Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

First, check out this fine piece of cover art for Rick Moody’s new book. It’s a popup, but go on, it’s worth it.

Would you look at that cover and think, ‘Oh! Yes! A satire on Hollywood’s independent film industry!”

Of course you would...not!

Noble and clever Ron Hogan forwarded us this article about how the cover is turning women off to the point where the publisher has redesigned it (warning: NY Times requires registration after the dateline of the article) to reflect more of the book’s content.

Oh, if only the same were true for most romance authors. Can you imagine - “No, you will NOT have big man-titty on my book cover!”

Candy asked for dissent and commentary, and one of the requests, made by more than a few people, was for a link to comments that would display the newest comments first, as opposed to having to scrooooooll down to the bottom to see the most recent comments.

So, behold. You see below each entry a “comments” link, which displays oldest to newest as you scroll down, and a “new comments first” link, which displays new comments at the top of each window.

Enjoy! 

From Kate Rothwell’s blog cometh this very interesting tidbit concerning Medallion Press’ status as an RWA-approved publisher:

From Wendy Burbank of Medallion with permission to forward: “Medallion Press has received a letter from the Executive Director of RWA stating that our status as a publisher was revoked in error.”

Man, I’m just sooo freakin’ curious about what went on over here. For a while there it sounded as if Medallion had kinda dropped the ball, but now… Huh.

Dude tries to stop some young thugs from beating up a sweet young thang on the tube. Dude gets the crap kicked out of him. Dude falls into a coma. Dude enters into an incredibly self-conscious reverie as he attempts to wake himself up from said coma.

And there we have the entirety of Alex Garland’s The Coma. Not all stories with simple plots are brief or insubstantial, but both are true for this book. And when I say brief, I mean brief. It’s only 208 pages, it’s a smaller-than-average hardcover book, every chapter starts with a woodcut illustration, and the font is big. If you’re a book size queen, you’ll barely notice this tiny tome.

That’s not to say it’s a bad book. It’s just that, as a whole, the story was obvious and, well, kind of juvenile. If a precocious high-school kid had been given a writing assignment about the nature of consciousness, she might’ve come up with something like this.

The concept itself is pretty damn cool, but if you were made to suffer through Descartes or Waking Life at some point in college, this book covers much of the same ground. What is being? What is reality? What is the nature of consciousness? What is the nature of perception? Unfortunately, this book doesn’t offer anything new, insightful or particularly interesting.

A few of aspects of the book manage to save the story from being utter drek. The surreal yet concrete nature of the coma patient’s experiences mimic the dreaming state quite credibly. Three scenes in particular—one in the narrator’s bathroom, in which he discovers he’s bleeding, one in a music shop and one in a bookstore—are truly excellent. These scenes, however, are fleeting, and the deeper ramifications are left unexplored.

Garland’s prose style, as always, is gorgeous. If sacrificing shaved gerbils at the altar of the ancient Sumerian god Manititti would help me write sentences as clean and beautiful Garland’s, my house would be well-stocked with really tiny razorblades.

(Don’t worry, the gerbils are safe. I’m content to envy Garland from afar.)

The woodcut illustrations for the story, courtesy of Garland’s father, Nicholas Garland, are also gorgeous. On one hand, they add a certain oomph to the book. On the other hand, I couldn’t help feeling that they were used to pad the pagecount.

After the wonderful stories Garland offered in The Beach (get the British version, the American version seemed to be modified quite heavily), The Tesseract and 28 Days Later, The Coma hath broken my fangirlish heart.

OK, not broken. But it’s dinged quite severely.

Evil Auntie Peril, who cracks me up, wrote in the following: There is the historical association: male long hair = virility. From Samson to those wacky Merovingian reges criniti ("Cut my head off, but no, don’t take the hair!!!") to Fabio, the legend continues. Which begs the question, do flowing locks counteract the girly aspects of man-titty, or enhance it? Or are they subliminally evoking the unbridled passion one is guaranteed to find beneath these covers?

As for those of us with a fancy for the follically-challenged, I think Suzanne Brockman once wrote a hero with a receding hairline, but he never made it onto the cover (sniff). .

So true, the manly hair being a sign of virility. I agree that it is odd that the women on romance novel covers often have long, long, LONG hair and it is possible that they are subliminally echoing the virility of the man with their unbridled manes of peculiarly-colored hair.

But EAP’s comment at the bottom, about Suzanne Brockman’s hero with a receeding hairline made me ponder: how much does it matter to women today whether a man has a receeding hairline? Does it bother any of us? I think this might be the secret equal to women’s obsession with weight. We all worry (well, many of us do!) about our weight and whether the men in our lives notice our cellulite, our saddlebags, our muffin tops.

I’ve had a few conversations with male friends - who are profoundly unwilling to discuss their hairlines until prodded with the stubborn force of Sarah’s Will - wherein they’ve told me it is their biggest personal fear, that they will lose their hair. One friend of mine told me that her husband, who is a tall, muscular, kind, and incredibly talented carpenter, looked at her with a panicked expression when he realized he’d lost some hair and asked her seriously, “Are you going to leave me?”

While this has nothing to do with romance novels, it does touch on romance, attraction, and images of virility - which we here at SBTB like to skewer at least once a week! So - what’s your opinion: if a man loses his hair, is he out to pasture or is can he still be a hotty mc hot hot? Are we all holding on to the idea of a man with thick, luscious hair as the ultimate sign of handsomeness (and don’t forget those mantitties!) or is it ok for a romance hero, or a hero in our real life romances, to have a slighty-less-than-full head of hair?