Justin Peacock

Daily News

I've got an essay in today's New York Daily News, discussing the origins of my novel as they relate to the great borough of Brooklyn.  I also talk about three of my favorite New York novels, which runs as a sidebar in the online version.  There's also a nice review of my book in the paper, though for some reason that has not appeared online.  I'll post a link when and if it does.

On the Eve

The official publication of A Cure for Night is only a few days away.  Since a novel's publication date generally doesn't have the same sort of weight as the release date for a movie or CD (unless the book in question is by J.K. Rowling), the official date doesn't mean that much (in fact, someone just e-mailed me a moment ago with a sighting of the book on a bookstore shelf). 

Although newspapers often re-arrange their schedules at the last minute, I'm tentatively expecting one major paper to review the book on Sunday, another on Monday (and no, I don't know what they're going to say).  So although the book isn't "published" until Tuesday, I'm personally designating Sunday as the day I transition from unpublished to published novelist. 

How do I feel as I near the end of the countdown? Excited, nervous, scared -- as you'd expect.  Uncertain, too.  So many books vanish without a trace, and nobody knows what gets you to where that won't happen.  Reviews are very important, obviously, but even well-reviewed novels don't necessarily make a dent.  I'm not expecting the book to be a runaway best seller, but I obviously do hope it reaches readers. 

Waiting on the reviews is the most stressful part.  While the early reviews have been very good, none of them have been in publications with the sort of circulation of those coming down the pike.  I feel very vulnerable and exposed at the prospect of being reviewed, but also lucky and excited.   It's a stress I wouldn't trade for anything. 

Blogging, You're Doing it Wrong

It may be a little early to get meta around here, but I'm about to blog about blogging.

I will freely confess that I'm still feeling my way as to what this blog will be.  I'm also, not coincidentally, feeling my way into being an actual writer, as in one who has actual readers.

It seems to me that the word "blog" is used to describe a number of very different kinds of sites, more than can be usefully grouped under a single umbrella. I certainly don't plan for this blog to be an online diary, a place where I discuss my daily life.  For one thing, as I alluded to in a previous post, the life of a writer is deadly boring, consisting mostly of sitting in front of a computer, interspersed with staring off into space.  Occasionally I liven things up by moving my laptop from one room to the next.

I do plan to use this blog to write about things that interest me -- mostly cultural things, but probably some law stuff as well.  I like doing critical writing, and its great to have an outlet for it.

But the main purpose of this blog is to be a forum for interacting with my readers, when and if they come to exist.  And that's the part I'm thinking about now. 

On the one hand, I'm well aware of the J.D. Salinger/Thomas Pynchon strain in American writing, where writers should be recluses, completely private, invisible to the world other than through their work. And I do think its true that readers can know too much about a fiction writer, that the person can become a distraction from the work.  I also think that writing fiction is like performing magic tricks -- both rely on sleight of hand to make the fake seem real -- and if you give away the secrets of your bag of tricks then the jig is up.

But I also think the vast majority of writers, myself included, hunger for interaction with our readers.  The act of writing is itself so private that when the book does enter the world we want to accompany it.  Traditionally that was done by the book tour, though it turns out that book tours are a relatively recent invention -- started by Jacqueline Susann, of all people, in the 1960s.  Book tours never made much practical sense in terms of cost-benefit, and its not surprising that publishers are increasingly looking to the web rather than bookstore signings to promote books. And the so-called web 2.0 is a fantastic medium for any writer, published or unpublished, to reach out to readers.

I'm curious what readers think of all this.  At this point, this blog's readership is a small trickle, which may or may not pick up once the book actually hits the shelves next week.  But I'd like to issue a standing invitation to any and all who come across this: what do you, the reader, want a fiction writer's blog to be?  Are there particular things that you'd like to see addressed?  Or is the whole blogging enterprise a bad idea for a fiction writer, who should let his or her work speak for itself? I'll keep an eye out for any responses, and will revisit the issue in a month or so.

