ASB :: Cover Commentaries

Thoughts on two covers for Tom Wolfe's I am Charlotte Simmons by Susan Mitchell and Henry Sene Yee

This extended character (or, I might say, caricature) study throws some of the most extreme and stereotypical personalities from the folklore of the American undergraduate experience into a set of exquisitely rendered yet entirely expected situations and sits back to watch the drama (as in theatrics and melodrama) unfold.

To be fair, the undergraduate experience is exceptionally dramatic and indulgent within its own hermetic, amplifying bubble. And, in full revelation, I'm still a believer in what probably is the fairy tale of the ivory tower; the taste of the "life of the mind." And so the novel left me with a slightly slimy, unsettled feeling. Perhaps this was Wolfe's intention.

Susan Mitchell's hard cover dust jacket plays on the iconography of the varsity letter. Isolated in a colorless field, the varsity jacket letters and cheerleader typography are a stand-in for the conflicted tropes of individuality, competition, and conformity that play out over the course of the novel. What symbol more aptly captures the stereotypes of the undergraduate lifestyle (really, the student lifestyle, and, in many ways, the American lifestyle) than the varsity letter? It evokes cliques of athletes and cheerleaders; it implies a social hierarchy; it reinforces an "us and them" mentality. And this is what the book is about; a series of characters circumscribed by their social roles and plagued by the insular drama those roles provide—and the somewhat broader theater created when those social roles come into predictable conflict. Certainly the novel is bold (perhaps blunt is the word) and largely unambiguous in its character development, and this cover mirrors the novel's tone rather well.

Henry Sene Yee's approach to the trade paperback edition is more enigmatic. The cover elements include a silhouette of a female figure (alluringly accomplished via a die-cut) and stylized ivy patterns, along with the author's name. The ivy is an iconic reference to the "Ivy League," and while the visual is more subtle than the varsity letter as a reference, once recognized, it evokes similarly stereotypical images (I should say here that the novel combines the most extreme aspects of large state football powerhouses and the elite private institutions of the Northeast; thus both the varsity letter and the ivy make sense in the context of the novel). The more time I spend with this cover, the more I see the cut-out of the female figure (obviously Charlotte Simmons, the novel's nominal protagonist) as direct allegory; students arrive at college as empty cutouts, ready to be filled and defined by their experiences. Or, perhaps, as Wolfe at times seems to imply, the characters that epitomize our elite institutions are largely empty; simply bodies acting out their roles and fulfilling expectations. The front cover opens to reveal the title of the book; which is itself a bold assertion of self, of individuality. A more generous interpretation might be that from the outside, the characters are paper-thin and empty, but that if you look even one layer deeper, you'll see that each is a unique individual struggling under the yoke of ossified stereotypes. In my view, this stylish cover, while largely successful and actually quite thought-provoking, promises more than the novel can deliver.

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2004 Susan Mitchell		2005 Henry Sene Yee

Thoughts on two covers for Ha Jin's The Crazed by Archie Ferguson and Michael Mascaro

Ha Jin's The Crazed revolves around a graduate student in pre-Tiananmen communist China, and his stroke-stricken advisor and mentor. It documents the student's spiraling self-knowledge as his beliefs are put to the test by his mentor's ramblings. Whether the stroke has brought down a veil of insanity over the professor, or has simply allowed the professor to express himself openly for the first time is left to the reader to decide.

Archie Ferguson's cover for the US hardcover edition captures many of these elements, as well as the spare, light, and uniquely paced feeling of Jin's writing. The sparse room with its sea foam green paint evokes the professor's hospital room, while the wicker chair brings to mind a provincial sensibility that relates to the student's self-circumscribed horizons. The chair and wall also help establish the novel's setting outside of a more richly (or technologically) appointed Western environment. The window, which reveals nothing but light can be read as a metaphor for several aspects of the story: the student's (initial) blindness to the realities and possibilities of the larger world; the professor's stroke, which has erased his world; or, possibly, the open slate of the future. Ferguson's typography, with its poetic arrangement and letter-spaced lower-case forms reinforces the cover's overall feel with a sensation of groundlessness and dissipation. The author's name, like the student in the novel, is about to move beyond the frame; outside the realm of the known.

Michael Mascaro's cover for the UK hardcover edition goes about establishing the feel of the novel in a totally different manner. The novel is, perhaps, largely a psychological character study (and, by extension, a study of a larger society), and this cover plays up that aspect of the novel by focusing on a singular face and, more specifically, a single, red-toned eye. A "crazed" eye? Perhaps a "Communist" eye? The image is contrasty and ghost-like, or, perhaps more cadaver-like; the overall tone is of menace. The implication is that the book is a thriller. While the novel does blur and investigate the distinctions between sanity and normalcy, between civil society and a "natural state," it's not a thriller. It's much more than that. The faux calligraphic type on the cover could be seen as making poor reference to the student's studies of poetry, but, in my view, its violent lines tend to reinforce the impression that you're about to read a violent thriller, rather than a literary exploration of the soul of an individual and of a nation.

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2001 Archie Ferguson		2002 Michael Mascaro

Thoughts on two covers for Gautam Malkani's Londonstani by Darren Haggar and Jon Gray

While both covers for this coming of age story with a twist—Darren Haggar's hardcover edition and Jon Grey's trade paperback—make intuitive sense, each interpretation advances a different aspect of the narrative, casting the novel in two very different lights. The novel follows a group of teens as they deal with the rigors and confusion of growing up in a multi-racial urban area of London. It's about perception as much as it's about reality; and about how perception and reality can—and sometimes do—interact.

Haggar's cover smartly integrates a series of references that help place the reader in London (via the ubiquitous 'Underground' red circle) and gives the reader a sense of the ethnic group they'll be immersed in (via the stylized typography). The distressed background texture evokes a sort of claustrophobia that helps convey the characters' severely self-limited social horizons, even if it greatly overstates the 'urban grit' of the novel's setting. Or, perhaps, in this novel where everything is not what it seems to the degree you might at first think, that's just the point the cover is trying to make. The characters are remaking their environment as they need it to be; some of their efforts are bravado and illusion, and some are all too real. That said, it may have been enough to simply juxtapose the Underground circle with the 'South Asian' typography. The collision of two such iconic references clearly express the novel's central conflict without the potentially muddying allusion to urban grit and decay.

Gray's cover takes a more enigmatic approach, letting the novel's title place the the viewer geographically and 'racially.' The 'doodle graphics' that faux-deface the cover place the action firmly in (what we'd call) High School (or perhaps Junior High), and their obsessive quality helps express the central characters' distracted desperation while maintaining a sense of humor somewhat lacking in Haggar's cover. Though the book deals with serious issues of identity, it's characters also possess all of the talent for drama and melodrama that can (or, at least should) only be expected of pubescent students. Gray's cover implies that the novel will be more about the school yard than Haggar's cover, which embraces the whole of the urban stage.

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2006 Darren Haggar		2006 Jon Gray

Thoughts on two covers for Gish Jen's Mona in the Promised Land both by Chip Kidd

coming soon...



1996 Chip Kidd		1997 Chip Kidd

Thoughts on three covers for Rick Moody's Garden State by Paul Sahre, Todd St. John, and the studio Pentagram

coming soon...



1997 Paul Sahre	1997 Todd St. John	2002 Pentagram