BOOK TOUR
By Shashi Tharoor
Newsweek International
May 21, 2001

AMERICANS, THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM HAS IT, DO not read. At least not as much as they used to. Television, movies, computer games, the Internet -- all have driven people away from books. And when they do read, it seems it's not literature they want. The best-seller lists are overflowing with diet books, books on self-improvement, books on how to play the dating game. The fiction lists seem to consist of nothing but steamy romances and formulaic thrillers. "Americans," a British academic once growled to me, "don't know the difference between wanting to read a book and wanting a book to read."

So it was with decidedly mixed feelings that I found myself at what is billed as America's largest literary gathering, the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, an annual event that overwhelms the UCLA campus on the last weekend in April. Could the home of Hollywood and Burbank, capital of the mass-entertainment industry, better known for its trivial game shows and glittering but insubstantial soirees, truly celebrate something as solitary and unglamorous as reading?

Apparently 400 authors and 250 exhibitors thought so. So did an astonishing 125,000 people who thronged the festival to hear authors ranging from Salman Rushdie to Sharon Roan, author of "Our Daughters' Health." There were the usual readings and signings, as well as discussions on topics from "Is Geography Fate? Reflections on the East," featuring two British writers and your faithful correspondent, to "Do Books Have a Future?" (The answer was apparently a qualified yes.) But this being L.A., the truly Big Moment was an awards ceremony: the year's Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, from poetry to fiction.

Entering from Sunset Boulevard, I couldn't help thinking oft hat other L.A. awards ceremony -- the Oscars. But the invitation prosaically required "business attire and there wasn't a shimmering blonde in sight. Instead of the collagen-enhanced, serenely Botoxed faces and figures that would be on hand to celebrate the silver screen, one floated on a sea of wrinkles, furrowed brows, eyes narrowed from squinting at the page. (Author Frank McCourt last year took the mike to plea for more cleavage at the event, but he evidently did not get his way.) Even so, Hollywood casts a long shadow. A giant fake bookcase dominated the stage, framing a high-resolution TV featuring the photos and book covers of shortlisted nominees. As the prizes were announced, there was the inevitable fumbling with the envelope -- then the sweet high of triumph. Gasps and shrieks rose from the audience, none louder than those greeting the winner of
"Best Mystery/Thriller." A spotlight plucked her from embraces of family and friends, and she strode briskly to the stage -- our laureate, a matronly figure in an unpretentious pantsuit.

If that showed the limits of the Oscar parallel, the acceptance speeches were all too familiar. Fervent gratitude to editors, publishers and publicists is, alas, no more exciting to hear than teary lists of thanks to producers, directors and publicists. All hail the biography-prize winner whose entire remarks consisted of the sentence, "I will not start thanking people because I couldn't stop." But then his book has a long list of acknowledgments.

The book fair brought home a fact I'd long known but never fully appreciated. In America, whether in literature or in life, there is nothing worthwhile that couldn't be improved by better packaging or promotion. No writer is too eminent to need marketing; no publicity is beneath a successful writer. Serious novelists appear on the "Today" show to be quizzed about their lifestyles by interviewers who haven't cracked their books; the talk-show hostess Oprah Winfrey can catapult an unknown into best-sellerdom with five minutes of breathless air time.

Perhaps that's the only way literature will survive in America. Amid the general atmosphere of celebration at the awards ceremony, Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Times, editor of what is perhaps the country's most cerebral books section, sounded a grim warning. The next day the San Francisco Chronicle was to close its separate book-review section, collapsing it into its entertainment section. The Boston Globe, despite appearing in a city famed for its 50 institutions of higher learning, was about to do the same. Even the venerable New York Times was to reduce the country's most widely read book review from 36 pages to 32.
Some book publishers quietly welcomed the Chronicle's action. Entertainment sections of newspapers always have attracted more readers than books, and advertisements for books would therefore reach a larger readership. It's a reminder that literature, too, is a business. I noticed that the actress who provides the voice of Bart Simpson on the animated TV show "The Simpsons" was a major draw at the festival, helping sell a number of volumes based on the popular cartoon series. Those are the kinds of things that help sustain publishers' profits -- and the reading habit. If there were a best-supporting-author award, I'd have been glad to give it to her.

THAROOR is the author of "India: From Midnight to the Millennium."