Circle of cliches
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 08/08/2004
Tom Payne's guide to the words that reviewers and publishers love too much
When did you last come across the words "coruscating" or "magisterial"? It's unlikely to have been in a holiday brochure or a recipe. Surely it was on the back of a book or in a book review.
The book world has a language all of its own. I hadn't noticed it much before 1998, but then I joined The Daily Telegraph's books team. I had not been long at the desk when I found some cuttings by a prospective reviewer, and a note under it from my predecessor, who liked what the writer had to say but deplored the "reviewese". The dialect had been identified before: Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which tells a two-paragraph story 99 different ways, has a study in reviewese. The story is retold as a book review, and in Barbara Wright's English translation the story's author is commended for bringing it off "with a rare felicity".
Reviewese isn't confined to book reviewers; it pervades the literary world. A lot of it comes from book-jacket blurbs, which produce a repertoire of sentences that publishers would like to see in book reviews. This literary lingo consists of words, constructions and formulations few English speakers use, but that sound true if used about books. I started to notice it everywhere, and began keeping a list of phrases that recurred and jarred. Later, I discovered that people on the books desks of other papers did the same. The Times Literary Supplement has a list of the top 20 phrases without which they could live, and its editors update it annually.
All trades have some kind of professional jargon ? hacks must have their spikes, and cobblers their lasts ? but there's something different about the patois of Grub Street. Admittedly, it relies on the same sorts of abbreviations as other trades: "I couldn't put it down" becomes "unputdownable"; "It was so funny I laughed out loud" becomes "laughoutloud funny". Publishers and critics need these terms like they need terms for genres, such as chicklit, ladlit, bonkbusters, sexandshopping and killerchillers. Somehow, the way we talk about writing has become rich in cliches. It affects the way we publish books, the way we cover them, and the way we consume them. You could devise a circle of cliches, starting (because we have to start somewhere) with the publishers. Publishers have to tell journalists, shopkeepers and readers what a book is like as quickly as possible, so find themselves using an immediately recognisable language. There is no counting the books that have subtitles beginning with the words "the extraordinary true story of", or the times when the story is untold and the truth shocking. One publisher told me that a book was a "lie-in-the-bath-with-a-glass-of-wine" kind of book; another that a work was "Alan Bennett meets Victoria Wood". (I wish I'd stopped myself from suggesting that they might have met already.)
The "x meets y" construction is an invaluable way of summarising a book whose disparate elements might call for lengthier description. Another is to talk of an author's progeny ? he or she could be the bastard offspring, or bizarre lovechild, conceived in a crack house by the union of Marcel Proust and Jeanette Winterson. Yet another is the culinary image: take Tobias Smollett, stew him in his own juice, reduce, mix in some finely chopped Poe, season with Patti Smith and serve with late Henry James.
I have read this kind of thing from publishers often, and critics occasionally; but then, critics are apt to talk of the resulting stew, or broth, or heady mix. And we critics love to concatenate names and drop them from the heavens: in his novel Who's Sorry Now?, Howard Jacobson describes a critic "famous for the number of books on any subject he was able to review in one week, and for the number of mentions of writers other than the ones reviewed he was able to squeeze into 600 words".
The namedrop is an effective shorthand, and flatters the reader too. Let me drop another, then: in Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly writes that "journalism must obtain its full impact on the first reading", and adds: "Carelessness is not fatal to journalism nor are cliches, for the eye rests lightly on them." Connolly found a way of excusing the argot that irked me for four years of a mostly heavenly job. I had thought that literary journalism should be better than other journalism, because it was about literature ? in the words of Ezra Pound (clank), "news that stays news". Let other scribes begin every feature published shortly before Christmas with the words " 'Tis the season"; let those more on the qui vive tell us what just got hot. But if Connolly is right, I missed the point: "Journalism is loose, intimate, simple, and striking; literature formal and compact, not simple and not immediately striking in its effects." Literary journalism, I had to remember, was still journalism.
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