Gawker
A piece in this morning's Times concerning fledgling novelist Marisha Pessl caught our eye, particularly this paragraph:
...before the book's publication there was grumbling on the World Wide Web about yet another attractive young writer earning a big advance for a first novel. "It's not that I am mocking Ms. Pessl's appearance or writing ability," Sarah Weinman, crime fiction columnist for The Baltimore Sun, wrote on her Web site, "Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind" (www.sarahweinman.com), "just the publishing world's almost masochistic desire to let attractive packages, so to speak, dictate their buying guidelines."
Well, looking at the picture that accompanies the piece, all we've got to say is that the publishing industry is in more trouble than we thought. We've nothing against Ms. Pessl's appearance, but if this is what's meant to make the book-buying public sit up and take notice we're moving our money into mutual funds. Still, let's be fair; every form of employment comes with its own level of grade inflation, looks-wise (take blogging, for instance: In the real world you would lock your car doors when you saw us pass by; on the Internet, we soar to "just roll up the windows" standards); after the jump, we've provided you a simple chart of various jobs and where their avatars of attractiveness fall on the real life scale.
With Marisha Pessl, You Can't Judge a Book by the Photo on the Cover [NYT]
Comments
ha ha!
Signed, Too Ugly Even For This List
Is that a bruise, pimple or horn on her forehead?
It's odd that the Times used such a bad picture to illustrate said hotness, but she's a fox.
And for the record, eff Sarah Weinman. Everyone loves to gnash their teeth about the fact that "no one reads literary fiction anymore," and yet when a promising, high-profile debut comes out they bitch because she's pretty? I'd understand if this was a bad book by a hot girl, but as it is, Weinman just sounds like a bitter wallflower.
Melissa Berkelhammer!
That is a bad pic, and Marisha is seriously fucking radiantly gorgeous in person and in other photos, but you have a great point re book "hot." Can we have some gender equality here, though? Can we talk about Ben Kunkel's non-hotness?
How big was her advance?
no one is remotely hot on that list :-\
just finished the book last night. it was fantastic and almost impossible to put down. i wanted to hate it at first (simple envy on my part, most likely) but the fact is that ms. pessl is not only gorgeous but a fabulous writer. thank god there's a new, young, successful female writer out there who has not felt compelled to lower herself to plum sykes/candace bushnell territory in order to sell a book. this book will NOT be sitting on the "urban fiction" table at barnes & noble, and that's a compliment.
Damn, that is a bad photo of her! Here's a better photo that was in the Times the weekend before last:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/31/books/31masl.html?ex=115...
So now I know the ticket to getting published... I need to start attaching a photo to my manuscripts.
"My dears, you all have a face for radio..."
Signed, an ex-radio DJ
Shouldn't Ann Coulter be right-wing lunatic fringe hot? Bitch could turn anyone gay. Worked on me.
Agent: Thanks for the review, now I'm actually interested in reading the thing. And you're right, in that photo she's insecurity-inducing hot.
Maybe I'll head to Borders during lunch. Maybe I should stick my Misshapes backpack over my hot-if-there-is-nothing-better-around head when I do.
The shot is a little Helen Gurley Brownish, no? --esp. around the hairline?
Maybe the photographer disagreed and this is a clever way to undercut the article?
I think you do need to add a $ column to that, so we can see how bone structure relates to advance size.
Gotham -- I too thought it was Berkelhammer! I nearly died for a bit at the thought of her getting a book deal, in addition to the undeserved degrees from Princeton & Harvard Law.
How about News "Hot" (e.g. Paula Zahn)? The teacher you fantasized about in 10th grade...
In the spirit of fairness, I should probably hold off on commenting about Marisha Pessl's work until actually reading the entire book. That being said, I found her reading last night at Skylight to be somewhat disappointing.
As an aspiring twentysomething novelist, I had every reason to be excited for a glimpse at the newly crowned wunderkind. Beyond that, as an avid consumer of literary fiction, I really hoped to be awed by her talents. (What's better, after all, than adding a new author to the rolodex?) Unfortunately, this wasn't the case.
To begin with, the sections from which Pessl read were freighted with similes to the point of distraction. Some, of course, were clever and well-placed, but the majority seemed superfluous and detracted from the overall descriptive flow. Additionally, and I know this is perhaps unfair--and I really do hate to make a tired structuralist critique--the notable similarities to Donna Tartt's "The Secret History," if only from a superficial armature standpoint, were a bit off-putting for me.
Lastly--and, again, I don't mean to pick nits--during the Q&A Pessl made several borderline embarrassing grammar mistakes; e.g., failing to distinguish between subject and object ("She returned the draft to my mother and I"), mis-using the subjunctive, etc. Admittedly, anyone can get nervous during a Q&A, and I'm not trying to suggest that Marisha Pessl doesn't know basic grammar. Nonetheless, it seems somewhat inconsistent for the author of a "pitch-perfect," sprawling pomo tome to be making simple grammar errors. One questions, for instance, whether a Moody, DFW, or JCO would fall prey to said pitfalls.
Again, to be fair, one can't really blame Pessl for a case of nerves (if that is, in fact, what it was) during her first reading tour. But she didn't really help her case any when she later admitted that, as an undergrad at Barnard, she simply "made up" footnotes for academic papers b/c she was "too lazy" to actually do the required research. That is, in the wake of such recent literary hoaxes as JT Leroy, James Frey, and Kavvya Viswanathan, a rising-star young author would be well-advised to avoid elucidating instances in which (s)he cut corners.
Again, I can't stress enough that I'm not putting Pessl in the fraud category; rather, I intend only to point ways in which she might lend herself more literary credibility, which is sure to be a concern going forward, given that she's already suffering something of a minor (if ineluctable) backlash against her "glamorous young author" status. In a nutshell, I guess I'd suggest that her handlers advise her to skip a few sessions of cardio and instead cozy up with Strunk & White.
That is, the best way, perhaps, to stifle the criticism that Pessl is primarily being championed b/c she's such an obviously saleable commodity (and no, she's not as hot in person) would be to have her give truly erudite interveiews and readings. Last night, at least, she failed to deliver.
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