Often, when Kathleen goes off on a business trip, or to spend the weekend with her father and her brother in North Carolina, I fade into an inert silence. It wasn’t so this past week, however; I was very busy with the mess in the blue room. So it was only upon her return that I collapsed — a combination of excitement at having her back, a late video (Arbitrage) and a few drops too many BV Rutherford cab. I collapsed into the arms of John Kenney, author of a new novel, Truth in Advertising. Someone was touting it somewhere on the Internet, and for once, I bit. 

Truth in Advertising belongs to the family of novels, currently headed by Dave Eggers’s A Hologram For the King, about bluffers — men who lack both the concrete agricultural, artisanal, or military skills of their fathers, and the professional training of their brothers. Longer and more richly rounded than Hologram, Truth in Advertising shares its foundation of dread and its overlay of satire. Both books are funny and terribly unnerving, sometimes simultaneously. The narrator’s situation is precarious in each. The looming danger seems less a crushing catastrophe than a fatal becalmment: these are lives like sailing ships far out at sea, in dwindling winds.

Kenney’s hero is Finbar Dolan, a Manhattan advertising copywriter with misgivings about his own abilities and a troubled family history. He has commitment issues, having broken off an engagement six months earlier and then covertly fallen in love without daring to acknowledge it to himself. He’s suave and charming, not that he has to work at either, but his life is stalling on the eve of his fortieth birthday. What recharges it is a ramped-up schedule imposed by his boss, a taskmaster who doesn’t seem to like him, and then, the insanely rushed production of a Super Bowl commercial. With smothered desperation and a vivid fantasy life, Fin struggles to make the most of what feel like last chances. Meanwhile, Fin’s father, from whom he and his siblings have long been estranged (they are bareless less estranged from each other), turns up in a Cape Cod hospital, unconscious after a heart attack. Kenney adeptly weaves his protagonist’s development from these threads, with a warp of unresolved childhood secrets and a weft of sparkling but very dry Madison-Avenue satire. The settings are assured, and the narration easily brilliant.  

So you try. You throw yourself into it. You learn. You learn the difference between writing and shooting. You learn the difference between how you hear a line of dialogue and how an actor says a line of dialogue. The line you thought was so funny turns out to be hackneyed and expected. Later, in the edit room, the takes you thought were great turn out to be not so great. You try harder next time, work longer on the script, on cutting the superfluous, on saying it better, funnier, more … real. You read plays and screenplays. You study them. You try to understand how they work. You take a writing class at the 92nd Street Y. You see plays at an off-Broadway theater. You read the scripts of award-winning commercials. You realize that advertising, at its best, tells a story. It closes the gap between the thing being sild and the person watching. The really good work, done by the best people, makes you feel something. It tells the truth. It elevates the business, transcends a mere ad to something better, more valuable. It connects with another human being, breaks through the inanity and noise to find something essential and real and lasting. Like art. Not always. Not often. But sometimes. You have seen it done. You have admired the people who do it. And you have come to the conclusion, in spot after mediocre spot, that you are not that good.

Except that John Kenney himself is. I heartily recommend Truth in Advertising.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2013 at 5:04 pm.