Judging a Book by its Cover: Day 15, and 27,478 Words

Writing has been getting harder, especially now that I actually have to make things happen in my novel! Today I mostly spent some time setting things up, which will hopefully commence tomorrow. In the meantime, here is a lengthy excerpt that has (slight) answers to some of your questions, and answers to questions you didn't ask.

After purchasing a copy of Portman’s Complaint from the bookshop around the corner from her house, Nora thought to herself that the cover was exactly how she had expected it to look. It was a heavy tome that was over four hundred pages. The title was in large black sans serif letters at the top, and Oliver Goldstein’s name was printed at the bottom in even larger letters. Behind the lettering was a greyscale drawing of an abstract and angular forest. The cover even had quote from Anthony Doerr, another white guy who had won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2015, describing it as “A generous book, musical in its prose and expansive in its structure and range, about growing older and the essential nature of love.”

It all looked quite serious.

Everyone does indeed judge books by their cover, and she had long known that men’s and women’s books are depicted incredibly differently in ways that influence readers’ perceptions of their quality. Women’s books are much more likely to be packaged in such a way so to suggest that the book is “girly,” and thus, of lower quality. Women’s books are more likely to have soft-sell covers with warm colours that almost make it look like a bad Instagram filter. Books with female authors and main characters will often feature a beautiful young woman gazing wistfully off the side of the page or offering a suggestive smirk to the reader. Or perhaps the focus will be just a part of her body, such as her hands, lips, torso; even if this image has no relation at all to the book’s plot. This is a classic move of division that has long plagued depictions of women in advertising and the media; it is dehumanizing and objectifying. In contrast, novels written by men feature covers that are often just pure text or abstract art, illustrating the seriousness of the topic. These covers often have significant symbols and images from the book itself: for example, a picture of a sword across the front of George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones or the drawing of the iconic carousel from The Catcher in the Rye.

An Althusserian scholar may even have described the gendering of books as “hailing” potential readers, by constituting (and reproducing) their gendered subjectivities through a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life. When browsing books in a bookshop, men and women are interpellated by the covers of books as they recognize themselves as being hailed by the book cover that aligns with their gender.

When Nora was deciding on a book jacket for her own books, she had grown quite frustrated by the book covers that were sent to her by her publisher. She enjoyed a sexy witch as much as the next person, but she did not think that a woman wearing a witch costume with long purple and black striped socks, both of which appeared to be from a lingerie store, were representing the contents of her book the way that she had hoped. Most of the covers were just close-ups of different body parts, leading to an overall unpleasant effect of dismemberment. And for god’s sakes, why was there so much Comic Sans on everything? It took several phone calls from Nora for the publisher to start sending her anything else. One of which ended with her shouting “Stop trying to interpellate me!” to her publisher, which surprised her as she did not even consider herself to be an Althusserian scholar!

Eventually she was able to settle on a tasteful purple and black cover with drawings of two witches flying next to a castle.

Nora read through Portman’s Complaint over two particularly rainy Toronto days. She could hardly put it down. It was a beautiful and heartwrenching book about coming of age as a Jewish boy in 1940s-1950s Toronto, and then rural Saskatchewan in the 1960s-onwards. The main character, Abraham (Abe) Portman, pours out his soul in journals that he keeps from his childhood until middle age. There is death, sadness, repressed feelings of attraction to men, an eventual unsuccessful marriage to a gentile woman named Patricia. Abe battles feelings of bitterness and alienation while pursuing fulfillment in his life.

Portman’s Complaint was certainly suggestive of the difficulties that Oliver may have experienced as a bisexual man. If Oliver had indeed had a relationship with another man, and it was someone who he thought was the love of his life, surely other people in his life must have known? Nora wasn’t sure if Oliver was “out” as a public figure, or if he kept those aspects of his life more private. She read articles about him, and none had happened to mention it. She even Googled “Oliver Goldstein bisexual” and “Oliver Goldstein gay,” which did not reveal so much about Oliver but she certainly learned more about homosexuality through those search results.

Was it too nosy for her to want to learn more? Was it her place to try to find out about Darcy’s sexuality? Was it possible that he was gay now and any interest he might have had in her was only in her imagination?
Should she go to the source and ask Oliver himself, or would that be completely inappropriate? Their interactions had largely amounted to her criticizing his white male privilege, without her even stopping to consider that he might not be heterosexual. Would it be forward and unwelcome for her to bring it up? Or instead, should she try to ask Shalini about it, hoping that the topic might have come up at some point on one of her many dates with Noah?

As she was thinking about her next move, she heard a chime on her phone that indicated that she had received a text. Her phone had been working poorly recently, and the nincompoops at the Rogers store had been little help. As a result her phone was largely still on the fritz; her service had been spotty and she wasn’t receiving texts. Just the thought of it made her want to “hail” them as assholes!

She looked on the screen, which indicated that the text was from Wynn David.

“Interesting,” Nora thought to herself. She hadn’t considered asking him about the news that he himself had shared, for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, the two hadn’t purposefully met up yet, and she didn’t want to seem overzealous or weird. She had liked him after their first meeting in the coffee shop, and had hoped to reconnect so that she could see if they were as compatible as they seemed when he struck up a conversation with her about brian j. Pickles. It was surely the most romantic scene that his name had ever appeared in.

But second, after the encounter between Oliver and Wynn at Jackie’s Place, she was starting to think that she couldn’t trust him. She had read enough of Pride and Prejudice, and various adaptations of the book, and had written her own, to know that the Darcy character was always considerably better than he initially appeared, while the Wickham character was considerably worse. The Wickham character always had a tortured past with the Darcy character—such as him trying to elope with Darcy’s sister for her money—which he would lie about to Elizabeth and she would believe him because of her prejudice towards Darcy.

She didn’t want to fall into this trap. Nora was often foolish, but on this score she had the benefit of knowing what was going to happen next. Or, at least, some version of it.

Looking at her phone, which was working no thanks to those fucks at Rogers, she read his text: I feel like things ended kind of weird at Jackie’s Place.

They usually do, Nora texted back. She would never forget the time that she had been there and Jackie had inexplicably booked a dog-themed Guns N' Roses cover band called Pugs N' Roses.

LOL, he replied. She watched as he typed for a minute, then stopped, then started again. Want to meet up at Empire Espresso to talk about it?

Nora thought very hard about this. Was getting some information from Wynn worthwhile if he was just going to lie? Should she set out a trap for herself and potentially start to be even more attracted to him than she had already been?

Can I meet you there in half an hour? She finally typed.

Sounds good, he said.

She quickly dressed in a red knee-length skirt, a navy tank top, and navy flats. As she was stepping out the door to take the short walk to their meeting place, she thought to herself, “I wonder if Henry Golding from ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ is available to read for the part.”