The Copywriter

A 30-something poet navigates the vagaries of freelance copywriting work in Poppick’s reflective and often funny debut novel (after the poetry collection Fear of Description), which unfolds as a series of journal entries. The narrator, D__, has devoted his life to poetry. His partner, Lucy, with whom he lives in New York City, is also a poet, as are his friends Ruth and Will. Though he’s invested in these relationships, something ineffable is missing from D__’s life. A “permalancer” for a failing consumer product company, he keeps a fire wall between his “stupid” copywriting and his poetry. Sometimes he tosses gigs to Will, who, hilariously, doesn’t make the same distinction and turns in product descriptions that read like absurd prose poems (“The era of normal umbrellas is over. That’s why this umbrella isn’t normal: it’s kind of cool. This is a cool umbrella”). After D__ is laid off, he and Lucy break up, and he finds he can’t write poetry anymore. He drives Ruth across the country to where she’s entering a PhD program, makes notes about the poems he longs to write, and reads Proust to try and understand the nature of time. D__ is a frank and companionable narrator, who endears himself to the reader with his devotion to the “parallel dimension” contained in poetry. This portrait of a modern-day Bartleby is a blast. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Feb.)