How To Tell If A New Book Is Any Good Or Not

The blurbs.

Bless you, you’re new here.

It’s not that blurbs tell us nothing. Since it’s typical for an author, during the production process, to suggest potential blurbers or even to seek out blurbs, the identity of the blurber tells you something at least about the writer’s goals and what and who they admire. If it’s a first book, it might also tell us who is the most famous person favorably disposed to the author (in the case of Midwest Futures, it was Tressie McMillan Cottom, who knows I will always love her). If things go well, the blurbs on a writer’s book will resemble a Pinterest page — they may not tell you if the writer’s any good, but they tell you what “good,” if attained at all, would mean for that writer.

They also, of course, might tell you who the author is friends with. This isn’t automatically a problem; a lot of intra-author friendships are based on, or even begin in, mutual admiration of each other’s stuff. I assume that James Wood genuinely thinks that his wife Claire Messud’s work is good, because James Wood would have trouble being married to someone who he thought was a hack. Guy Davenport wrote glowingly, in public, about Hugh Kenner, and vice versa. It’s good they did. We needed each to help explain the other. Really new movements — if we ever again get any more of those — have historically absolutely depended for any readership whatsoever on what a sour-souled person could only regard as logrolling. You don’t just put Khlebnikov or Stein out there and hope everyone will get it. Some literary intellectuals seem to feel that there’s something ignoble about explaining what people like about a violently new style,¹ but I’m not one of them, and I think those people are the rare actual snobs and elitists in a field where those epithets are so carelessly wielded that they lose the sting they really ought to have.²

So it’s not like blurbs have no information in them. But at best they tell you what someone’s trying to do. That can definitely be enough to get me to open a book, and if I’m feeling generous, it can be enough to get me to buy the book and hope it’ll be good. It cannot get me to read the book.

(My next book, which comes out sometime in the fall, has blurbs from Debbie Blue, Tyler Huckabee, Zito Madu, and Francis Spufford, if that tells you anything. Which it does. It tells you, if nothing else, that I have crazy good taste in who I pick to blurb me.)

Word of mouth.