| As recently as the 1970s and 1980s, it was possible for the likes of E L Doctorow (Ragtime, 1976), Herman Wouk (War and Remembrance, 1979), Anthony Burgess (Earthly Powers, 1981), Salman Rushdie (Midnight's Children, 1982) and Umberto Eco (Name of the Rose, 1984) to elbow their way onto the top of the lists despite fierce competition from the Sidney Sheldons and Wilbur Smiths of the world. |
| But that was before the publishing industry began producing bestsellers in more flavours than Ben & Jerry's has ice creams. If you look at the New York Times bestseller lists for the last decade, two trends emerge. |
| This is the age of the monolith, the one-book-rules-them-all universal bestseller; it's also the age of so many kinds of fast food for the mind that there's less and less space for plain vanilla literature. The Booker and the Nobel cause minor flutters on publishing's Dow Jones index, the odd Anne Tyler novel makes it up there alongside Dan Brown, Dan Brown and more Dan Brown, but that's about it. |
| Many commentators see a parallel between the music industry and the publishing industry: more boybands and girlbands in one, more chicklit in the other; more emphasis on finding new talent and less emphasis on promoting the quiet bands or mid-list authors with small but loyal fan bases; more homogenous, don't-rock-the-boat "products" with the attendant hoopla of hype, product placement and brand management. |
| We're looking in the wrong direction. The real connection is between the publishing industry and the fast food industry. Both of them depend on packaging and chains to an extent unimaginable just 40 years ago. Both offer products sold on the basis of convenience "" who has the time to eat, or read, these days? |
| The fast food industry sells plastic food: burgers that taste of rubber mats, microwaved cheese tacos that taste of salt and synthetic sauce. The publishing industry sells plastic books: quick reads that are guaranteed to kill off your intellectual taste. This is what's on the menu for the average reader: |
| Burger with fries: The gigantic one-size-fits all bestseller, moving seamlessly off the shelves at a bookshop near you. This is the Da Vinci Code type of book that has an endless profit run, until it's replaced with a feelalike book that takes over the sales charts for a brief while, until the next variation on the theme comes in. |
| Serial killer murder mysteries, frothy sex-and-the-city knockoffs, a thousand Bridget Jones clones: all of them basically offer a dubious centre loaded with brain-damaging fat, served in between slices of mass-produced blandness. We just can't get enough of them. |
| Hot dog: This is the one where everyone knows the ingredients stink; the critics never fail to point out how sloppily it's been put together; and even the garnishes taste stale; but hey, it keeps selling. |
| The Clintons, husband and wife, are the latest purveyors of this sort of bestseller, where no one cares what they're buying or how rotten the contents might be, so long as the signature on the cover looks right. |
| Sold in the millions (Bill Clinton's My Way, where the title is as recycled and cliched as the prose, just crossed a million in sales and publishing industrywallahs expect him to catch up with his wife's memoir soon) at any franchise near you. Reviewing this sort of book is like reviewing the ubiquitous mystery-meat hot dog: it doesn't matter how many times you point out how bad it is, there'll still be takers. |
| Fudge sundaes with whipped cream: These do roaring business on the basis of synthetic ingredients, artificial flavours and dollops of fake sweetness. Think of the recent wave of celebrities "" Madonna, Billy Crystal, "" who're churning out children's books by the sackful. |
| The formula is simple: convince celebrity to get in touch with his/her/its "child" side, which is easy given that most celebrities are at the very least in constant touch with their inner spoilt brat. Get celebrity to barf up a storyline of sorts, which can then be reworked by overworked, underpaid in-house editors. |
| Hire an illustrator who will actually produce brilliant drawings that might even sell the book, at a far lower fee, of course, than the marquee name will get. What you have is a high-calorie, no-value product that will do great business "" especially if you add dollops of whipped cream, chopped frozen nuts, chocolate sprinkles in the form of tight editing and great production values. |
| Chaat masala: This comes in two flavours. The first one is intended for the mass market, and will be described in suitably exotic terms: for "a confection of puffed rice laced with boiled potatoes and coriander, served with three kinds of sauce that include tamarind and mint among the ingredients", replace with your own terms of choice. |
| "A cracking/ soulful/ luminous historical saga/ saga of three generations of women/ family saga across the span of several decades/ a year of living dangerously/ The Year of the Rat/ one day, set in a myriad-hued landscape/ the lush green verdance of God's Own Country/ the rugged forbidding Himalayas". |
| The second one is the real thing, just as light as its phoren counterpart, but laced with more spice, more chillies, more flavour (and in some recent examples, far more heaving bosoms). |
| Junk food writing has never been this exciting, this accessible, this multicultural "" or this pervasive. Some of us out there might deplore the uniformity "" the same old book in bookstores in every city all across the world; others might point to the lack of nutritive value (no real flavour, nothing to digest); and still more might suggest that we're missing out on quirky, unusual, fresh authors "" organic authors, like organic vegetables. |
| But when you're spending more time on marketing and packaging authors than on nurturing talent, something's got to give. In this case, you have nothing to lose but your tastebuds. Go on, chomp down. |
| Tailpiece: Hindi rules, ok: The 11th edition of the Concise Oxford English dictionary has added a mass of new words from Indian languages with Hindi effortlessly in the lead. |
| From aloo to angrez, baap to bustee all the way down to yaar and zardozi, Hindi's way ahead in terms of the number of words it contributes, with a lone adda or uttapam waving the banner for other Indian languages. |
| Language chauvinists may not be pleased at the thought, but it reflects our filmi obsession with Bollywood and it is in large part thanks to the tamasha of the Hindi film industry that Hindi has joined the Oxford mela with such josh. (Josh, as far as I know, is not yet in the OED, though it should be under consideration.) |
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