Deadwood -- an Appreciation (Part Three)

Warning: This post discusses major plot points of Deadwood's three seasons.  If you haven't watched the show and intend to, consider this a categorical spoiler alert.

In law school, my professor for Property was an interesting fellow named Robert Ellickson.  Unlike most legal academics, who tend to specialize in parsing abstruse constitutional nuance, Ellickson's scholarship had an empirical bent.  His best known work is a book called Order Without Law.  In that book, Ellickson studied how Western cattle ranchers resolved disputes arising out of damage caused by escaped cattle.  Contrary to the assumptions of legal academia, which, unsurprisingly, focus on the law's centrality in human interactions, Ellickson found that dispute resolution among the ranchers was actually conducted via social norms that did not necessarily follow the actual law.  It wasn't just that the ranchers didn't utilize the law in the sense of hiring lawyers and filing lawsuits; they also didn't resolve the dispute in the same way as the law would have.  Ellickson's main point is that, in the vast majority of day-to-day social interactions, even those involving disputes, the law isn't especially relevant. Instead people are governed by their surrounding social norms.  (This may strike some as merely common sense, but at a law school it is practically apostasy.)

I have no idea whether David Milch is familiar with Professor Ellickson's work (or, for that matter, whether Ellickson is familiar with Milch's).  But thematically, Deadwood is about precisely this question: how human beings form a society in the absence of law.  Indeed, this theme was the genesis of the show; it actually pre-dated the show even being a Western.  In an interview with Salon, Milch gave the following answer to the question of how he first became interested in writing Deadwood:

"I had proposed to HBO a series about the city cops in Rome at the time of Nero. What had interested me was the idea of order without law. [emphasis added] The Praetorian Guard, who were the emperor's guards, understood how they were to proceed. But for the city cops, who were called the Urban Cohorts, there was no law at all. So they were sort of making themselves up as they went along. I wanted to focus on that idea of how order is generated in the absence of law. They [HBO] were already doing a show about Rome in the time of Caesar, so they asked if I could engage the same themes in a different setting, and that was how I decided to do the western."

The reason the show is about Deadwood is because of the camp's unusual history: it was not initially recognized as part of the United States.  One of the guiding concerns of the characters, particularly in the first season, was whether any agreements they had governing property, the basic societal building block of who owns what, would maintain their validity when and if the camp was brought into the United States.

The changes in the town's organizational structure are perhaps best reflected by the show's most memorable character, Al Swearengen.  At the start of the show, Swearengen is the most powerful man in Deadwood, and also a full-fledged villain, albeit a compelling one.  By the show's end, Swearengen has become something close to a conventional protagonist, and he has also seen his power (and his body) severely diminished.

The arrivals of Seth Bullock and Cy Tolliver combine to eventually break Swearengen's hold on power in Deadwood over the course of the first season.  Tolliver is essentially a peer of Swearengen as he sets up a rival saloon, gambling establishment, and whorehouse, ending Swearengen's near-monopoly on vice in the camp.  (The No. 10 Saloon, where Wild Bill Hickok meets his end, is clearly small-time compared to Swearengen's Gem.) Over the course of the first season, the rudiments of government begin to appear in the camp, such as the meetings of the town's unofficial power brokers, at which Swearengen religiously serves canned peaches (despite the fact that eating them often seems to lead to illness).  E.B. Farnum is appointed mayor, although clearly this is a token with no weight.  Seth Bullock's becoming sheriff, on the other hand, is essentially the first season's climax.

Bullock continues as the town's unquestioned sheriff for the rest of the show, despite the facts that 1) he is self-appointed, and 2) there are no actual laws to enforce.  His authority is accepted by the camp, and he often acts more as a mediator than as a conventional law enforcement officer.  He also doesn't hesitate to use violence in his role as sheriff.

