usually think, but I have so much more to live for!)
One starts to worry for the wellbeing of these blurbers, considering how often they’re reading unputdownable books. A cage with no key! Chronic blurb queen Zadie Smith appears to have paid the emotional price for her generosity. On my desk right now, by sheer coincidence, are blurbs from her on 2020’s Trick Mirror paperback by Jia Tolentino – “It filled me with hope” – and on 2021’s Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler, which poor Zadie reports “made me want to retire from contemporary reality”.
The worst thing about blurbs, though, is how they skew the industry. Since the words used in any given blurb are reliably absolute codswallop, the only thing that matters is the name printed beside it – a model of celebrity endorsement, a Cinematic Universe crossover, a Kanye x Adidas for the books world. Shouldn’t literature be smarter than that? Blurbs are now expected earlier and earlier in the process, sometimes even before the book has been finished. It’s torture for young writers, who have to spend months prostrating themselves before every industry icon they’ve ever met. And in the attention economy, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
The blurb game obviously tilts the scales in favour of people who happen to personally know famous authors: people who have family connections, did expensive and prestigious MFAs or go to the right parties. (I recently heard of a big-name author who will give you a blurb only if you reimburse them for their reading time: an ingenious and totally corrupt workaround.) Sometimes it’s fun to match the big-name blurb on the front to the friend, lover, drinking buddy or MFA instructor in the Acknowledgements section in the back. Being in the biz myself, I have learned that some people give blurbs without even reading the book, and certainly don’t hesitate to offer faux-praise when they didn’t really like it. (Sometimes you can tell.) The distortion goes even further: if you want someone to blurb you, you’ll suck up to them, in print and offline; you might even give a blurb to their friend in exchange. The whole thing is silly to the core. And, while literary insiders understand the total emptiness of the blurb game, most everyday readers have no clue.
So it is time to stop pretending. One Simon & Schuster imprint recently announced an end to their requiring blurbs. I suggest we go one step further and ban them all. Marketing copy, quotes from reviews – sure. But author-on-author action must be totally banned. Join me in writing to your local lawmaker for support. In case we fail, however, I have a cunning plan to fall back on. I am going to legally change my last name to ‘Prizewinning’ and my first name to ‘Pulitzer’. And I am going to give my debut novel the following title, punctuation and all: “Gorgeous…this destroyed me” – Ocean Vuong”* That can’t be against the rules, right?
