Fatigue in the first person

All the buzz a media profile can muster doesn’t necessarily sell books, based on the preliminary figures for Dog Days by Ana Marie Cox, a roman-a-clef inspired by her year at the helm of Wonkette. Results from Bookscan (via GalleyCat) show 3,800 copies sold of the novel about summertime in Washington, D.C. – extraordinary numbers for a first-time novelist, but deemed underwhelming given her celebrity. And since the notoriety of Wonkette involved bawdy comments about the GOP, these unremarkable returns on a $275K advance should prompt a few rounds of partisan schadenfreude – while leading other bloggers who scored big-league book deals to wonder if their online attention is capable of translating into customers for their prose in a format not found via search engine. In the five-years-behind tradition of Toronto media, attention is stuck on a pair of novels whose publication is rooted in the millennial newspaper war: How Happy to Be, by former National Post film critic Katrina Onstad, boasts favourable reviews from every outlet in town – while fictional accounts of the psychological experience of slumming amongst celebrities on Conrad Black’s expense account seem to have marginal novelty value, there’s evidently enough under that surface to render it buyable. Longer knives await the mid-February arrival of The Continuity Girl by Leah McLaren, which isn’t about life as a 25-year-old Globe and Mail columnist of unclear credentials, rather about a fictional 35-year-old script supervisor who retreats to London, England in pursuit of a sperm donor. McLaren and Onstad will be swapping anecdotes next Tuesday (Jan. 31) at The Gladstone Hotel (1214 Queen St. W.) in what’s either a last hurrah for press baron-funded narcissism, or a payoff for years of opinionated perseverance. Meanwhile, the dearth of autobiographical blogs from youngish females in the GTA indicates such public self-expression might actually be the most unnatural display in the world – or first-person fatigue has finally settled in.