Posted on December 11, 2007 by Steve Pollak
You know the old saying about not judging a book by its cover. Well, the graphic design group Fwis does judge a book by its cover. But, they’re design professionals so they look at things differently.
Each week, they write a column for Publishers Weekly and on Tuesday they reviewed the cover for Michael Chabon’s latest novel, “Gentlemen of the Road.” They remarked that Chabon has had his share of bad covers in the past but the good ones have been really good. The Fwis folks especially liked the covers for “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and for “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.”
Here is their take on the Chabon covers:
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, designed by Henry Sene Yee, masterfully encompassed the era and the mood of the book, while the cover for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, designed by Will Staehle, was seen in just about every design-annual possible.
And then you’ve got Gentlemen of the Road, which fits in an awkward state of passable blandness. The story follows two men in the fabled Jewish kingdom of Khazaria as they traverse the wonders of the Silk Road. The whole thing references the far-eastern style well enough, without really making us all that excited about it. Little more than a series of disparate elements thrown together in a decent composition, this cover comes across as a missed opportunity that does alright for itself.
It almost sounds like a metaphor for Chabon’s career: an incredibly gifted writer dabbling in disparate genres while missing the opportunity to join the ranks of the great ones. I think I said something similar in my review of “The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.”
Speaking of the great ones, the Fyis group did not like the cover to Philip Roth’s “Exit Ghost.” Here’s what they said about the cover and its designer, Milton Glaser:
Milton Glaser takes a break from his typical illustrative fare for this fictional story of charged emotional revelations, a capstone on Philip Roth's Zuckerman series. All we can do is snore a little bit... about the cover, that is. While the tale is brash but complicated in human emotion, the cover is loud, red, black and white, and there seems to be some meaningful reason for the gradient, though we can't see why. The glow of the EXIT sign? Departure is a key theme within the novel, but perhaps there's a direct quote we're missing.
And I thought literary critics were harsh. That review could merit a satirical response in Roth's next novel.