It's the lament of artists everywhere: the time and effort needed to create art versus the need to put food on the table. Or even worse, how to live up to your ideals when you're stuck in a soul-sucking, dead-end job. Daniel Poppick's sardonic yet meditative The Copywriter tackles both these quandaries. It's 2017, the country in the throes of the first Trump administration, and Poppick's autobiographical narrator (only identified as "D__") is a New York poet masquerading as a marketing writer, tasked with describing useless tchotchkes like "eggplant emoji drones." But not for long: a new, young, annoying CEO is taking over, which means that D__ and the rest of the staff are on the chopping block. If that wasn't enough, D__'s long-time relationship with fellow poet Lucy is on the rocks, and his own poetry has dwindled to near-nothing.
What's a depressed poet to do when his life is going nowhere but to catalog the specifics of that nowhere? The Copywriter is D__'s notebook of trials and tribulations, crammed with asides, dreams, anecdotes, parables, fragments of poems and literary references. As indulgent as the enterprise may be (D__ himself writes, "A notebook is a performance for one person: the person writing it"), it also serves as a silent rebellion against a world of plastic occupations and products, a creative outlet for D__ to work through his dark night of the soul.
But lest you think The Copywriter is pure rage against the machine, or a portrait of the tortured artist, rest assured that Poppick has different aims. Trump is mentioned often, and not in a flattering light ("a crinkled veil of damp ectoplasm" is one of Poppick's kinder descriptions), but politics are more backdrop than foreground. As D__ endures bouts of work and unemployment (neither offering much in the way of spiritual sustenance), seethes over the state of the nation, seeks solace with his poet buddies, and chews over every random thought that occurs to him, his journal becomes less a compendium of grievances than a more existential document regarding time itself. D__'s random musings echo the eddies and flows of his life, as the momentous hangs out with the inconsequential. Everyday items like fortune cookie messages and spice racks rub shoulders with more significant happenings like the death of a grandfather, or the birth of a child. It's no surprise that D__ spends much of his journal quoting passages from Proust's In Search of Lost Time; like Proust, D__ struggles to reconcile past with present, the march of time nudging him towards change and maybe something concrete, like a new poem or two.
In the wrong hands, this sort of self-reflexive playfulness could come off as showy, overdone, or too cool for school, but Poppick is comfortable poking fun at D__ (as well as himself). Erudite, disillusioned and nebbish-y, D__ may be a hip intellectual but confident he ain't. When asked about his poetry, he can only shrug, "Most of it doesn't rhyme," and when he's not sabotaging himself during a first date, he's getting kicked off odd jobs for being a klutz, or finding himself stranded on an Arizona highway on a road trip from hell. Likewise, his observations and attempts at artistic whimsy range from the genuinely clever to half-baked, sometimes both at the same time. Take, for example, his suggested marketing copy for a sandcastle building kit: "Feeling pail? Dig this: you need sun, and a castle to call your own…" At least his stabs at marketing language fare better than those of his other poet friends: "When you think of dish racks, you should think of postmodernity, because postmodern theory is often arid—or, in layman's terms, dry."
The Copywriter's fleetness is its major strength, and also its weakness. Barely pausing to take in one moment before flitting to the next, Poppick lets his fancies fly free, which leads to a few inconsequential tangents. But the broad canvas gives him plenty of room to stretch out with dry wit and idiosyncratic turns of phrase, with (dare we say) poetic results: striking descriptions of landscapes ("Shadows stretched like musical notation over the mountains") and moments ("The night, like a cat, suffers from resting void face"), or brief, sharp vignettes, such as an encounter with an unsympathetic heartland shuttle driver that ends with both D__ and the driver bonding for a brief instant over their disappointments.
For all its wide-ranging aimlessness, D__'s story gains heft as it progresses and he stumbles towards grace, if not catharsis. "I think I've put too much pressure on poetry and love to give my life meaning," he admits late in the book, but The Copywriter finds its soul (and its reason for being) in D__'s passion for poetics (even if he spends too much time thinking up ekphrases for office objects) and his love for his friends. Trumps and jobs may come and go, but comradeship and art are eternal—something surely Proust would have agreed with.
The Copywriter doesn't arrive at a conclusion so much as it reaches an inflection point in D__'s life, as he finally strikes a blow for integrity by quoting Melville's "Bartleby" when asked to perform a morally squishy task at work: "I would prefer not to." The book concludes in 2019, with further unrest looming outside its purview: COVID, more political turmoil, even fewer jobs for liberal arts types like D__. Given the dubious benefit of having too much time ahead of him, D__ may be no closer to answers, but the artistic project called living continues. "So what I believed was nothing to me was simply my entire life," writes Proust, and The Copywriter honors that sentiment in its own digressive, winsome way. It bestows upon D__ (and us) the terrible and wonderful possibility that change is ongoing.