Editor? What Editor?
Consider the following sentence in John Twelve Hawks's The Traveler (on page 59): "The tension in his shoulders and the quick way he moved his hands showed he was worried, but Gabriel knew that his brother would never show it."
I think I know what this author meant to write (that the brother would never show worry to an outsider), but the way it appears in print is blatantly and unintentionally self-contradictory. (You can't both "showed" and "never show.")
This is a hardcover title published by the prestigous Doubleday division of Random House. The novel essentially has the appeal of a cable sci-fi action movie: not much depth or characterization, but quick moving and diverting. It has received a fair amount of attention (including a starred review in Publishers Weekly) and sales (it is currently #71 in sales on Amazon).
So my rhetorical question is really this: if a frontlist title like this gets the kind of skimpy editorial review that the sentence I cite indicates, what kind of editorial support is given to most books these days. Better we shouldn't ask.
Posted by Harold Davis at July 22, 2005 10:35 AM
