High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [67]
The words from my own mouth begin to fill me with despair. I’m making a parody of my own earnest trade. If I could say my piece in a glib sentence or two, why on earth would I have spent years of my life on it, and all those pages? If Leo Tolstoy did a book tour for War and Peace, how would he answer? “It’s about how Napoleon invades Russia, and all these people discover war is, like, bad news.” Duh! Middlemarch in a plot summary sounds like a soap opera, and Pilgrim’s Progress, a Sunday-school lesson. My own book doesn’t have a prayer in the interview format. I flounder to define not just my own intentions but the concept of novel itself. “It’s not so much what happens,” I try to explain, “but how the words fit together, and what carries over from it into your own life.”
My interviewer looks at me, her eyes two perfect asterisks of mascara, and cuts to a commercial.
Through every city, every hour, every question asked and partially answered, I’m missing my daughter. I sleep in an oversized T-shirt she decorated awhile back, with help, in nursery school: it has her picture silk-screened on it, underscored with her name in childish handwriting. But I can’t hear her voice on the phone, for I’ve yet to finish a day and get to a hotel before she’s gone to bed. Finally, when I arrive on the East Coast, thanks to the gods of time zones, I can call while she’s still awake. At the sound of her small Hello, my heart shudders along my ribcage like a stick dragged down the length of a picket fence.
In a voice much higher-pitched than I remembered it, she details for me her day, the pictures she made, some new kids she met in school. She brightly reports, “I told them I have an imaginary mom.”
In Denver, for the noontime news roundup, the commentator clips a mike to my jacket and advises me I’ll have fifty-eight seconds to discuss my book. In a flash of insight, I understand everything. In fifty-eight seconds, all I can possibly get across is my name, the color of my jacket, and whether or not I have anything stuck on my teeth. It’s not my book that’s on sale here. It’s me.
Can modern literary success really come down to this, an author’s TV persona? In a word, yes. Early on, when a publicist first apprised me of my promotional duties, I whined, “I thought an artist had the privilege of being a recluse!” She firmly replied, “A starving artist has that privilege.”
An author can say no to a book tour—just as any employee can step backward down the career ladder for the sake of family or peace of mind—but a stigma comes with that choice. From what I’ve overheard, a writer who won’t travel is viewed as an ingrate, a coot, a hermetic unknown who deserves anonymity, or just plain stuck-up. As Garry Trudeau has pointed out, America is the only place where refusal to promote yourself is perceived as arrogance.
Why isn’t the author’s written word enough? Why must she follow her book out into the world like an anxious mother, to hold its hand and vouch for its character? Why, for that matter, is a book more desirable when it has the author’s signature on the flyleaf? I’m so grateful to my readers, heaven knows, I would do anything for them—probably scrub their kitchen floors if they asked. Certainly I would go along peacefully with the book-tour concept, if it were only a matter of my own temporarily disturbed life. But in principle it’s an industry trend that worries me. Celebritization of authors rivets the nation’s attention on a handful of books each year, shutting out diversity, leaving poets and first novelists to huddle in the cold with the masses of nonfiction scholars whose subject matter is more vital than it is sexy. Readers do need help, of course, in selecting among all the many deserving titles—but what criteria that could possibly fit in a fifty-eight-second TV spot will guide them to an informed choice? The quality of a book’s prose means nothing in this race. What will win it a mass audience is the author