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By Root 12251 0

remorseless, insufferable. High in my glassed-in cubbyhole on the twentieth floor of the McGraw-Hill Building—an architecturally impressive but spiritually enervating green tower on West Forty-second Street—I leveled the scorn that could only be mustered by one who had just finished reading Seven Types of Ambiguity upon these sad outpourings piled high on my desk, all of them so freighted with hope and clubfooted syntax. I was required to write a reasonably full description of each submission, no matter how bad the book. At first it was a lark and I honestly enjoyed the bitchery and vengeance I was able to wreak upon these manuscripts. But after a time their unrelenting mediocrity palled, and I became weary of the sameness of the job, weary too of chain-smoking and the smog-shrouded view of Manhattan, and of pecking out such callous reader’s reports as the following, which I have salvaged intact from that dry and dispiriting time. I quote them verbatim, without gloss.

Tall Grows the Eelgrass, by Edmonia Kraus Biersticker. Fiction.

Love and death amid the sand dunes and cranberry bogs of southern New Jersey. The young hero, Willard Strathaway, heir to a large cranberry-packing fortune and a recent graduate of Princeton University, falls wildly in love with Ramona Blaine, daughter of Ezra Blaine, an old-time leftist and leader of a strike among the cranberry harvesters. The plot is cute and complex, having largely to do with an alleged conspiracy on the part of Brandon Strathaway—Willard’s tycoon father—to dispose of old Ezra, whose hideously mutilated corpse is indeed found one morning in the entrails of a mechanical cranberry picker. This leads to nearly terminal recriminations between Willard—described as having “a marvelous Princetonian tilt to his head, besides a considerable feline grace”—and the bereaved Ramona, “her slender lissomeness barely concealing the full voluptuous surge which lurked beneath.”

Utterly aghast even as I write, I can only say that this may be the worst novel ever penned by woman or beast. Decline with all possible speed.

Oh, clever, supercilious young man! How I gloated and chuckled as I eviscerated these helpless, underprivileged, subliterary lambkins. Nor was I fearful of giving a gentle dig in the ribs at McGraw-Hill and its penchant for publishing trashy “fun” books which could be excerpted in places like Reader’s Digest for a hefty advance (though my japery may have contributed to my downfall).

The Plumber’s Wench, by Audrey Wainwright Smilie. Non-fiction.

The only thing going for this book is its title, which is catchy and vulgar enough to be right down McGraw-Hill’s alley. The author is an actual woman, married—as the title coyly indicates—to a plumber living in a suburb of Worcester, Mass. Hopelessly unfunny, though straining for laughs on every page, these illiterate daydreams are an attempt to romanticize what must be a ghastly existence, the author eagerly equating the comic vicissitudes of her domestic life with those in the household of a brain surgeon. Like a physician, she points out, a plumber is on call day and night; like that of a physician the work of a plumber is quite intricate and involves exposure to germs; and both often come home smelling badly. The chapter headings best demonstrate the quality of the humor, which is too feeble even to be described properly as scatological: “Rub-a-Dub-Dub, the Blonde in the Tub.” “A Drain on the Nerves.” (Drain. Get it?) “Flush Times.” “Study in Brown.” Etc. This manuscript arrived especially tacky and dogeared, having been submitted—according to the author in a letter—to Harper, Simon & Schuster, Knopf, Random House, Morrow, Holt, Messner, William Sloane, Rinehart, and eight others. In the same letter the author mentions her desperation over this MS—around which her entire life now revolves—and (I’m not kidding) adds a veiled threat of suicide. I should hate to be responsible for anyone’s death but it is absolutely imperative that this book never be published. Decline! (Why do I have to keep reading such shit?)

I would never have