Fran-ZOOOOOOOOONE!

Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions brings our attention to the print ad campaign for the paperback version of Jonathan Franzen's The Discomfort Zone, which uses both positive and negative blurbs.  For example:

• "Luminous, essential reading" - Tim Adams, The Observer (London)
• "Odious...incredibly annoying" - Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

This is the appropriate approach for someone whom I find to be humorously Manichaean.

I'm sorry to say, however, that even if effective the campaign isn't terribly original.  Mr. Esposito somewhat rhetorically asks: Am I the only one to find the "counterintuitive" marketing of Franzen's paperback a big yawn?

That might be because you've seen this Full Disclosure/Hairshirt & Humility approach used a time or two before.  (Ahem.)

It also might be because the Franzen-branded FD/H&H is a very hedged (neutered?) version of the gambit Norman Mailer played for The Deer Park in, uh, 1955.

Here's some background:

Critics, aware that the wunderkind of The Naked and the Dead had evolved into an enfant terrible, were not happy. In fact, the two novels Mailer wrote during this period, the politically charged Barbary Shore (Rinehart, 1951) and the sexually explicit The Deer Park (Putnam, 1955), received mixed reviews. Mailer, true to form, fought back. He designed a half-page ad for the Village Voice that read: "All over America, The Deer Park is getting nothing but RAVES." The ad went on to quote only the most damning reviews, a print equivalent of giving his critics the finger.

And some more:

In the '50s, New York Times Magazine editor Harvey Shapiro was in on the inception of The Village Voice. When asked his advice, Shapiro told colleague Mailer that his idea to publish a page of terrible reviews of Deer Park in the Voice was a silly gimmick that wouldn't work. "I was totally wrong," Shapiro later admitted. "It made him famous."

See a scan of this "silly gimmick" after the jump.

(Click for full size.)

Amusingly, Dwight "Paper Cuts" Garner is on the case, but only sort of.  After being prompted by a commenter, he "remembers" this ad, although he has the incorrect year.  And novel.

Comments

[Kaleb Nation]

I think the entire marketing of Lemony Snicket was based on negative reviews pasted on the back cover... One of those reverse marketing techniques, I suppose.

[nbm]

I think a gambit used 52 years ago might be deemed to have regained its freshness by now.