I just got my copy of the paperback edition of Kenneth J. Harvey’s The Town That Forgot How to Breathe last week, so when his name popped up in Toronto’s Globe and Mail, I took a closer look. Turns out he’s got a new novel coming out in Canada, but after 14 books, writes Michael Posner, “Harvey nevertheless maintains an awkward relationship with Canada’s literary establishment. As much as anything, this seems to be based on Harvey’s commitment to and talent for self-promotion.”
Imagine the audacity: Harvey has “has used the Internet to bring his name to the attention of other writers, critics, agents, publishers, reading groups, bookstores, film producers, professors of literature and journalists.” This is just like that publicity-grubbing Mark Childress loading up his home page with META tags; you wouldn’t catch a real literati like John Updike engaging in this sort of tawdry commerce! But here’s the bit from the article that stood out for me:
“Implicitly, however, Harvey’s various advertisements for himself constitute an indictment of his publishers, as if he were saying to them: You’re clearly not prepared to spend enough time or money promoting me, so I will. And I’ll do a better job. And he usually does. The result is that he tends to wear out his welcome, and ends up having to sell manuscripts to different publishing houses each time out.”
Somehow this strikes me as Bizarro World reasoning. It’s hard to imagine how an author who’s actually willing to show some hustle towards building an audience could possibly “wear out his welcome” with publishers, who quite frankly aren’t “prepared to spend enough time or money” on most of the titles they publish, let alone the literary fiction. They like writers who are willing to meet them at least halfway on this issue, so if Harvey burned through several publishers before landing at Random House Canada, it couldn’t have been because he was an aggressive self-marketer. Unless he was a jerk about it, I suppose, but he’s never sounded like a jerk in any of the emails he’s sent (oh, yes, I get them, and I’ve never had a problem with them; hell, I bug people about my book a lot, too)—or unless he initiated the breakups by invoking the “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” clause. Or maybe Canadian publishers don’t like money?