This post has the feel, to me, of something that has the potential to go viral in all the wrong ways, so let me be a hundred percent clear before I get started: Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water isn’t a bad book. It is not a book I especially enjoyed, and now that I’ve finished it I don’t find it especially likely that I’ll ever pick it up again, but that’s on me: literary fiction is not my thing, and this was a rare example of a book that just sort of grabbed me out of nowhere and made me buy it, knowing full well at the time that I was likely to have … well, precisely this reaction to it. It’s 715 pages long and it took me nine days to read, which is a fucking eternity for me, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it at all on the site were it not for the fact that I happened to take a good look at the blurbs on the back cover and, my God, they are completely out of control. I know what blurbs are supposed to do; they are to sell the book, and whatever editor is in charge of such things is likely to choose the most heavily enthusiastic bits out of the entire blurb to highlight. I get all that. But this level of praise is bordering on unhinged, and I think you need to see it.

That’s … really high praise! Really, really high! I don’t think I’ve ever been “overtaken with joy” even once in my entire life, and I’ve never “caught my breath” while reading a book, or at least if I have I don’t remember it. I am genuinely unsure what the hell the third sentence means; it has the feel of something that was translated from some other language, but the author of the blurb is a fellow Hoosier, born in Kokomo and currently teaching at the University of Oklahoma, of all the Godforsaken places on the planet. One assumes, then, that this was not translated, and thus it’s just incomprehensible. Or at least uncomprehended. One of my problems with literary fiction is the lingering feeling, while I’m reading it, that I’m just not smart enough to understand why it’s good. Like, I read genre fiction, and the people who read literary fiction openly look down on us, and we just accept it and move on with our lives; our shit isn’t as Good or as Important as theirs is … for some fucking reason that I’m also too dumb to have ever figured out. To start an entirely unrelated argument here, if I can get over this bullshit with Christians and morality you’d think I’d be able to get over it with literary fiction and intelligence, but apparently not yet. The gaslighting continues unabated.

(Again, not complaining about the book. It’s not a bad book. It’s just very much a Not for Me book. I three-starred it, and I could be convinced to raise that to four, especially since I really felt the book stuck the ending. But I was never going to love this.)

But, okay. She was overtaken with joy from the first page of the book. Again, maybe I just don’t get it! Let’s look at that first page. Surely fair use allows me to pull out 1/715 of the entire book, right? That’s .13%. I’m good:

Be honest: are you overtaken with joy right now?

To me, the most significant thing about this first page is that I genuinely have nothing to say about it. I’ve certainly read first pages and first paragraphs and first sentences that grabbed me by the shorthairs and didn’t let go, and I’ve read first pages that let me know in no uncertain terms that I was in for some godawful bullshit and I should either put the book down or buckle the fuck in. But … this is just a page of writing, to me. It’s certainly not bad writing and I have no complaints; the imagery is nice, but let’s be real, you could lose the paragraph about the bird and no damage would be done. Or would it? Maybe the bird is symbolic or some shit; I have no idea. But one way or another, I don’t feel anything in particular from having read this. I wouldn’t put the book down, but if you handed me just the first page and asked me if I was excited to read the rest, I’d shrug.

You tell me; I’ll believe you: what’s your reaction to this first page? What am I missing here?

The rest of the quotes on the back are not much better, by the way. Let me know if you want to see more.