Book: THE COPYWRITER
Author: Daniel Poppick
Published by: Scribner
Price: $26
The title of the book gestures towards a profession devoted to the packaging of language to entice consumers. Daniel Poppick’s novel is about D__, a 32-year-old poet living in New York, who finds himself condemned to earning his livelihood by forcibly assigning meaning to words, an ironic counterpoint to the vocation of poetry. In the beginning of the novel, D__ works as a freelance copywriter for a retail start-up while nurturing his true vocation with his circle of friends, Lucy, Ruth and Will. Their conversations often hover among literary gossip, poetic references, and existential inquiry, lending the novel the atmosphere of an intellectual commune. The wider political landscape — a “fascist” Donald Trump, migrants’ detention at the border, Israeli airstrikes, and the job crisis — serves as rohstoff for D__’s ruminations.
Poppick’s novel does not have a conventional plot; it is structured as an interior monologue of a writer. The narrative unfolds as islands of texts, essentially a series of notebook entries that he begins to keep since the summer of 2017. These passages are filled with dreams, stray conversations, poetry, emails, and philosophical musings, each of which he headlines as “parable”. His eventual layoff, the gradual unravelling of his relationship with Lucy, and his search for employment — alongside the unexpected luxury of finally finding time to read Proust — are scrutinised with a poet’s sensitivity.
The novel, peppered with wry humour, is understated, even absurd at times. D__’s perception of people, objects and situations is filtered through an obsessive attentiveness to language and its cadences. D__’s truncated name — a letter followed by an underscore — seems to echo Barthes’s argument that the writer is no longer the sovereign source of meaning but merely the medium through whom language passes.
What enriches The Copywriter is its exploration of the tension between the utilitarian language of consumerism and the nuances of poetic expressions. This collision mirrors the predicament of what it means to be a writer in the modern world.