Currently Reading: 'The Disappearers' by Marlon James
I was captivated by Dwight Garner's recent review (read: glowing endorsement) of The Disappearers, the latest from Booker Prize-winning author Marlon James.
It stood out to me for its unabashed adoration, which is not usually a mode I associate with Garner's reviews. But I know this: As soon as I read it, after being sucked in by an arresting headline, I had no choice but to buy the book.
Here's a free gift link to the review:
By Dwight Garner
From the line that spurred the headline to comparisons to giants (Rushdie's Midnight's Children, Morrison's Song of Solomon, and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!) to the following humdinger of a paragraph, Garner is totally in the bag for this book:
A bonus is that James is casually funny in a way Faulkner rarely is, and his novel has Nirvana and Soundgarden and Duran Duran and Prince cassettes locked into its boom box. It occurred to me around Page 350 that “The Disappearers” places him near the front of the line, a decade or two from now, for the Nobel Prize.
I mean, come on. Who doesn't want to read that book?!
Garner's review was the lead subject in the always-fun Book Gossip newsletter from New York magazine, and it answered the question quite simply: Nobody doesn't want to read that book right now.
As a now-deleted tweet with the first few hundred words of the book circulated online, haters and skeptics were all too characteristically quick to issue judgment about the prose. But it didn’t matter — wherever there were copies of The Disappearers, they disappeared nearly overnight. The novel peaked at No. 6 on Amazon’s “Best Sellers” list, which is updated in real time, then promptly sold out on the site — “a publisher’s nightmare,” according to one Big Five publicity director — just one day after publication. The team at Riverhead shared that the novel had an original print run for the U.S. and Canada of 37,000 copies and that 50,000 more were on the way.
I can attest that my dear local indie shop was backordered on the title less than a day after it dropped (and it was a big social media post/announcement when they got it back in stock).
I'd already listened to a handful of book podcasts, and I knew The Disappearers was going to be a hot commodity. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that Garner's excitement excited me. I sped up my buying as a result of it, and I love that for not only the book world itself (authors and publishers who benefit from the excitement) but also for the state of arts criticism.
It feels like time-traveling, back to a more defined monoculture, where things like this could move the needle, and we get to pretend like we're all reading the same thing for a minute. I love that notion because I miss it so often in our fractured media ecosystem.
Book Gossip agreed with me on that one:
One clear result of Garner’s review: Publishing professionals are newly optimistic that criticism can fuel attention and debate. “There’s something so special when a review ricochets far enough that I’m hearing from friends outside of publishing writing to me, ‘Hey, have you heard of this book?’” said one publicist. The sources I spoke with were also curious to see how The Disappearers, which is short-listed for the Booker, will go over with the general reading public.
I'm about 100 pages into the book now, and I'm loving it so far.
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