6.15.2006
Easy Breezy Beautiful Literature
It's interesting that the move by Cover Girl to advertise in an upcoming youth novel is being touted (by itself) as a "narrative experience which breaks out of the book itself in unprecedented ways." I'll say! For starters, you have the Proctor and Gamble marketing machine taking the place of responsible critics, with results like this: "Cathy's Book...' is just the kind of project that sets Running Press' upstart YA publishing program apart from the pack," added Jon Anderson, Publisher of Running Press. "This highly designed, heavily illustrated, interactive and hip project is just the kind of publishing we like to do. And P&G's unique support will allow more readers to find the book and makes the story even more believable for its audience." Wow! apart from the pack, you say? I hate that nasty pack of writers out there, with their lupine group mentality. We need alpha writers to lead the hunt for believability by incorporating product placements, otherwise books would be nothing more than, well, literature.
My japes aside, perhaps this is actually an understandable trend. Writers like Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club), Douglas Coupland (jPod), and Bret Easton Ellis (American Psycho) have all fetishized commodities in various ways, and at times their critiques seem to get lost in the dazzling spectacle of the product (think the "Planet Starbucks" scene from Fight Club). As a cliche-spouting PR person would say "no publicity is bad publicity," or as Michel Foucault would say there has been a "veritable discursive explosion" of product-in-literature in the past twenty years. The more ways that you resist consumerism, the more fields it has in which to respond on its own behalf. Perhaps this move by Cover Girl could merely be read as a reframing of an already eazily, breezily, beautifully convenient aspect of contemporary literature.
