Jordan Peterson and the art of the dodgy book blurb

Literary critics slam Peterson’s latest book as publishers magic a scathing review into an endorsement and use it on the cover - with the practice commonplace.

James Marriott actually wrote Jordan Peterson’s philosophy is ‘bonkers’, but that word didn’t make the cover of his book. Picture: Getty

Publishers are like medieval alchemists. They can take the base metal of a stinking book review and turn it into the gold of praise. James Marriott, for instance, reviewed the oddball guru Jordan Peterson’s last book, Beyond Order, in The Times. He wrote that “ideas that flit and glimmer in Peterson’s videos look bloated and dead when strapped to the page” and his prose is “repetitious, unvariegated, rhythmless, opaque and possessed of a suffocating sense of its own importance”. Ouch.

But this week the former book-desk imp came across his words transmuted by the magicians at Penguin into praise on the paperback. From his radioactive review glowed words of approbation - “A philosophy of the meaning of life . . . the most lucid and touching prose Peterson has written.” Well, Marriott actually wrote “his philosophy, which is bonkers”; and it’s true, Marriott wrote that one chapter, about interior design, had “one of the most sensitive and lucid passages of prose he has written”. Faint praise.

Marriott tweeted about it. My colleague, the Sunday Times literary editor, Johanna Thomas-Corr, saw her scathing review likewise magicked into an endorsement: “genuinely enlightening and often poignant”. Her words, but wrenched from the context of “a lumpy soup of bromides about marriage, Old Testament commentaries, Jungian archetypes, Mesopotamian myths and endless deconstructions of Disney movies”.

Publishers have long been sneaky, playing fast and loose with reviews. My favourite is this, which appeared on the paperback of Alain de Botton’s novel The Course of Love: ” ‘moving’, The Sunday Times”.

Scathing reviews magicked into an endorsement. Picture: The Times

Hmmm, that didn’t quite capture the spirit of the review. Peter Kemp, a duffer-upper of mediocre novels, wrote this: “Cropping up as frequently as every few paragraphs, these blackboard-rapping intrusions loom large among factors making the novel unengaging. Turning its pages, you come to dread the sight of yet another chunk of de Botton’s italicised opinions moving towards you.” Genius. You have to admire the chutzpah. You feel the publisher was trolling the reviewer.

Or take this - the mighty AN Wilson wrote a book a few years back called The Book of the People: How to Read the Bible. The Times reviewer, in the course of an admittedly mainly favourable review, wrote: “Accreted over the years, the work of many hands, translated and altered, the Bible is an almost accidental work of genius.” I then gave the review the headline, referring to the Bible itself, “Believe it or not, this is a work of genius”, and a standfirst that read: “The Bible is full of profound beauty, even for the godless.” Of course, the book blurb now claims: “Believe it or not, this is a work of genius.” Wilson is a superb, puckish writer, but I’m not sure even he believes that the divine being is guiding his hand.

Picture: Supplied

James Marriott, columnist at The Times.

Edward St Aubyn’s novel Double Blind was panned. Yet the words ” ‘heroic and astonishing’: Sunday Times” appeared in the publicity. But that came from an interview in which Bryan Appleyard, marvelling at the author’s own story of childhood abuse, said, “St Aubyn’s reinvention as a writer is heroic and astonishing”; the review said it was “self-pleasing, mannered - and sometimes even dull”. Naughty, naughty.

Our man in Berlin, Times correspondent Oliver Moody, wrote a brutal review of a biography of Angela Merkel. The paperback ran a line quoting the one kind thing he had written: “[Kati Marton] has recruited a formidable cast of talking heads . . . and obtained a remarkable degree of access to the chancellor’s inner circle.” But it omitted these lines, which I suspect were more useful to a bookshop browser: “She drops clanger after cast-iron clanger . . . Presumably these errors will be corrected in future editions, unless the publisher does the decent thing and pulps every copy of this balderdash.”

Moody then mentioned “on the back of the [hardback] book a puff quote from a Pulitzer prizewinning writer hails Marton’s ‘signature superpower of rigorous research’. It seems this superpower does not extend to basic fact-checking, kicking the tyres on apocryphal anecdotes or indeed reading German newspapers.”

So here’s the moral. Be suspicious of the quotes on the back of paperbacks. The clever people in publishing have used all their skills to bend critical words into new, more pleasing shapes. But never ever believe the puffs on a hardback. That’s where the real deception takes place: fellow authors praising their mates, often without even reading the damn thing.

The Times