Book Worms

Goods and services that outlive their usefulness, interest or impact are supposed to roll over and play dead dog to their updated, improved replacements. Built-in obsolescence--it’s big business’ rule of thumb and it operates everywhere. But not in the American book publishing industry.

Publishing houses engaged in a sales shoot-out are boring down the sights of one another’s best-seller hopefuls, and firing off round after round of a new genre known as the “celebrity seller.” These are “little” books written by “big” names, short on quality but high in promotability.

Faded movie queens, fat sports heroes, corrupt politicians, exiled heads of state--all are making a comeback in between the pages of hacked-out hard-backs. Overnight, decades of has-beens, addicts, frauds, mistresses and scoundrels are crawling out of the closet, turning “writer” and bolting onto our bookshelves.

Just ask “whatever happened to that actress, what’s-her-name?” and she’ll roll out of obese obscurity onto Phil Donahue’s lap, camouflaged in caftans and chatting away about her book, which is synonymous with “bout”--booze, bankruptcy, bad husbands, bulimia, endless victimizations. She is totally oblivious to the pitifulness in her public confession, this laying bare of her tarnished and tattered life for the titillation strangers. Perhaps that is what happens to inner dignity when the lure of second printings and movie rights give a wasted life monetary meaning.

Enter next our All-American athletes, bending beneath the weight of gold medals won in the days when their chests sported muscles, not polyester. Some are permanently punchy from too many rounds, too much cocaine, too many wives. Now they’re cashing in on tales of locker-room sex, on-the-road infidelities, thieving managers, bad-boy teammates, rigged competitions, drug-supplying physicians.

These books, supposedly about the sports world, read more like tales from the underworld. It’s enough to make you think twice about signing up your kid for Little League.

Comes now the most absurd and unforgivable capitalizer of the celebrity seller: former government officials. If lies, deception and outright fraud got them ousted from office in the first place, who can believe that their books aren’t full of lies, deceptions and fraudulent claims? A liar is a liar. Even if he graduated cum laude from law school and has personally autographed photographs in his penthouse den of every president, premier and potentate in the world.

Do we not give the political marauder an implicit element of credence by publishing and publicizing his testament? Are we not sanctioning his crimes by paying him princely sums to show up on our TV screens and sedate us with rehearsed renditions of the “truth” as he sees it? Is our book-buying appetite for political memoirs perhaps serving to propagate a new generation of politicians susceptible to corruption? “Never mind,” say their consciences, assuaging them against the immediate consequences of criminal action, “in the long run I’ll get a fat book deal!”

This needs to be asked. While publishing companies are stocking their sales larders and stuffing the reading public with voyeuristic trivia of the celebrity seller, what is happening to the real American writers? You may remember them: people with sweeping imagination, dedicated scholarly research, people with original stories to tell in innovative and artful styles. People who can write and who live their lives to do so.

They are still among us, born with non-celebrity names and unglamorous lives that don’t generate headlines. They are hidden in attics, seated at kitchen tables, slumped over typewriters at this very moment--creating, developing, polishing works of word-art to give to the world.

If only they could get published. But how are they to compete against our appetite for the life story of a what’s-her-name who made modeling brassieres the hallmark of her career?

It’s all supply-and-demand, the publishers say, lobbing out another round of new releases penned (poorly) by a quarterback, an Academy Award winner, a disgraced senator. If so, next time you’re in a bookstore, do something daring. Buy a book that has been written by a writer.