The early lawless order that is established over the first season and which holds, tenuously, over the second, is increasingly disrupted and finally overthrown by the arrival of George Hearst.  Hearst represents the arrival of a different sort of capitalism to Deadwood, the moment when the individual prospectors and the small businessmen of the camp are largely muscled out by a wealthy man who has a seemingly endless array of minions at his disposal.  Once Hearst arrives on the scene, the alliance between Bullock and Swearengen is solidly established, and Swearengen's transformation from captivating villain to flawed hero is complete.

The climax of the third season -- or one of them, anyway -- are that elections are held.  These elections cover not only Deadwood, but "the county."  The county! Yes, Deadwood has been integrated, and takes its final step towards more conventional law and order.  Of course, Deadwood's first elections are the precise opposite of a moment of triumph.  The fix is in: George Hearst has seen to it who will win, which means the end of Seth Bullock's law enforcement career.  Indeed, the first formal step towards Deadwood becoming "civilized" is actually nothing more than Hearst consolidating his power and displacing those who laid the groundwork for Deadwood becoming a civil society.

The third season of Deadwood, in particular, invokes Robert Altman's classic McCabe and Mrs. Miller.  One of a series of brilliant films Altman made that deconstructed the genre they nominally occupied -- MASH, The Long Goodbye -- McCabeis an anti-Western.  As with the third season in Deadwood, the story revolved around small-time individuals in an isolated and primitive western community who find themselves on the wrong side of powerful and amoral mining interests.  If you like Deadwood and haven't seen McCabe, you owe it to yourself to take a look.

Deadwood -- An Appreciation (Part Two)

The most distinctive aspect of Deadwood is its language. I know people who dislike the show entirely based on its dialogue, and while I disagree, I don't argue with them either.  The language of Deadwoodis stylized, exceptionally so, and if you can't get on board with that stylization than chances are it'll be a deal breaker for you.  But to me, it is the dialogue of Deadwood that is the main source of its genius. 

There are three aspects to Deadwood's dialogue that make it so unique.  The first is its abundant use of profanity, and particularly its use of modern-day profanity in a historical setting. The second is its use, right alongside all that swearing, of an elevated, Victorian/Elizabethan rhetoric, in which even some of the crudest characters can perform dazzling displays of wordsmithing. Third is the distinctive sentence structures employed in the dialogue.

Deadwood's profanity was perhaps the show's most attention-grabbing trait.  There's a lot of it, for one thing, and its also deliberately anachronistic, completely contemporary rather than historically accurate.  While there can be something jarring, especially at first, at hearing all these 19th Century cowboys utter every possible permutation of the word "fuck," I think modernizing the profanity was absolutely the right call.  Profanity in Deadwood is practically an act of violence, in itself a way of establishing a person's place in the pecking order.  Historically accurate profanity -- "goldarn," for example -- would have stripped all of the menace out of the swearing, leaving only camp in its place.

And the incessant swearing is hardly gratuitous.  It is modulated based on character, for one thing -- some characters never swear, others seldom. Characters constantly adjust the vulgarity and the formality of their speech depending on whom they are speaking to and what their goals are in the interaction.  And one of the overarching themes of the show, as I will discuss in my next post, is how human beings establish order, or even community, in the absence of law.  Language is the primary tool by which this is done, and swearing in Deadwood often carries with it the suggestion that the person doing the swearing is willing to back up his words with force. 

In addition to the Hobbesian nature of the profanity in terms of the interactions between the characters, it is also a reminder that the town of Deadwood, as a lawless and stateless mining camp, has a violent relationship with the earth itself.  This is not a farming community, working in cooperation with nature, but rather a community which centers around mining, which is itself a violent activity.  Coarseness is thus an essential part of its nature.

Mixed with that coarseness is the show's astonishing rhetoric.  Again, objections as to the realism of this rhetoric are duly noted, presumably accurate, and entirely beside the point.  This is the primary source of the show's being described as Shakespearean: not only are many of the character word-drunk, but they also utilize a version of the English language which is, ornate, prolix, and certainly Victorian, if not Elizabethan, in tone.

