Between a Rock and Bleeding Mouth-Cancer in the Penny Press!

As I’ve mentioned before here at Stevereads, it’s always a pleasure for me to see a glossy square-bound lad-mag divert from quick-ab workouts and $35,000 wristwatches to talk about some of the less venal elements of what goes into making a well-rounded person. The most vulnerable of those elements is of course the gentle art of reading, so it’s usually a distinct treat when a magazine like Esquire or Men’s Journal runs a short piece on the added value that your average bro can get from your above-average book.

The latest GQ (the one with a picture of a very old Clint Eastwood on the cover) has just such a feature: “21 Brilliant Books You’ve Never Heard Of (Championed by 21 Writers You Have).” Naturally, such a feature isn’t really going to present me with 21 books I’ve never heard of, but the title promises some off-the-beaten-path choices, and the feature delivers.

We get Ben Fountain praising Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, for instance, and we get Hanya Yanagihara recommending, oddly and delightfully, My Abandonment by Peter Rock. Wells Tower calls G. B. Edwards’ The Book of Ebenezer Le Page “a work of seaweed, heart, and waves that break on granite” (true enough, especially in how it reflects the thing’s readability). TC Boyle puts forward Denis Johnson’s great slim novel Fiskadoro, and A. O. Scott, bless his hitherto-inconspicuous heart, praises Mary McCarthy’s great novel The Groves of Academe while not actually talking about it all, and Marlon James singles out Russell Hoban’s masterpiece Riddley Walker (and pays the simple readerly respect we all must pay: “if it wasn’t for Salman Rushdie, I would never have heard of it”).

It’s true that the otherwise-trustworthy Emma Straub recommends the dreadful Stoner by John Williams, but we also get some of our best working novelists making cases for books they think are underappreciated: George Saunders writes about American Youth by Phil LaMarche, Junot Diaz praises The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel Delany, and the great Adam Johnson recommends Robert O’Connor’s terrific novel Buffalo Soldiers.

In fact, there was hardly any fault to lay at the door of the feature’s editors, who assembled a very thought-provoking mixture of lesser-known books and interesting recommenders. No, the fault came from the emphysema sandwich-buns that encased the feature: the last page of the magazine before the feature started and the first page after it ended – the absolutely inescapable brackets of the thing – were both full-page color ads for tobacco products, just exactly like this was a 1956 issue of GQ rather than a 2016 issue. One of the ads was for chewing tobacco, and the other was for super-sexy cigarettes, and in both cases, there were federally-mandated warning boxes telling readers that chewing tobacco isn’t a “safe” alternative to smoking, and that cigarettes contain elevated levels of carbon monoxide. No mention made of the fact that in studies not heavily subsidized by the tobacco industry, the data shows that fully 100% of idiots who use chewing tobacco develop tooth-rot and mouth cancer, and that fully 100% of idiots who smoke develop emphysema and lung cancer. No exceptions, unless the tobacco industry is paying for them outright. The ads instead offer only the very mildest finger-shaking admonitions – X isn’t safe, Y contains carbon monoxide – instead of This product will give you cancer.

And just as an editorial team was responsible for the quality of that “21 Brilliant Books” feature, so too is there responsibility for the ads that bracketed it: Jim Nelson is the Editor-in-Chief of GQ, which means that in order for those ads – extolling the cool-factor of weaponized tobacco, for Christ’s sake, in 2016, for Christ’s sake, when the science of how absolutely lethal this crap is has been settled for seventy years – to appear in the magazine, he either had to approve of them or else not quit his job because of them. So either Editor-in-Chief Jim Nelson wants GQ readers to get addicted to carcinogens in order to keep his ad-revenues flowing, or he’s too spineless to take a principled stand against it.

Either is despicable, and especially so in this case because there’s already a long-cultivated association (carefully encouraged by the tobacco industry) between being a writer and ingesting vast amounts of carcinogens. Thanks to the placement of these ads, that association will only be strengthened in the minds of the biddable young twentysomething men who are such a key component of GQ‘s audience. I’ll just have to hope that the ones who are smart enough to want to read some of these books are also smart enough to avoid the evil fate to which Jim Nelson wants to condemn them.