John Freeman

As soon as I decide that I am enjoying a book, I often flip to the back cover and study the author photo. I'm not sure what I expect to find there. Sometimes there isn't a photograph at all--as on Anne Carson's books, which simply read "Anne Carson lives in Canada." Other times the bio reads like a resume in prose, as in Norman Mailer's back-flap filibusters.

One of the weird things about literary arts today is that I feel a little small-minded for this curiosity, even in the privacy of my own reading chair.

Deconstructionist critics tell us we're not supposed to read this way; that books are art, not documents. That it is the text which matters, not its creator.

But this notion overlooks one crucial fact: reading is an intensely intimate experience. And reading books without any idea who wrote them is a bit like having sex in total darkness; it feels good, but you wonder whose body you're crashing into. A face, however gussied up, has a way of responding to these needs.

Which is why I am growing a bit weary of the too-knowing author tagline. John Twelve Hawkes, author of the hit new sci-fi crossover novel "The Traveler," "lives off the grid" if you believe his author bio. Will Clarke, author of "Lord Vishnu's Love Handles" has a tagline that says "Will Clarke doesn't want you to know where he lives." Great, so why has he been more than happy to blog about his tour on the Internet?

Consistency, I suppose, has never been a guarantee in life or in an author's plans. The only time an author bio made me laugh was on Mike Albo's "Hornito." In the wake of so many writers moving out of Manhattan it read: "Mike Albo does not live in Brooklyn." Five years later, I happen to know that Mike Albo now does in fact live in Brooklyn.

Even if that first bio was a joke, I enjoy the lie since that's what I am looking for when I turn to the back cover: a continuation of the story over the shaky footbridge of photography and biography into the real world.

This leaves us wide open to outright bamboozlement. The Russian writer Viktor Pelevin cheekily invented a degree in aeronautics for his spoof of the Soviet space program, "Oman Ra," and to this day you can watch journalists work it into their profiles of him.

Then again, perhaps that's just Pelevin--who is so reclusive fans started a debate over whether he actually existed--until he did an interview in person.

Like more and more writers these days, Pelevin seemed to want to just write books and live his life without turning either into a striptease calculated to garner the most publicity. "It used to be that when you turned the book in your job was done," John Updike once told me in an interview. "Now it's just begun, because you have to go out and sell the thing."

I'm not so naïve that I believe that this trend will ever reverse itself, and I feel sorry for the authors who try to take a Pynchon-like stand against publicity today. Our culture is so saturated with marketing that no one will believe turning down publicity is anything but another publicity stunt. To this day I talk to people who are convinced Salinger's four-decade long silence has been a calculated ploy for launching the mother-of-all comebacks.

I might believe that were Salinger not so tetchy about being a public figure even back then. The book-club edition of "The Catcher in the Rye" featured a full bleed portrait of him taken by Lotte Jacobi on the back cover. He looks rather hollow-eyed but dashing, long in the face. You can almost picture him in a great coat on the train platform in New Haven, on his way to a Yale-Harvard football game.

But two books later, the photograph was gone and the flap copy had replaced any trace of the author himself. At the bottom of the back page, he gave the prurient-minded reader a glimpse of himself, but not without a tiny bit of recrimination.

"It is my rather subversive opinion that a writer's feelings of anonymity-obscurity are the second-most valuable property on loan to him during his working years," he wrote on the hardcover edition of "Franny & Zoey." "My wife has asked me to add, however, in a single explosion of candor, that I live in Westport with my dog."

The problem and the pleasure of how we read today is that were this book published in 2005, we wouldn't just have a photograph of J.D. We'd have one of the dog, too.

(2005-08-02)

Also by John Freeman

Fiction Review
From the beginning, Banana Yoshimoto has been eerily preoccupied with loss and slumber
(2005-07-05)

Superhero
It's 1pm on a hand-chappingly cold day at the Brooklyn Superhero Supply store in New York and Dave Eggers has things to do
(2005-06-28)

What I'm reading this summer
``I am rereading Thomas Mann's `The Magic Mountain.' I am fascinated by the way Mann interlinks...
(2005-06-09)

Nonfiction Review
The only thing Americans love more than a scoundrel is a reformed one
(2005-05-31)

Family Guy
(2005-05-31)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-05-10)

Versatility
(2005-05-10)

Fiction Review
(2005-04-26)

Fiction Review
(2005-04-12)

Fiction Review
(2005-03-08)

Nonfiction Review
(2005-02-22)

Fiction Review
(2005-02-08)

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