Winner of the National Book Award

Back when Miss Edith worked in a real-life bookstore, the kind where someone walked in and you’d say hello all friendly-like and then studiously ignore him or her until you realized they needed your help and then you’d be, like, the single nicest person in the world, who also did free gift wrapping, back in those days, Miss Edith read a novel she dimly remembered reading reviews of a few years before. It was a handsome paperback, published by Picador, and the title was Winner of the National Book Award. Written by someone called Jincy Willett, this was a book that made Edith snort with laughter. She chewed through it gleefully, and came back to work and ordered several copies of it. “This book is fucking hilarious,” she told her cronies. “If there were a God, this book would be on the best-seller list. People suck.” I mean, we’re in a college town, filled with Writers and Thinkers and normal people who’re just sort of around, and every type of Pompous Git you can imagine – and this is the cast of the novel, too. This novel should have been a guaranteed hit.
Edith stacked up the books face out and set up a little card next to them saying, “We heartily recommend Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award. Anyone who reads contemporary fiction should read this. We cannot fathom why it’s not on the best seller lists… Ok, we can. But that just goes to show you…. This book is GREAT!”

The book began to sell. At first it was one or two copies a week. Then it became a copy a day. After a while, management decided it might be fun to compile a shelf of in-store bestselling books, so people could really see what their peers and fellow café denizens were reading (as opposed to what was on the NEBA or New York Times lists, which often were books no one in our store cared about at all). It turned out that Jincy Willett’s novel was the best selling book. By a long shot.

So we set up the display. The book sold even better. It sold and sold and sold. I contacted the publicist for Picador to see if they were doing publicity for it or anything; was WotNBA being promoted for book clubs or anything? Nope; the publicist who got back to me asked me roughly how many copies we were selling (he could tell that we were ordering a lot, but of course had no way of knowing how they were really moving) and I told him. He was floored.
I asked a bookseller in Cambridge, MA, if it sold well there. He’d never heard of it. The posh place in Madison, Connecticut that readers rave about, of which I’ve never been too fond, didn’t even carry it. (Too bad for them.) It seemed that New Haven was unique in its craving for Jincy Willett.

That novel remained on the in-store bestseller list, in the top 5, for the rest of my tenure at the store. When I quit, last June, it was still in the top 5, and usually at number 1, 2, or 3. When I went into the store – long story – about six months after quitting, I noticed that my card was still hanging there, and I took it down. Two months after that, the book was still in the top 10. I don’t know if it’s up there now, but I should have a look. Maybe when I’m next walking around there I’ll stop in, wearing shades. Edith tries to slink around incognito, you know.

I think this is a significant story about bookselling, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s interesting, at any rate. What got me thinking about it again was a Daily Galley Cat emailing I got yesterday that cited a New York magazine article about “Great Books of the Last Ten Years No One’s Read” or something like that. Kurt Andersen’s pick was Jincy Willett’s Winner of the National Book Award. I can’t say as I agree with everyone’s picks on this list – and quite frankly, I don’t care; to each his own, right? – but I was glad to see Miss Jincy there. (Edith feels she can be on a first-name basis with her, since she must have provided her with enough royalties to count for something.) If you’re curious to see the list – I’m not big on linking things, but in this case I’ll make an exception.

Clinton Heylin's Editor

Miss Edith would like to have a word with Clinton Heylin’s editor.

For those of you who have been following Miss Edith’s thought process for a while, you’ll know that if there’s a big new book about the history of punk out there, I’m bound to have a gander at it. The delightful Mr. Armstrong at the local public library seems to know that I have a yen for these things, and he keeps ordering them for me (it’s because of Mr. Armstrong that I discovered the Steven Lee Beeber book that so impressed me a while back). Last week I found another exciting item, Clinton Heylin’s Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Grunge and was thrilled to take it home with me. Heylin has written a lot of rock and roll books, and one of them, From the Velvets to the Voidoids, is really a classic in its field. (I know that sounds pompous, but really, bear with me; there’s so much crap out there when it comes to music writing that Heylin comes off as the John Updike of this genre, relatively speaking). (Now I’m thinking about it, he might be more the Nicholson Baker of the genre. But let’s let this go, shall we?)
So I had great hopes for Babylon’s Burning, and though it’s a brick of a book – 623 pages of text, not counting appendices or index – I lugged it home.
I started reading it right away, got to about page thirty, and thought, “Oy.” (Not Oi, mind you.) Heylin has never been shy about going into minute detail about this stuff, but it was clear that with this book, he has taken detail to new heights. If you look at the table of contents, you’ll see that he’s broken down his time frames into slots of two or three months. And he starts in 1971. To be fair, he divides the time, at first, by years, covering 1971 to 1975; this makes sense. But then in the second part of the book he really does measure the scenes – and we’re talking London and New York here, these are huge casts of characters were dealing with – in terms of months. The pointillist view of this leaves the reader – or at least this reader, who has a high tolerance for this stuff -- rather numb. We reach 1980 at about page 500, and it was at about that point that Miss Edith scratched her head and said to Notarius, “Um, how’re we supposed to cover 1980 to 1995 or so in a hundred pages? This sucks.”
You could describe the problem as one of pacing. That would be fair. And with that view, Heylin’s editor, Tony Lacey, has some explaining to do. But I think the problem is really more conceptual: basically, I think Heylin bit off more than he could chew here, given the kind of obsessive guy he is. The book is just trying to cover too much stuff, and as a result, a lot of material gets left out or given short shrift. The 1980s is a decade that’s just woefully under-written here. There is, for example, a vast amount of material about the Australian punk scene – not my interest, but I wasn’t offended by its presence or anything – and then there’s nothing about the Boston scene. Heylin basically just leapt from the Minutemen and X (in his okay section on the LA punk scene, which is really just okay, no better) to Nirvana. The Pixies, who deserved better from Heylin (and that’s just one band that deserved better – one could name many more), are not quite a footnote in the chapter about grunge, but almost. If I were one of the Pixies, I think I’d want to smack Clinton Heylin.
Were Heylin a different, more magazine-y, kind of writer – this problem wouldn’t be so glaring. But by virtue of his tight focus in the first parts of the book, he makes the last part suffer badly. Miss Edith wished ardently that he had either trimmed the first sections dramatically to make room for more material at the end, or simply decided that this was really a two-volume project. I can understand wanting to document each of these scenes so carefully, I really can, but mistakes were definitely made here. This is another case where I feel bad that I didn’t like this book better – I wanted to much to be able to say, “Heylin’s done it again,” but I just can’t. The book is probably too much for a 101-level reader, and for the graduate-level classes… it just won’t do. Miss Edith offers her regrets, but urges her interested readers to look at From the Velvets to the Voidoids, along with Legs McNeil’s Please Kill Me.