Crap Looking Book Impressions #4: Man and Wife

When I was hunting for Crap Looking Books, I almost glossed over Andrew Klavan's Man and Wife but found myself drawn back to it. The cover is unassuming to the point of being inconsequential, a passive, calming scene that could belong to any novel without having much affect on the interpretation of the story. This could be an Iain Banks, or an Ian McEwan, or an Iain Hollingshead, or even a book written by someone with a different forename.

We have a tree. We have a lake. We have sky. Nowhere on the blurb or jacket notes is there any mention of these three things. All the front cover gives us to go on is the suggestion that "Maybe if I had loved her less there would have been no murder."

Putting aside the poor grammar, this set up is ok on the surface, it doesn't give too much away and it puts the hooks into the reader or potential buyer a little... but it’s also an insulting abuse to the craft of... cover... making.

Consider the following possible replacement texts:

“It was an ordinary summer until the Nazis fell from the sky.”

“Perhaps if I’d been less bored I wouldn’t have sat on it.”

“Finally, I knew the way to San Jose. And I’d been away so long...”

“It was the day my eyebrows started talking to me.”

The lack of relation between the story and the cover lead me to think there is simply nothing in the story that is worth putting on the jacket, no defining image or moment that can be represented visually.

As such I expect a lot of very ordinary characters in ordinary locations, and a predictably generic sense of some secret beneath and behind everything that turns out to be not exactly the secret the protagonist expected. A gun will make a dramatic and striking appearance, and someone’s going to spend half a chapter having very specific and descriptive sex with someone else.

Nick
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