The Audacity of Hype

Open the first page of any award-winning paperback, and you’re guaranteed to find four to five pages of fawning reviews. A seemingly endless clanjamphrie of newspaper critics, published authors and hacks tripping over one another to declare their unconditional love for the text and author. Among them, not one criticism, as though the work is an Eggersian work of staggering genius.

How then, after wading through four pages of one-note praise, are we supposed to go into the book unbiased? Our expectations have been blown so enormously high, surely anything less than a work of brain-melting brilliance will leave us bitterly disappointed?

You say: “You don’t have to read the reviews.” I say: “Don’t be stupid, disembodied voice! How can you avoid them! They’re plastered on the cover, the back cover, the inside, and the inside back pages! Your curiosity is too strong! Get away from me and take a bath!”

Often, of course, the reviews are right. There are simply books everyone is going to love, pretend to love, or whose prosaic powers of seduction are so strong, the only response is to open one’s legs and receive their thrusting magnificence. Example: Janice Galloway.

Then again, there are dozens of examples of overhyped tosh, and these books are collected in a handy repository known as the Booker Prize. When a book is nominated for this masturbatory vacuum of talent, it is usually a good idea to run from it, far, far into yonder hills.

A recent example, for me, is James Lever’s decent novel Me Cheeta. Published (in hardback) anonymously, this amusing spoof Hollywood autobiography, narrated by the chimp from the 1940s Tarzan films, is passable train fodder, but hardly a serious literary watermark. I found the text risible, but since I dislike Hollywood trivia – and chimps – my attention waned.

At no point was I conscious I was reading a ‘spoof of genius’ or a literary masterpiece. The prose was clever, satirical – maybe even touching – but for the most part, rambling and obvious. Maybe I was feeling humourless that day (most likely), but I found myself questioning the narrator’s natural apeness. In a novel such as Will Self’s Great Apes, our simian friends were written about with remarkably detailed charm and wit. I longed for a greater anthropomorphic kinship with my Darwinian antecedents.

So I ploughed through the spurious anecdotes like that one man who sits in the front row of a comedy gig and laughs at nothing all night. I decided that the book had let me down. Where was that spoof of incredible genius, that touching masterpiece of dazzling originality that the critics promised me? And why is everyone united in their praise of this book? Look for one negative review on the net, and you’d be hard-pressed to find it.

The answer? Either Lever is a complete genius, and I’m a chump, or there are greater forces at work. When a novel is Booker-nominated, a form of collective brainwashing takes place. Books are officially declared ‘genius’ and enter an untouchable pantheon of undeniable greatness. Any fool who dares to criticise these texts is carted off and shot quietly behind the offices of the Times Literary Supplement.

I say: run from overhyped books as though rescuing your child from stampeding wildebeest. Leave the worthy novels to fester on bourgeois trestle tables, and scour the small presses for the true genius. It’s out there in many guises.

And publishers: please stop splattering books with good reviews and building our expectations! You know it’s destructive, you showy animals.