The paperback of Matrimony has a different cover from the hardback. A new cover for the PB is pretty common these days, and Vintage, my paperback publisher, does it for most of their books. Thanks to the web, you can get oodles of feedback on the matter, and one book blog, which did a giveaway of MATRIMONY a couple of weeks ago, asked all entrants to weigh in as to which cover they liked better. Lots of strong opinions. The contest also led to an extended correspondence between one of my readers and me as to whether the women's shoes that appear on the PB cover would in fact have been worn by Mia. The reader went on at great length about what Mia looked like--what clothes she wore and other Mia-related sartorial and hygiene details. She had a clear and detailed (and accurate) physical sense of Mia, but when I asked her how she knew all this, she said, "Why, it's in the book."
Actually, it isn't. I know, because I wrote the book. Yes, Mia is described physically at various points in the novel, but not in the detail that this reader offered me. This, it seems to me, is what Hemingway meant by the tip of the iceberg. If you get your details right, the tip of the iceberg implies the whole iceberg. I think of Carver's "Cathedral" as an example of a story in which the physical details about the blind man are pretty sparing (he's blind, he smokes, he has a beard), but they're nonetheless rendered so specifically and the story is animated by such a distinct voice that, boy, do you have a clear picture of the blind man. It's not true of all of Carver's work (in his lesser stories, all you get is the tip of the iceberg without the whole iceberg implied), but the best of them--and I'd include "Cathedral" in that category--are worth reading over and over again.
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