Book Blurbs

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, February 6, 2025

Strolling through Dymocks with a friend recently, I spied a book with a rapturous blurb from The Australian on its cover. “A stunning piece of work,” it said.

 “I wrote that,” I told my friend, wiping away a little tear of pride. I didn’t mean that I wrote the book. I meant that I wrote the blurb. More precisely, I meant that I had, many years ago, written the book review from which the blurb had been culled.  
 
On the back of the same book were longer blurbs from other people. Unlike me, the authors of these blurbs were identified by name, because unlike me these people were famous. Not famous for knowing anything about books, mind you, but famous for other things.
 
How far should we trust these celebrity book blurbs? Quite often they emanate from close personal friends of the author, who want to remain close personal friends of the author. Sometimes they come from people who are authors themselves, which doesn’t mean much unless their own books are any good. Frequently they’re not.
 
Blurbs weren’t always so easy to come by. Shakespeare himself struggled to get a decent blurb during his lifetime. Indeed, his collected plays weren’t even published until seven years after his death, when the First Folio appeared.
 
Looking for a suitably impressive endorsement, the Folio’s editors approached Ben Jonson, the most respected poet-playwright of the time. Privately, Jonson had a few reservations about Shakespeare.
 
Even so, he coughed up a pretty good blurb, in the form of a dedicatory poem. In it he hailed Shakespeare as the “star of poets” and “wonder of our stage.” But he couldn’t resist throwing in a little dig at the Bard’s relative lack of education. “Thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,” Jonson observed.
 
Now there was a blurb you could trust – not just because Jonson leavened it with some words of dispraise, but because Shakespeare was dead when he wrote it. Plainly, Jonson wasn’t just blurbing Shakespeare in the hope that Shakespeare would one day blurb him.
 
Writers can do crazy things in quest of a blurb. When Norman Mailer finished his third novel, The Deer Park, he sent a copy to his hero Ernest Hemingway, hoping the great man would favour him with a blurb for use in the print ads.
 
Being far too macho to ask nicely, Mailer made his pitch to Hemingway in almost insanely aggressive terms. “If you do not answer,” he wrote, “or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc, then f— you, and I will never attempt to communicate with you again.”
 
Papa did not provide the blurb.
 
Blurbs can be a delicate matter in the book world. They can make or break a literary friendship. When Vladimir Nabokov was struggling to make his name in America in the 1940s, he would have killed for a blurb from his friend Edmund Wilson, who happened to be the nation’s most influential literary critic.
 
But Wilson seemed curiously reluctant to endorse Nabokov’s work in print. When their friendship imploded years later, the two giants denounced each other in a series of delightfully snide public letters. In one of these, Nabokov very elegantly made it clear that he was still simmering about Wilson’s failure to blurb him.
 
“During my first decade in America,” Nabokov wrote, Wilson “was most kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in refraining from reviewing any of my novels.”
 
Closer to our own day, Christoper Hitchens and Gore Vidal got into a nasty public spat about a blurb. When Hitchens published his book Unacknowledged Legislation in 2000, a generous endorsement from Vidal appeared on the cover.
 
“I have been asked whether I wish to nominate a successor, an heir, a dauphin or delfino,” Vidal wrote. “I have decided to name Christopher Hitchens.”
 
When the two men fell out a few years later, Vidal took the extraordinary step of trying to retract his blurb. Speaking to a reporter, he claimed to find it baffling that Hitchens had been going around identifying himself as Vidal’s heir.  
 
Hitchens wasn’t about to let that pass. In a fiery magazine article, he pointed out that Vidal had offered him the blurb voluntarily – and that he still had the correspondence to prove it. Anyway, he added, he had “stopped making use of” Vidal’s endorsement some time ago, having privately concluded that the man was losing his marbles.
 
When my own second novel came out in 2017, it featured a glowing front-cover endorsement from Clive James. It was a blurb for the ages. He didn’t quite use the word “genius”, but it was heavily implied.
 