The rhetoric of the characters is again a way of showing how language itself is one of the primary sources of law in the camp. While characters who are hostile to one another engage in a litany of vulgarity, affection in Deadwood is often expressed through excessive politesse.  I don't believe, for example, that Charlie Utter ever referred to Joanie Stubbs as anything other than "Ms. Stubbs."  And negotiations in Deadwood -- and negotiating is precisely what occupies much of the show -- also often involve a excess of formality, which is used as a way of masking intention. Here's one of my favorite such scenes:

Integrally related to all that free-flowing rhetoric are the unorthodox sentence structures employed in Deadwood's dialogue.  Sentences of the straightforward declarative sort we were all taught in elementary school certainly occur in the dialogue of Deadwood, but they are overshadowed by sentences that are long, complex, and sprawling. The subject noun is often in hiding, waiting to pop out at the end of a sentence, rather than the beginning, where we are used to finding it.  Unlike other prominent masters of dialogue, like David Mamet and Richard Price, whose attentiveness to sentence structure is grounded in rhythm, the beat of the words, Deadwood's sentence structures are grounded in meaning.  By hiding the ball as they do, they force us to pay special attention, to follow the arc of the thought without the usual guideposts.  David Milch's re-ordering of words in this regard is more like that undertaken by the poet John Berryman in the Dream Songs, than it is Mamet's staccato jazz.

Milch actually used some of these devices, albeit in more conventional guises, in NYPD Blue, of which he was the main creative force for the first half a dozen or so seasons.  While that show was certainly not operating at the same level of sophistication, and obeyed some of the constrains of network TV (while charging right through plenty of others), the dialogue was blunter and bawdier than any previously heard on network television.  While the language was nowhere near as ornate, it was certainly stylized (and more Mametesque), but again words often did not appear in their normal order, particularly with regards to Andy Sipowicz's dialogue.  Andy Sipowicz -- now there's a guy who would've felt right at home in Deadwood.

To be continued.

Deadwood -- An Appreciation (Part One)

I don't really think it can be seriously maintained that we are in a golden age of television as a whole -- a look at the prime time network listings simply won't permit it. But clearly there is now a defined niche of quality television.  HBO gets the lion's share of credit for creating it.  The best shows on HBO in recent years have been not only the best things on TV -- that goes without saying -- but have been some of the best American narratives in any form.

I came late to Deadwood, never having watched it when it was on the air.  I've just finished watching what unfortunately became its final season.  Although I knew of the legend of David Milch as TV's mad genius, I was resistant to the show based on its premise -- I simply had no interest in the Western as a genre, and while I understood that Deadwood's ambitions were different from those of the standard Western, I was still reluctant to watch a show set in that time and place.

When I finally did start watching the first season on DVD, it took no more than a few minutes for my resistance to dissolve completely.  As a writer, I find the show to be a sort of master class, and I study it as much as I watch it.   While there are many aspects of the show that merit discussion (and perhaps future posts), I want to focus on three: its supporting characters, its language, and its themes.

Deadwood is frequently called Shakespearean, and rightly so.  But while this comparison is sparked by the density of the rhetoric through which the characters communicate, it can also be seen in the show's minor characters.  As in Shakespeare, Deadwood's minor characters often serve as comic foils to the darker hues of the main action.  They are sometimes broad, and some are close to caricature: the relationship between E.B. Farnum and Richardson, for example, whose narrative purpose is clearly comic relief.  But others have far more subtle shadings: the friendship between Joanie Stubbs and Charlie Utter, for example, which is a sort of asexual romance.

What distinguishes almost all of Deadwood's characters, no matter how minor, is their strangeness.  There is something fundamentally unknowable about almost all of them.  Calamity Jane, for example, is obviously drinking herself to death and has at some fundamental level lost the will to live.  Every scene she is in has a dance of advance and retreat, people reaching out to her and her instinctive withdrawal from them. 

