Book Marks

JAMES ATLAS

Fast Food for Thought

Publishing, not exactly a business known for its financial acumen, is finally getting around to this rather basic problem. Literature has a new look. You can see a conspicuous instance of it on the covers of Random House's Vintage Contemporaries line, launched by Fisketjon and two colleagues in the fall of 1984. The covers exude a uniformly hip, Art Deco aura: bright colors, blocky print, a geometric logo. "I told the art director to make the covers look like record albums," Fisketjon says. That casual suggestion was a stroke of marketing genius.

Penguin's new Contemporary American Fiction list, supervised by Patricia Mulcahy and Kathryn Court, is equally distinctive visually. The hoodlums in a parking lot overlooking the city on the cover of Richard Price's The Wanderers; the spouting fish in front of a pink

Leafing through Peter Ackroyd's recent biography of T. S. Eliot in my local bookshop, I glanced at the price—$24.95—and tried to remember who I knew at Simon and Schuster. I mean, a substantial new book on Eliot is something you want to own, but who has that kind of money? Fortunately, no one in the book biz ever actually goes out and buys a book. "You see a book you want and you think, I'll call someone up,'' admits Gary Fisketjon, a senior editor at Random House. Few who work in this ill-paid profession can afford such luxuries. But if people whose livelihood depends on getting other people to buy books won't buy them, who will? southern hotel on Frederick Barthelme's Second Marriage; the eerie rural landscape on Ernest Hebert's Whisper My Name: there's something playful and campy in these images that evokes a whole era. They speak to a generation brought up on rock music, old movies, and a heavy dose of hallucinogens.

Gary Fisketjon is a long-haired, Camel-smoking young man who bummed around the country with his Williams classmate (and Vintage Contemporaries author) Jay Mclnemey before settling down at Random House in the late seventies. Unlike most editors in this gentleman's profession, he's very shrewd about business. "Hardcover books just cost too much," he says. "Nobody buys them. And even paperbacks are getting expensive. So how do you sell books?" His own answer was to give his list an image and to price the books low enough ("$4.95 to $6.95, and I'll be damned if I'll go over that") to reach a large audience. So far, he's been right. Of the first twelve titles in the series, ten have gone back for second printings; sales have averaged 21,000 copies—a very respectable figure for a literary book.

The new look reflects changes in the landscape of American literature. You won't find books about academic life, heroes who've read Henry James, or the New York literary scene on the Vintage Contemporaries list. What you will find are many exemplary specimens of the six-pack genre lately made famous by Raymond Carver. The bookish types who used to dominate the novel—Bellow's Herzog, Updike's Bech, Roth's Zuckerman—have given way to the kind of people you see at the checkout counter of a 7-Eleven late at night. The desperate drifters in Richard Ford's A Piece of My Heart, the tough-talking crooks in James Crumley's Dancing Bear, the southern crackers in Barry Hannah's Airships: these are the yahoos of current American literature. Not that everyone on Fisketjon's list is a crazy. Janet Hobhouse's Dancing in the Dark is full of worldly New York types, and the characters in The Debut, an early novel by the suddenly popular British novelist Anita Brookner, have probably never seen a roadhouse in their lives. By and large, though, it's a pretty unruly crowd—the writer as redneck.

Penguin's list, with nearly seventy-five titles, is more eclectic. It ranges from best-sellers like Gail Godwin and Harriet Doerr to relative unknowns like James Wilcox and Sheila Ballantyne. Both houses resurrect out-of-print classics; Penguin is reprinting Grace Paley and Donald Barthelme, Vintage has Frederick Exley and Peter Matthiessen on its list. But they're also concentrating on new talent; Penguin bought Bret Easton Ellis's novel, Less than Zero, about the zonkedout, under-twenty set in the wealthier precincts of L.A., for nearly six figures.

In a way, though, the significance of the new Vintage and Penguin lists is more cultural than literary. What their MTVlike covers proclaim is that serious literature by new and unknown writers has a wider market than the traditional, educated, book-buying elite. For the price of a movie, packaged in attractive, eye-catching editions, these books seem made for the Woodstock generation. Today's novels for the readers of today.

Whether the books will last is another matter. They're all impressive achievements, if you're grading on a curve. I doubt many of them are candidates for the Library of America, those somber volumes of Hawthorne, Melville, and other nineteenth-century classics now being selected by a committee of scholars. But then maybe the whole idea of the "classic," the book that survives over time, is obsolete; in a society where so much is disposable, why should literature be made to last? As Gary Fisketjon puts it, "there's been a changing of the guard."