Equipped with a killer blurb from Clive, I thought I had it made in the shade. Then certain grim realities of the book business began to impress themselves on me. If people were going to see the blurb, they first had to enter a bookshop and browse the shelves. What percentage of book-buyers still do that?
 
Then I found, to my horror, that in certain bookstores my book was being shelved spine-out instead of face-out. Other books, with blurbs from people like Lee Child, were on full-frontal display. To access my blurb, people didn’t just have to approach the right shelf. They had to be so intrigued by my book’s spine that they would feel compelled to expose its cover manually.  
 
Speaking of Clive James, he delivered the best crack about book blurbs that I’ve ever heard. When a prominent Australian author blurbed a second-rate book as “unputdownable,” Clive was sceptical. Perhaps the reason the prominent author couldn’t put the book down, Clive said, was that it was so full of hot air it kept springing back up again.
 
 

Penn & Teller

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, 29 January, 2025

“Do you believe in magic?” the Lovin’ Spoonful asked in 1965.

That’s a pretty broad question. Let’s refine it a little, so it can be answered with a simple yes or no. Do you believe in magic as a form of entertainment?
 
To that question my answer is an enormous yes. At its best, magic is a thrilling blend of creative ingenuity and consummate technical skill. There’s no show I’d rather go to than a good magic show.
 
Some people, who otherwise strike me as quite intelligent and decent, tell me they’re not into magic. A friend of mine was recently heard to remark that magic “just isn’t my thing.”
 
I find this attitude baffling. How can magic not be your thing? Magic is magic, for crying out loud. It’s a byword for delight. If you think you don’t like it, maybe it’s because you’ve never seen a first-rate magician perform.
 
Consider Penn & Teller, the superlative American magicians who are currently touring Australia. I’ve been lucky enough to see these brilliant men play the Sydney Opera House twice now – first in the winter of 2022, when Australia was still staggering out of its Covid hibernation, and again in January this year.
 
I would say, without the slightest hesitation, that those two shows were the most exhilarating and mind-expanding nights I’ve ever spent in a theatre. Penn & Teller are supreme masters of their craft, to say the least. But I would go further. I’d say they are creative artists of the highest order.
 
In the 2022 show, Teller performed his masterpiece, a show-stopping routine called “Shadows.” If you’ve never had the privilege of seeing this sublime creation unfold in a theatre, you can watch Teller perform it on YouTube.  
 
But that is a poor substitute for seeing it live. When Teller executed the trick’s final move at the Opera House, the effect was literally breathtaking. You heard the sound of 1,500 people all gasping at once.
 
When I recall that moment now, I find myself getting a little choked up. The climax of that trick was no less moving than a great line of poetry, or a soaring phrase of music.  
 
In Penn & Teller’s current show there’s a mind-bending number called “Entropy”, which is less a trick than a happening, a genuinely weird incursion into the laws of space and time. It’s a radically original piece of art, as intellectually frisky and audacious as a Stoppard play. Watching it unfold, you feel the world being taken apart and remade in front of your eyes.
 
Great magic renovates your brain, as all true art does. It takes your mind on a wild ride. It expands your sense of what human beings can do when they put their minds to it.
 
In the 2022 show, Penn did a hair-raising routine with a nail gun. It looked phenomenally dangerous. But he was at pains to reassure the audience – which contained many children – that he would never be so crass as to endanger his life on stage. There was a secret to what he was doing up there. He wanted us to know that, even if he wasn’t about to tell us what the secret was.
 
Penn & Teller do things on stage that seem to defy rational explanation. But just because you can’t see the rational explanation doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Like all honest magicians, Penn & Teller don’t claim to possess psychic or supernatural powers. Far from it. These are tricks, Penn repeatedly stresses on stage. Their outcome is carefully controlled. No other result is possible.
 
