The End for Writers

Stuart Jeffries examines How Waterstone's killed publishing. So great is the stranglehold of the book chains over publishers that he can't get any publishers to talk openly about the situation. Agent Bill Hamilton tells him that "They fear speaking out about how their books are being sold." Hamilton, a man who should know, tells us instead:

"There's been a slow bonfire of literary authors in the last 18 months," says Hamilton. "Publishers are sending out to pasture established literary novelists because they realise they aren't going to be sold by the chains. The complaint now from publishers is that most of their quality books hardly get a look in at all"

Old Authors: Shut Up

Same old story from Robert McCrum as he adds fuel to the ageism of our literary culture once again. (It's always the same old story, Observer, today.) Old authors ought to shut up, is his basic message, pointing to the thinness of Roth's latest novel, the disappointment of Nabokov's recently revealed last, and the fact that Doris Lessing is remembered for the novels she wrote in her forties rather than her latest, written at 87 - and the fact that Shakespeare hung up his quill before he was 50, another aspect, according to McCrum, of his genius. McCrum rather shoots himself in the foot again, though, with his finger-wagging retort to Tolstoy's avowal, expressed at the age of 79, not to be silent: that Tolstoy produced his last 'novel of any consequence' at the tender age of 72...

Edited in: This, ironically, in an edition of the review which leads with an appreciation by Tim Adams of Alan Bennett and the cover story strapline: At 75, with a masterly new play on stage, are we finally seeing the true Alan Bennett?

Same old

Joe Queenan is sick of the repetition in film which current marketing practice has created. (They liked this, so let's give them another.) Most of the films he mentions, though, are populist, and while many of us deplore the blanket application of such marketing philosophy to all films and books, including the serious and 'literary', I only have to haul my ex-mother-in-law before you once again to indicate that, when it comes to populist culture, the marketers have got it right. Picture her once more: rotund, leaning back in the soft chair by the fire, feet up on the side of the fireplace, Mills and Boon in her hand, utterly engrossed for two solid hours. Then she gets to the end and snaps the book shut with great satisfaction, heaves herself, knees spread, from the chair, stops half-way up with a thought and then says, matter-of-fact: 'Mmm, think I might have read that one before!'

Definitive versions?

Today in the Observer Tim Adams reviews Beginners, the unexpurgated version of Raymond Carver's second story collection, published by Gordon Lish as What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. He finds the differences startling, but that the 'new' version is nevertheless 'an extraordinary book, more generous and rambling in tone than its distilled counterpart', more nuanced, yet 'still recognizably Carver's'.

Struck by the incongruity of that last thought - presumably that we should be looking for, and hoping for, what we think of as Carver's 'real' voice in his more original work - Adams muses most interestingly on the power and practice of editors:

Editing of Lish's kind is a dark art, but not so unusual. I used to work for a literary magazine, Granta, where the editor, Bill Buford, brought a Lish-style idea of editing to all the content. In some pieces, long stories of 10,000 words or more, not a sentence of the writer's original draft stood. Many writers were grateful for these interventions: they had never sounded so good. Some, of course, balked at the mauling. Carver's friend Richard Ford, for one, would always take Buford back through any story and painstakingly argue for the choice behind every word and comma until the original was restored exactly, not in every case better, but all his own.

One does wonder if this still happens: the Booker judges this year complained at the apparent lack of editing. But you never know, really: as a once-editor myself, I know that it's perfectly possible to overlook the typos but still mess about with a writer's prose, and anyway I suspect that in general nowadays an obsession with the market promotes a cavalier attitude towards authors' intentions which allows for the former and leads to the latter.

The Carver-Lish debate and these Granta revelations focus on the issue of prose style. My experience with my first novel was to have to submit to a change of structure - simple but radical: chapter four was moved to the beginning - specifically designed to create a very different type of novel (as I indicated recently) which would appeal to a very different market. As a new young writer I felt I didn't have a leg to stand on in this matter, but I was never happy with the result, and later republished the book with its original structure restored. Adams predicts that the publication of Beginners will start a trend in this direction - 'the author's cut'.

(If anyone is interested, the revised edition of my first novel The Birth Machine - The Author's Cut, which includes a preface discussing the implications of the changes, is available on Amazon or direct from me via my profile along with a limited number of used copies of the original edition.)

Carver and Tricks

Interesting Guardian books blog article by Stuart Evers on Carver and Lish, and the matter of experimentation/innovation in short stories. As usual, the comments illustrate the wide variety of responses readers can have to a single author...

Robert McCrum Tells it Like it Is

A friend of McCrum's has, like so many of us, fallen foul of the current situation in which

new fiction by unknown writers, the lifeblood of the business, is being scrutinised by people who have neither appetite for, nor understanding of, originality.

He says what I have been saying for years about the errors of contemporary publishing marketing philosophy:

Here, as in Hollywood, [from the nineties] the cry was: "Give us books that look like other successful books"... Original books are, by definition, not like others. They must be selected by experienced readers (aka editors).

History Matters

Good article by Hilary Mantel on recent comments about historical fiction.