So it turns out that Thomas Pynchon really does sound like The Dude from The Big Lebowski. Tracy Locke of The Penguin Press confirms that the reclusive author narrates the trailer for his new book, Inherent Vice, which we wrote about on Shelf Life yesterday. Of course, Simpsons fans might have recognized the voice from Pynchon’s memorable guest appearance — with a paper bag over his head — in a 2004 episode of the long-running Fox series. (In fact, the Wall Street Journal went so far as to send the Simpsons clip and a Pynchon-voiced German TV spot to a Michigan-based sound engineer and voice identification expert to help prove it’s Pynchon on the trailer.)
Although the text of the trailer’s voiceover is not from Inherent Vice, Locke says that Pynchon composed it himself. The trailer seems to channel the voice of the book’s hero, a stoner private eye in ’70s L.A. named Doc Sportello. Now the real question is: Does Pynchon also look like The Dude?
It all started, I suspect, with Melissa Bank’s 1999 best-selling novel-in-stories, The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing and its striking cover photo by Peter Davidian. This was the prototypical chick lit title that helped kick off a very lucrative fiction genre, and it put its best foot forward with an image of a single gal dressed for the elements, from her ear-flapped cap to her sturdy black rain boots. And since that epochal moment in publishing, the rain boot (or galoshes, or — for the Anglophiles out there — Wellingtons) has provided book shoppers a quick visual signal that the contents should contain a hardy soul prepared for anything, including stormy weather in the romance department. In other words, it’s become a cliché, one that’s popped up on the covers of everything from Po Bronson’s 1995 nonfiction collection Why Do I Love These People? to Marisa de los Santos’ 2008 novel Belong to Me.
With her self-help book Rinnavation: Getting Your Best Life Ever already a New York Times bestseller, it’s not shocking to hear Lisa Rinna has signed a deal with Simon Spotlight Entertainment, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, for another tome due out summer 2010. The real surprise is that the new book will be a roman-a-clef about Rinna’s life in Hollywood; think the adult version of Lauren Conrad’s current literary hit L.A. Candy. “I mean I have no problem being honest and open as we all know,” says Rinna, currently on vacation with her two daughters and husband, Harry Hamlin. “So imagine when I can set it in this kind of a book! Everybody better watch out [laughs]!” The former Melrose Place star says that she’s already begun envisioning the lead ingenue and, especially, the bitchy villain. “It’s going to be a few people put together,” she admits of the book’s main baddie. “I’ve had a lot of really interesting run-ins with women in my life and in my career. And you gotta remember that my husband’s been married a few times and there’s a couple of interesting women in the landscape so to speak. So I think this book could be mindblowing [laughs]!” Rinna even hopes the novel finds a home outside of the printed page, like The Starter Wife. Says Rinna, “I would love to create a character that could go on for many books or we could make a series out of it or a movie.” But, as always, the star’s primary goal is to give fans and readers a good time. “I wanna make this the kind of book that is so entertaining, that there are so many people that you’re trying to guess who they are,” she says. “And I just want it to be really, really juicy, entertaining, fun, scandalous, sexual—you name it!”
While we’ve come to terms with the idea that we’re never supposed to judge a book by its cover, both literally and figuratively, no one ever said anything about first lines. We here at Shelf Life recently came across an opener that grabbed us from the get-go. Brian DeLeeuw’s debut novel, In This Way I Was Saved, piqued our interest with this beginning: “I enter the lobby of Claire Nightingale’s apartment building, here to tell her I have murdered her only son.” The story, which revolves around two childhood friends, wastes no time delving into its major story arc, and for that, we say, “Read on!”