The best magicians don’t just entertain us. They educate us. They’re rationalist warriors, who immunise us against metaphysical charlatans by demonstrating that the physical world is far more rich and strange than we previously thought.
 
There’s a long tradition of this in magic. In the 1920s, Harry Houdini denounced the spiritualist mediums who were taking the post-war world by storm. These people were just jumped-up magicians, Houdini said. Their work was “a fraud from start to finish.” In the 1970s, the Amazing Randi waged a similar campaign of demystification against the purported psychic Uri Geller.
 
At the bottom of most magic tricks lies some relatively simple physical mechanism: a sleight of hand, a moment of misdirection. The beauty of great magic – and I use the word beauty in its fullest sense – lies in the artistry with which these mechanisms are concealed.
 
Robert Hughes, the Australian art critic, once explained the simple philosophy underlying his appreciation of art. “I love the spectacle of skill,” he wrote.
 
That’s what great magic delivers, in a strikingly pure form: the spectacle of skill. If you ever get a chance to see a master magician perform, take it. You won’t regret it. If you do, you may need to check your pulse.

The Great Australian BBQ

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, January 16, 2025

It’s funny how the implications of a word can change over time. Take the word barbecue. When I was young, the word connoted a lot of things: heat, flies, cricket, eskies full of canned drink. But one thing it certainly didn’t connote was mouth-watering food.
 
Things have changed. Some of the most delicious food I’ve eaten this summer was cooked on a barbecue. I’m talking about cumin-rubbed lamb rump charred over coals. I’m talking about premium swordfish steaks paid for by somebody other than me, seared to perfection on a gas grill. These days, when you hear the word barbecue, you ready yourself for next-level food – food that’s a cut above what you generally cook indoors.
 
When I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, things were the other way around. The food at barbecues was rudimentary, and way less enticing than the average home-cooked meal. Two forms of protein dominated the hotplate: sausages and steak. When I say “steak”, I’m not talking about something that would seriously be called a steak today. I’m talking about the kind of leathery, jerky-like slivers of so-called steak that you used to get with a motel breakfast.
 
As for the snags, they were invariably made of beef. Where I lived, there was no such thing as a non-beef sausage. Moreover, there was no such thing as a thin sausage. When I was young, the thin snag was not yet even a thing. When they first came in, they were called “breakfast sausages”. People said they would never catch on.
 
When I try to recall the flavour of a 1970s barbecue, I find that the dominant note was carbon. Everything tasted burnt. There were several reasons for this. For one thing, the barbecuing was invariably done by the men. Most of these blokes didn’t handle the cooking duties at home. Some of them barely knew how to open a box of cereal. But for some reason it was considered mandatory to hand them the tongs when a cook took place outdoors. Their signature move was to flip the meat incessantly whether it needed flipping or not, until every visible part of it was black.
 
In fairness to the dads, barbecuing technology in those days was deeply primitive. The default barbie setup was a thin steel plate over an open fire. The plates were knee-high, so that the barbie had to be tended in a crouch. Naked flames reared up around the hotplate and lashed the meat, sometimes setting it on fire. Neil Perry himself would have struggled to deliver a quality steak under those conditions.
 
All this was perfectly legal, because fire restrictions in those days were hilariously laid-back. Today’s fire-hazard signs start at Moderate and run through Extreme up to Catastrophic. In the old days, Extreme was the highest setting. Moderate was in the middle. Over on the left was a setting that said – believe it or not – Nil.
 
When the sign said Nil, it was open season for open fires. The kids collected the wood, then the parents activated the inferno, sometimes with the aid of an accelerant. Essentially, the old-school barbecue was a smallish bushfire with a thin metal plate on top of it.
 
I’m not sure what grade of steel those old barbie plates were made of, but I do recall that they tended to warp and buckle after repeated exposure to flame. The hotplate in our backyard had a big hump up the back of it. If you put a snag up there, it would roll off into the ashes with the foil-wrapped potatoes. It would then be hosed off and returned to the grill.
 
