THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 63
BOOKS
TRICKED OUT
Our love-hate relationship with gimmicks.BY MERVEEMRE
PHOTOGRAPH BY SAMANTHA CABRERA FRIEND
W
hen Jennifer Egan’s novel “A Visit
from the Goon Squad” won the
Pulitzer Prize, in 2011, much fuss was
made over its penultimate chapter, which
presents the diary of a twelve-year-old
girl in the form of a seventy-six-page
PowerPoint presentation. Despite the
nearly universal acclaim that the novel
had received, critics had trouble decid-
ing whether the PowerPoint was a daz-
zling, avant-garde innovation or, as one
reviewer described it, “a wacky literary
gimmick,” a cheap trick that diminished
the over-all value of the novel. In an in-
terview with Egan, the novelist Heidi
Julavits confessed to dreading the chap-
ter before she read it, and then experi-
encing a happy relief once she had. “I
live in fear of the gimmicky story that
fails to rise above its gimmick,” she said.
“But within a few pages I totally forgot
about the PowerPoint presentation, that’s
how ungimmicky your gimmick was.”
The word “gimmick” is believed to
come from “gimac,” an anagram of
“magic.” The word was likely first used
by magicians, gamblers, and swindlers
in the nineteen-twenties to refer to the
props they wielded to attract, and to
misdirect, attention—and sometimes,
according to “The Wise-Crack Dictio-
nary,” from 1926, to turn “a fair game
crooked.” From such duplicitous begin-
nings, the idea of gimmickry soon spread.In Vladimir Nabokov’s novel “Invitation
to a Beheading,” from 1935, a mother
distracts her imprisoned son from count-
ing the hours to his execution by de-
scribing the “marvelous gimmicks” of
her childhood. The most shocking,
she explains, was a trick mirror. When
“shapeless, mottled, pockmarked, knobby
things” were placed in front of the mir-
ror, it would reflect perfectly sensible
forms: flowers, fields, ships, people. When
confronted with a human face or hand,
the mirror would reflect a jumble of bro-
ken images. As the son listens to his
mother describe her gimmick, he sees
her eyes spark with terror and pity, “as
if something real, unquestionable (in this
world, where everything was subject to
question), had passed through, as if a
corner of this horrible life had curled
up, and there was a glimpse of the lin-
ing.” Behind the mirror lurks something
monstrous—an idea of art as device, an
object whose representational powers
can distort and devalue just as easily as
they can estrange and enchant.
Trick mirrors are gimmicks, but they
are also metaphors for how gimmicks
work, eliciting both charm and suspi-
cion. In “A Visit from the Goon Squad,”
Egan transforms a clunky corporate
technology into an ingenious storytell-
ing technique by embedding it in the
older technology of the novel. Seen in
this context, the PowerPoint’s history
as a management tool begins to vanish
behind the story of a young girl’s life—
the novelist’s version of the magician’s
final act, when he folds his assistant in
a trunk and makes her disappear. Tee-
tering between novelty and banality,
Egan’s novel manages to squeeze a drop
of wonder out of a crude communica-
tion method. Yet its single-use success—
no other writer could get away with re-
peating her trick—reminds us that the
literary marketplace, as Theodor Adorno
once observed of the art world, favors
“work with a ‘personal touch,’ or more
bluntly, a gimmick.”
The seductive wonders of Nabokov’s
mirror or Egan’s PowerPoint are harder
to find in the gimmicks of the present.
Recent headlines offer up a wide range
of gimmicks rushed into production to
contain the spread of the coronavirus
(robot chefs, antiviral cars), as well as
products and ideas whose sudden ob-
Sianne Ngai sees gimmickry as central to contemporary aesthetic judgments. solescence (“fun” workplaces, airline