Web Pulp
It seems like a good idea.
But nay, we know not seems.

BY MICHAEL S. STRICKLAND

Toby Press' publishing scam is, I suppose, not much different from many other publisher's scams: high-end advertising in high-end rags like the New Yorker and Vanity Fair to get gullible readers to swallow the swill they publish, thinking all the while it will be sweet--nourishing, even. Start-up Toby Press' spin, however, is to nix the middleman.

"Exlusive fiction by today's finest writers" is served "direct to you" via tobypress.com—and only through the website (and, perhaps a little more messily, through mail-order). In any case, Toby Press books, between printer's warehouse and reader's nighttable, will never gather dust on a bookseller's shelves. Such dust could cut profits, and so might any more time for readerly reflection than the week generously allowed for returns.

To be fair, you need not order from Toby Press without tasting—either on the website or in their glossy catalog-cum-literary-review—a pulpy wedge of each book. Let, however, the book buyer beware: Toby Press bills itself a high-quality, small-press alternative to the mass-market conglomerates, but they're only run-of-the-mill. Which could explain the full-page ads in Martha Stewart Living.

A half-dozen literary consumables is currently on offer, each finely honed to fit a genre/market and to eliminate any originality the authors—despite thorough workshopping in the going clichés—may accidentally have left in.

The worst by far is the hard-boiled Mediterranean political intrigue The Forwarding Agent by Austen Kark. Block-cut synonyms are set off by bare commas, as if tacking on a fantail of thesaurus entries could make up for a choppy phrase. Characters follow gut-hunches based not on what they've been able to intuit from anything thus far encountered, but because their author is sending them telepathic signals to further the plot. Cheap coincidences reveal that the author cares more for the money-making potential of the mystery than for the satisfaction derived from allowing the reader to solve an intricate pattern of enigmas. Multilingual, polyethnic politics demonstrate the author's command of the headlines, but do nothing to provide insight into any of the characters' motivations.

Kark studied English at Oxford, served in the Royal Navy and worked for the BBC, "specializing in the affairs of the Eastern Mediterranean, notably Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and Israel." Nevertheless, judging from the evidence presented in The Forwarding Agent, he thinks badly and writes worse.

The saddest of Toby Press' current crop is Samantha Dunn's Failing Paris. Sad because merely medicore; sad because I could feel the characters straining desperately to escape the swathe of stereotypes their author felt fit to stifle them with.

The protagonist is Sabine Wilcox—a pregnant, bitter, depressed, impoverished, Lion's Club scholarship student from Mesilla, New Mexico. Sabine stumbles, both sober and drunk, for 36 chapters and eight days, through a confused geography of Paris, one-night stands and impassive caricatures of French people, including a despicable modern-day Toulouse-Lautrec who is able, despite his dwarf-like ugliness, to create such beauty!

Ultimately, cashing in her return ticket to pay for an abortion, Sabine marvels "at how splendor can be created here, yet it is." Granted, she is still in the aura of painkillers and general anaesthesia and, granted, the sudden lifting of her burden of worry and shame has made her a bit lightheaded. Yet she has shown only spite and diffident dismissiveness for rainy, gray Paris and its inhabitants, shown us only sidewalks smeared with dogshit. Splendor was nowhere to be seen, let alone created.

All of Dunn's characters choke on their cardboard cutout limitations. There's the alcoholic mother, the heroin-addict/Vietnam vet/suicide/stepfather, the hinted-at real father, a suave European who, like Humbert Humbert, deftly handled his silverware. Also: the elegant, bigoted Boston grandmother, improbably named Síoban, the prim roommate who teaches Sabine the right way to make a vinaigrette, the shrivelled landlady who offers Sabine a shrivelled rose and the savior-like Turco-Lebanese American exile who invites Sabine to join him in Milan.

The other works on offer are equally disappointing.

Absence, by Raymond Tallis, is highbrow name-dropping philosophic drudgework, weighing in at 208 pages and $29.95, suitable for any and all who mourned Princess Di's death, i.e., corn-fed, Ayn Rand-reared postpubescent art students from GSA (Greater Suburban America).

Per Jorner's After the Campfires, translated from the Swedish by Laurie Thompson, aims at the Tolkien crowd. (Need I say more?) At $39.95 and 620 pages, it's surely the most cost-effective—sentence by plodding sentence—of the lot.

Cardiofitness, by Alessandra Montrucchio (translated by Sharon Wood from the Italian) is for the sagging, middle-aged Italophile in all of us. You know, the gal who owns everything written by Calvino but has read none, and who, returning home from a sunny Tuscan vacation, drowns her unassuaged libido by relating tales of a svelte 26-year-old bedding a 15-year-old Pan.

Anna Enquist's The Masterpiece, translated by Jeannette K. Ringold, surely bears the most clout. Enquist is said to be "one of the Netherlands' best-selling poets." (Rod McKuen, anyone?) The Masterpiece is about an artist and can be classified as generic bourgeois Eurofiction: pretentious, existential, replete with the first names (and only first names) of characters. Not to mention such profound gems as, "Ellen has read somewhere that true despair never lasts more than two days, because a human being starts eating after that."

There's more to come from Toby Press, and we can only hope the new books will be saddled with less pretense and mediocrity. Failing Paris, perhaps, is an object lesson: I have known people very much like Sabine—I wish her story could have been told with more talent, art and imagination and less hiding behind the writing-school shields of emotional, literary and cultural clichés.

Michael S. Strickland is a freelance writer living in Paris, France.