There may not have been a Catastrophic setting on the hazard signs, but those raging barbie fires certainly had catastrophic effects on meat. The sausages suffered rampant mince leakage at either end, so they wound up looking like dumbbells.
 
The steaks resembled bark chips, in terms of both looks and chewability. If you tried to penetrate them with a plastic knife and fork, the cutlery would explode. If you tried to eat them in a sandwich, the whole steak came away in your teeth, and you were left holding two slices of humid bread. If you wanted your steak to be in any sense moist, you had to reach for the Red Baron sauce.
 
The salads were better, because they were prepared by the women, who knew that food should taste of something other than charcoal and ketchup. In the salad space, there was room for vibrancy and innovation. I still remember the barbecue where I clapped eyes on my first tabouleh.
 
In retrospect, that was an auspicious day. In Australia’s cities, post-war immigration had been enriching our cuisine since the 1950s. That tabouleh was the first sign I ever saw that the multicultural food revolution had finally reached the barbecues of suburbia.  
 
By the mid 1980s, local butchers were getting in on the act. It was a game-changer for barbecues when some unsung genius of butchery invented the pepper steak. The pepper crust made the steak taste of something, and provided a vital layer of insulation between the meat and the infernal surface of the grill.
 
Meanwhile, the sausage scene was transformed by the introduction of the flavoured snag: tomato and onion, lamb and rosemary.
 
When Paul Hogan did his tourism ads in 1984, urging Americans to come over and throw a shrimp on the barbie, he seemed to be suggesting that the barbecuing of crustaceans was a long-standing Aussie tradition. It certainly wasn’t where I came from. Maybe I was going to the wrong barbecues. Maybe we lived too far from the coast.
 
At any rate, the first white meat I ever saw cooked on a barbie was some honey-soy chicken. It didn’t stay white for long, but it tasted sensational. The age of marination had arrived. Even today, with the vast array of rubs and seasonings on the market, the honey-soy combination can still hold its own.
 
Don’t get me wrong. When I was young, the great Australian barbecue was already great in many ways. It just took a while for the food to become one of them.

Celebrity Spotting

Originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, January 4, 2025

Who is the most famous celebrity you have ever encountered in the wild? I’ll tell you mine. About ten years ago, I was walking up the main street of Bangalow in northern NSW. A man and woman were walking towards me. They looked like a regular middle-aged couple, although the man was talking in an American accent.

 
As we drew level with each other, I glanced at the guy with the accent … and found myself looking at a startlingly familiar face. It was Paul Giamatti, star of more great movies than you can shake a stick at.
 
Giamatti must have registered my look of amazement, for he gave me a smile and a little nod, as if to say, “Yes, I am who you think I am, but let’s not make a big deal of it.”
 
I responded with a tactful nod of my own, intended to convey my deep respect for the man and his body of work. A guy like Giamatti must get gawped at by strangers about a thousand times a day. I wanted to be one of the cool ones who let him continue on his way, without bothering him for a chat or selfie.
 
You get a great natural high when you see a celebrity in real life. We tend to feel that famous people live in a different world from the rest of us – a better and more glamorous world. When you bump into one of them on the street, you realise that you live in that glamorous world too. For a fleeting moment you understand that life is more magical, and fuller of possibility, than you generally give it credit for. You want to spread the news to everyone you know.
 
The trouble with encountering a star like Giamatti, however, is that when you say to people, “Guess who I just saw down the street? Paul Giamatti!” they’re quite likely to burst your bubble by replying, “Who’s Paul Giamatti?” Everybody knows the man’s face, but not everybody knows his name.
 
To maximise the effect of my Giamatti anecdote, I started showing people a stock picture of him on my phone as the story reached its climax. Unfortunately, this created a fresh problem. People recognised his face all right, but they seriously doubted that I had seen him down the street. Maybe I’d only seen someone who looked like him.
 
