Some of the material in The Copywriter is banal ... Some of it is goofy ... Looming over the novel is a question: can this existence—this openhearted, roguish, aimless scavenging—yield anything of value, or is it just a waste? ... One of The Copywriter’s most moving aspects is its expansive definition of poetry ... The gentle, self-effacing tone of a novel whose sympathies lie with the minor and the easily overlooked ... Poppick’s point isn’t that everything matters; it’s that anything might.
Refreshingly understated ... Rather than build toward a dramatic conclusion, the events of the story occur much as they would in real life — that is, with little conventional narrative momentum. They just happen. This approach is mirrored in the novel’s structure: The Copywriter is formatted as a journal being kept by D__. That playful form is one of the novel’s delights.
The Copywriter is written as a series of notebook entries ... A chaotic repository of parables, dreams, and emails ... By meticulously documenting the 'uncanny, comically meaningless' nature of his tasks, D__ performs an act of de-naturalization; he refuses to see the office’s absurdity as normal ... Suggests that while the modern artist may be forced to lease their hours to the marketplace, the lease does not include the soul ... By reclaiming language from its day job and returning it to the realm of poetry, D__ does more than just survive; he stages a quiet, persistent revolution.
Part office satire but also part poetics of absurdity, making use of the corporate world’s vacuous jargon and ugly furniture. The question becomes: What can poetry do to transform or remake the dull day job—to make it bearable, make it interesting, or simply make it mean something else? ... It’s not that D__’s poetry is equivalent to his copywriting, but that they have something important in common ... We carry something of ourselves between places, that the choices we make in one arena of our life will eventually affect our expression in another. The day job is never just a day job.
This is one of a growing number of novels featuring a version of the author, a poet who almost begrudgingly produces a fine novel. Caustic and insightful about the pointlessness of contemporary labor, Poppick offers moments of profound comedy and wonderful turns of phrase throughout. A fascinating perspective on a specific period of recent history, this is a meditative and beautifully written debut.
Never trite ... A linear, moving, and accessible story. Comic and profound, an intricate collage of a novel that plants itself in exhausted earth and, somehow, flourishes.