This is even more true of the show's villains, who are portrayed as prisoners of their own nature, rather than people who, through free will, make destructive choices.  Francis Wolcott, in the second season, takes no pleasure from the violence he inflicts, and seems to accept the hatred others have for him as what he deserves.  George Hearst in the third season is the will to power divorced from every other human impulse. The world of Deadwood is Hobbesian in the extreme -- the closest and most enduring relationships are no more or less than alliances, and alliances are hardly the deepest of relationships.

Next: The language of Deadwood.

A Courtroom Novel

My novel, A Cure for Night, concerns a young lawyer who is fired from his job at an elite law firm after a paralegal he was involved with dies of a heroin overdose.  After nearly losing his law license, the narrator becomes a public defender in Brooklyn. 

 

I myself have never been a public defender, in Brooklyn or anywhere else.  But when I set out to write the book I wanted it to be an accurate portrayal of the sort of legal practice it depicts.  The book thus draws extensively on my own practice as a lawyer, particularly on my experiences representing poor clients. I also conducted an extensive amount of research, and consulted with lawyers who had worked as public defenders in New York.  In doing so, I sought to give the book an authenticity which is, to my mind, often lacking in fiction about the law.

 

For a realistic depiction of the practice of criminal law, the classic courtroom novel remains Anatomy of a Murder, published in 1958 by John Voelker, a Michigan Supreme Court Justice who published the book under the pseudonym Robert Traver.  That portrayal of how a criminal defense lawyer actually operates – the way he teaches his client how to shape his own story, the frequently adversarial relationship between attorney and client, the near-total irrelevance of the truth to the courtroom proceedings – has never been done better.

Contemporary legal fiction has two fathers: John Grisham and Scott Turow, two very different writers who publish very different kinds of books.  It’s helpful to distinguish between the courtroom novel and the legal thriller, with the foremost current practitioner of the former being Turow and of the latter being Grisham.  Grisham’s books are filled with conspiracies, evil corporations, and corrupt government officials.  They have chase scenes and things blowing up.  I don’t mean this pejoratively – thrillers are supposed to have chase scenes.  Indeed, one of the striking things about Grisham novels is how much their plots recall the classic paranoid conspiracy thrillers of the 1970s, such as The Parallax View or Three Days of the Condor, a movie whose plot is echoed by The Pelican Brief.  In Grisham’s world, big business and government are inevitably corrupt, and the individual who gets in their crosshairs better take off running if he or she hopes to survive.

 

Turow’s more introspective courtroom novels, on the other hand, are mostly concerned with how the stately machinery of the law intersects with the lives of the messy human being who operate it.  The drama in his fiction is usually focused on the workings of the law, and how those workings shape and twist the law’s practitioners.  Although Turow’s books generally center on a murder, and certainly have suspense and plot twists, they are not thrillers in the conventional sense – I can’t recall a chase scene in a Turow book, or even a scene where someone broke into a run, for that matter.  They are much more concerned with the machinations of the law itself.  Even a Turow novel not focused on the actual courtroom, such as Personal Injuries, is nevertheless filled with procedural details, and bears a strong resemblance to how an actual investigation played out in real life.  

 

A legal thriller, then, is a thriller that concerns lawyers; a courtroom novel is a novel in which the drama is focused on the workings of the law.  It is safe to say that most law-themed novels that have been published in the wake of Grisham and Turow’s runaway success have been legal thrillers.  Such thrillers were ubiquitous in the 1990s, bearing titles that appeared to have been plucked at random from Black’s Law Dictionary: Offer of Proof, Special Circumstances.   

 

In addition to their titles, the other thing that many of the recent crop of legal thrillers often have in common is that the cases in them involve some vast conspiracy reaching to the highest reaches of government.  I have nothing whatsoever against conspiracy stories, but in many legal thrillers these conspiracies have been drained of all real content.  Rather than trying to say something about how the world works, many contemporary conspiracy stories are simply a tired narrative trope, a way of raising the stakes.  But in making their stories so over the top, these legal thrillers lose sight of the inherent drama of an actual criminal case.

