The other day, while reading a short story collection, I found myself turning to the back cover of the paperback, which has brief descriptions of the themes of three of the stories. For some inexplicable reason I tried to match up these descriptions with the stories I had already read. Only one of the summaries sounded familiar.
These stories are not mysterious, and their themes were apparent to me as I read. But some peculiar need for validation led me to find out what they were "supposed" to be about. Or, let's face it, what someone in the publisher's publicity department decided they were about.
After reading the last two stories, I felt that at least one of them didn't quite fit with its supposed theme. Paging back through the rest of the book, I tried to see if that theme described a different story. But that didn't seem to be the case.
Readers are accustomed to learning from another source (a review or the flap copy) what a book is about before actually turning to page 1. Of course, the flap copy is meant to interest a potential book buyer. But what if we already own the book and are still in thrall to the content of those brief paragraphs?
They give us certain expectations—of a particular style, of the particular trajectory the plot will take, and the type of characters we will encounter. If we fail to find these elements as we read, we will feel deceived. Might we feel that the problem is ours—that we don't understand what the author is doing? In the case of experimental work, this may well be the case. Otherwise, the fault is the hype machine of publishing.
Imagine a scenario in which someone gives us a new book with an unrevealing title that was published without any descriptive information on its cover—a book whose author is also unfamiliar. What would we do? Read the first paragraph? See if the chapters have titles? Check to see how long it is? Surely we would be strangely at sea with no guidance about what's between the covers. Yet our experience as readers would be akin to that of a nineteenth-century explorer venturing upon an uncharted land. The experience might be upsetting or disappointing or captivating, but we would have no one with whom to compare notes. Entirely on our own, we would have to judge the writing purely for itself.