I found this response annoying. Obviously, I already knew that seeing Paul Giamatti down the street was a freakishly unlikely occurrence. That’s why I was telling the story in the first place.
 
I no longer live in northern NSW. At this time of year I wish I still did, because summer is peak celebrity-spotting season up there. The place is rife with famous people. Some of them live there. Others descend on the beaches for the holidays.
 
Once, in Byron Bay Woolworths, I saw Delvene Delaney buying some cold meat. In Bangalow itself I saw a super-tanned James Reyne eating a sandwich on a bench. I once narrowly missed seeing Elle Macpherson in the IGA. A friend told me he’d just seen her in there. But by the time I got there she was gone.
 
I once had to use the town’s only ATM to conduct an unreasonably lengthy transaction. I hoped that nobody was waiting behind me. When I was finally done, I found that somebody was. It was Kerry O’Brien, wearing an ancient T-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts. How long had he been waiting there? He looked a bit ticked off, but maybe he always does.
 
The first celebrity I ever saw in the flesh was Jon English. I was about ten years old, and my mother and I were waiting for a cab at Canberra airport. The monumentally tall English came out to the kerb, with a couple of heavy bags slung over his shoulder. He peered up and down the road, looking in vain for his ride. He uttered a single word: “Shit.”
 
On the basis of that encounter, I formed the impression that Jon English was an unusually foul-mouthed individual. It took me many years to appreciate that it’s quite normal for adults to say “shit” in an airport pickup situation.
 
Canberra isn’t a great place for spotting celebrities, by the way. When I lived there I saw only two kinds of celebrities: members of the Canberra Raiders football team, and politicians.
 
The best Canberran celebrity encounter I know of happened to my brother, not me. We were driving through the nondescript suburb of Campbell when my brother found himself in urgent need of a toilet.
 
We pulled into the local Shell, and my brother made a beeline for the can. It was one of those old-school servo toilets: a fibro structure tucked around the side of the main building, housing a single unisex cubicle.
 
After a strangely long interval my brother returned, laughing uncontrollably. It transpired that the toilet, when he’d got there, was already solidly engaged. Whoever was in there was in there for the long haul. My brother bounced from foot to foot outside the door, cursing the unseen occupant of the lav. Finally he heard a muffled flush. The door opened … and out walked the nattily dressed figure of Al Grassby.
 
You can’t pick and choose which celebrities you encounter, or where and when you will encounter them. The magic of the celebrity encounter lies in its unpredictability. All you can do, to maximise your chances of seeing famous people, is go to places where they are known to congregate. They rarely pay house calls.
 
In fact, I know of only one time in history when this has happened. Again I can’t claim this story as my own. It happened to a kid I went to school with. Both of us lived in the obscure Blue Mountains village of Faulconbridge. The chances of seeing a celebrity in our neighbourhood were about as close to zero as you can get.
 
One Saturday morning, however, somebody knocked on my friend’s front door. My friend opened it. Standing on the doorstep was Doc Neeson, lead singer of The Angels. “My name is Doc,” he said. “Have you seen my dog?”
 
When my friend told us this story he was met with yodels of disbelief. As if Doc Neeson had knocked on his door! Soon, however, it emerged that we owed him an apology. Surreal as it sounded, Neeson had indeed moved into our neighbourhood, along with his partner and at least one dog.  
 
And why not? Celebrities have to live somewhere. They have to go to the shops, and the toilet, and put out the garbage, and catch planes and trains.  
 
I’m 95% sure that I once saw Ian Moss standing on Strathfield station holding a guitar case. Once on an intercity train, I sat down next to a guy with a white beard who was dozing in the window seat. On inspection, he proved to be David Stratton.
 
Showing admirable restraint, I didn’t wake him up to initiate a conversation. I waited for him to wake up naturally. Sadly, he was still asleep when the train arrived at my station. I still regret this, because I had the perfect ice-breaker. If anyone would have loved my Paul Giamatti story, it would have been David Stratton.