Foveaux burst upon the world in March, when The Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about her memoir, which has circulated in photocopies since she wrote it 18 years ago. Two weeks later she had an agent (Laurie Liss, who sold “The Christmas Box”), an arty title (“Any Given Day”) and a million-dollar deal from Warner; it’ll publish this fall. She’d also checked into a hospital: sinus infection, headache from a new hearing aid and celebrity overload. To publishers, her artless memoir promised the Midwest verite of “The Bridges of Madison County,” the still-feisty-after-all-these-years wisdom of the Delany sisters’ “Having Our Say,” the vanished farm life of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the old-time values of sobriety and piety-plus a hint of proto-feminism. “It has the woman’s voice,” says Judith Curr, editor in chief at Ballantine, who got outbid. “You get the sense of sitting at the feet of your grandparents.”
That’s the good news. And the bad news. The copy NEWSWEEK saw has tons of stuff like this: “There were Aunt Daisy and Uncle Bert Frost and their two boys Lyle and Vern. There were Aunt Carrie and Uncle Roy Lowe and their daughter Mary, Aunt Rose and Uncle Ed Creviston and their four children: Earl, Pearl, Walter and Olive. There were Aunt Louise and Uncle John Hunter, whose children were Florence, Lois, Scott, Georgia, Donald and Ruth.” (It’s Warner, of course, not Foveaux, who thought this had universal appeal.) A VP at another house says it needs “tremendous edits and rewrites”-hard on Warner’s timetable. “But if it works, it’ll be the next hot thing–get a raw manuscript and let it go. You won’t need editors. Just publishers and computers.”
Web-heads, of course, ask why you even need publishers anymore. “The Big Picture,” about a Wall Street lawyer who yearns to be a bohemian photographer, shows why. It hit bookstores across the country two weeks ago–300,000 copies in one of those “one-day lay-downs” that resemble a synchronized military operation. And Disney-owned Hyperion has provided $750,000 worth of tactical support. This includes full-page print ads and a 30-second trailer with loud technoid music shown on 807 Cineplex Odeon screens. (Of course, that $750,000 figure may be part of the hype; publishers tend to exaggerate promotional budgets.) John Grisham’s “The Partner” also has a movie-theater trailer, but Kennedy’s was surely the first book whose Advance Reader’s Edition was sent to reviewers in an “evidence bag.”
Dead body: Kennedy writes better than Grisham, though not enough to hurt sales. His narrator amusingly disses Tom Clancy, and even more amusingly sends up “sensitive-girl” literary fiction: “‘That autumn, under a salmon sky, my mother began to sew a quilt in our backyard’… That kind of thing.” The first third of “The Big Picture” reads like a son of a gun; the momentum will probably carry you through to the silly ending. Then you’ll scratch your head. Ultimately Kennedy treats insurance fraud, murder and cutting up a dead body with a power saw as painful transitional experiences necessary to personal growth. He appeals–not too subliminally, either–to up-market fantasies: being rich and creative, getting written up in The New Yorker, shucking spouse and family, moving to Montana, getting seduced by somebody smart and sexy, killing jerks. We’d say it’s sure-fire, but Hyperion doesn’t miss a trick, and we don’t want to get quoted in its ads. As publishing’s gatekeepers give way to bookkeepers, we won’t run short of packaged upscale wish-dreams or packaged heartland authenticity. So if you miss these two-no big deal.