 

I set out to write a courtroom novel that would reflect the reality of the American urban criminal justice system.  My novel would not feature a beautiful heiress accused of murder, or a conspiracy whose origins date back to some biblical counter-narrative.  The CIA didn’t do it.  Instead, I wanted to write a book that would resemble the sort of case that actually make up the docket of this country’s criminal courts.  It would be a case in which race and class played a visible role.  One in which the defense lawyer was not some thousand dollar an hour wizard with Perry Mason’s ability to spring spontaneous confessions from the witness stand, but rather two young, relatively inexperienced, public defenders whose strategic decisions were tentative and occasionally made on the fly.

 

While I have tried to write a more human-scale, realistic portrayal of the practice of criminal law, my book is by no means a documentary.  When there was a conflict between strict adherence to reality and the narrative demands of fiction, storytelling wins hands down. But the actual conflicts inherent in a murder trial, the ambiguities, contradictions, and outright lies, and the conflicts that such things in turn create in the lawyers who work on such cases, is almost unimaginably rich dramatic material. The legal thriller may occasionally spill over into absurdity trying to continually raise its stakes, but the courtroom, that crucible of conflict, will always have a place in the novel.

The Writer's Life, Part II

After leaving the law firm, I became a full-time fiction writer in April of this year.  Although I'd been writing seriously for some time, the transition to writing as my day job was disconcerting.  There were certainly great things about it -- like not having to set an alarm, or ride the subway in the dog days of summer, or, you know, work.  Perhaps most important, I get to spend my time thinking about what I want to think about, a rare luxury for which I am grateful.

On the other hand, the simple fact of the matter is that writing fiction, particularly writing novels, is a rather tedious process. It's amazing to me how many stories have fiction writers as their main characters, given how writers actually spend their days.  Not only is the daily life of a writer lacking in drama, it is generally lacking in other people.  It's mostly solitary work, just you and the page.

The biggest adjustment I had to writing full time was trying to figure out what a good day's work looked like.  At first, it was very hard for me to feel like I could stop writing, like I'd done a respectable amount for the day.  I eventually set as my daily goal the writing of three pages.  At the time, this felt lame -- a mere three pages! That's what I accomplished when given an entire day? But I quickly came to realize that writing three pages of a novel, day in and day out, can be a daunting task.  Moments of pure inspiration are few and far between; much of the work of writing a novel is slow and methodical.  John Gregory Dunne, in a wonderful essay about the writing of his novel The Red White and Blue called "Laying Pipe," calls novel-writing "manual labor of the mind." Inevitably, there are times when you face the blank page and that page remains stubbornly blank.

I've often joked that if someone took the trouble to fully explain to young aspiring writers what the writer's life actually consisted of, there would quickly be no more books.  I don't really mean it, or at least I only sort of do.  But there is a world of difference between wanting to be a "Writer" and wanting to write.  Wanting to be a writer will inevitably lead to disappointment -- the romance of the "Writer" is almost entirely a myth.  Writing, however, is its own reward.  It can be a lonely daily grind, sure, but there is also the rush of inspiration, when a connection suddenly reveals itself, or when a character enters the scene and promptly starts stealing the show.  There is also the quiet satisfaction of watching the pages build, the stack on the desk, as you bring a new story into the world.

The Writer's Life, Part I

Ah, the life of a writer.  Has anything been more romanticized?

I will freely admit that when I sold my novel I expected that doing so would change my life in significant ways.  And it has -- after all, I'm at home typing this, not at a law firm office, drafting a memo about some patent dispute.  And that's the one big actual change -- at least for now, I'm writing as my day job, not what I do at night and on weekends.

I was working full time as a lawyer the whole time I was writing A Cure for Night.  It's safe to say I don't recommend the experience.  The law is not exactly a flexible profession, and law firms expect you to be on call 24/7.  Literally.  The book took forever to write; I was working around the clock at one thing or another, not socializing enough, and not feeling like I was able to give anything 100%.

