Right. That is fucking IT!

[The matinée idol] chuckles, seeming to contemplate the absurdity and drudgery of the logocentric realm, where scriveners scribble and toil, huffing and puffing like stevedores as they lift and carry big Latinate verbs and portmanteau nouns while Jason and his kind get all the pussy.

- Jay McInerney, Model Behaviour

Cover charges

1) In the flap copy of Philip Roth's not-particularly-highly-acclaimed The Humbling (2009), his optimistic editors/publicists have used the adjectives 'shattering', 'terrifying', 'unusual', 'erotic', 'haunting' ... and 'startling'. They note, also, that this is 'Roth's thirtieth book'. Even indifferent readers of Roth will see where I am going with this.

2) The back-cover blurb of Jay McInerney's Model Behaviour begins

'I'm sick of all this pointless glamour,' his glamorous girlfriend said. 'I want a simple life.' If only Connor McNab had listened.

Which is all well and good - except that the hero's name is Connor McKnight. Who's the McNumbnuts in Jay Mc's publicity camp?!

3) Dr Gregory House is well-known for owning lots of sneakers (it's an irony, see: cripple with running-shoe collection?*). More to the point, the rules of product-placement make it pretty hard to miss the fact that they are always Nike sneakers. Only on the cover of series 6 - my copy, anyway - House is quite evidently wearing New Balance. Oops.

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* Also a running gag, come to that.