I continued working full-time at the law firm for six months after selling the book, while making the final edits and trying to get book number two off the ground.  Now that I had an actual book deal, there were deadlines in place, phone calls I had to make during business hours, etc, and it became impossible for the writing side of things to be relegated to nights and weekends.  Moreover, I was working on a case whose trial was postponed by the judge so that it coincided with publication, meaning I would spend the month of pub working 18-hour days in a war room somewhere in Los Angeles.

Finally I asked the Firm if I could go part time, at least through publication.  (Whenever a lawyer deals with a law firm's bureaucracy, or when the law firm has bad news to impart, its "the Firm" that makes the decisions, as in: "The Firm believes that requiring associates to bill 2100 hours a year in order to be eligible for a bonus is reasonable.").  The Firm, which for reasons that elude me has a lingering reputation as a supportive place to work, at least as major New York law firms go, wouldn't even consider it.  There was no way I would consider maintaining the status quo, so I quit, and thus began my life as a full-time writer.

My favorite thing about the firm's response was, after completly ignoring the fact that I'd sold the book for the past six months, the day my resignation was announced two different partners promptly called me up to ask me for the name of my agent, so that they could pass it on to clients who had written novels...

To be continued.

A Writer Silenced

I just read a very upsetting article in the Wall Street Journal.  Random House has spiked publication of a novel, The Jewel of Medina, by a debut novelist named Sherry Jones, out of fear that it would become the next Satanic Verses.  The novel is about a child bride of the Prophet Muhammad, and the fear was that it would cause an outbreak of extremist Muslim violence, apparently because of its depiction of Muhammad's sexuality.

Obviously I haven't read the novel in question (always a problem when discussing censored books).  But it was clearly not a work akin to the Danish cartoons which were the last version of this particular global culture war.  Whatever you thought of them, those cartoons were obviously meant to be provocative, if not offensive, as is satire's wont. Based on the article and its description of the book, Jones, who learned Arabic to write her novel, had no such intention to offend.

Full disclosure: Random House is my publisher, too.  Based on the scant public information, its difficult to have an informed opinion as to whether their fears justified spiking the novel (unless you're of the view that such fears could never justify withdrawing a book, an easy position to take if you don't have to go into their office every day).  There can be no doubt that it is appropriate to take seriously any concern that publishing a cultural work that is "offensive to Muslims" may endanger the safety of a publisher's employees -- the death toll from such speech is real.  But it is a sad day when a major American publisher decides not to publish a novel because of fears that it might incite religious zealots to violence.

What is most upsetting about the present debacle is the central role played by an American academic, Denise Spellberg, in causing the book to be withdrawn.  At Jones' suggestion, Random House sent the book to Spellberg for a blurb.  Spellberg didn't just dislike the book; she decided to actively campaign against its being published, first by asking someone who ran a Muslim-oriented web site to "warn Muslims" about it.  She followed that up by contacting Random House, which was coincidentally also publishing a forthcoming book by Spellberg, and warning her editor that the novel would potentially cause an outbreak of violence against the publishing house.

Incredibly, not satisfied with those efforts at censorship, Spellberg then had an attorney write a letter to Random House, threatening to sue them if they associated her with Jones' novel.  To me, this is the part of the story where Spellberg goes from being an aspiring censor (bad enough), to a malignant lunatic.  I know a thing or two about both book publishing and the law, and there is simply no way a rational human being would do this.  How on earth was Random House going to use Spellberg's name in association with the novel?  I imagine it was pretty clear at that point that she wasn't going to blurb it! And if Random House used her name in association with it by saying something like: "Denise Spellberg hated this novel so much she tried to keep us from publishing it," -- not exactly a brilliant marketing strategy -- she certainly couldn't sue them for that. 

Its clear that if anyone should have been silenced out of this mess, its Spellberg, who comes across as a self-deluded raving fascist.   Regardless of the merits of The Jewel of Medina -- which we may never be able to judge -- it is a sad day for free speech in this country when a book is censored out of fear that its content will cause offense.  It's an even sadder day when the instigator of that censorship is herself an academic and author.  For shame, Denise Spellberg. May your own books be freely published, and never, ever, read.