The Life and the Work

Bless Lionel Shriver's little old-fashioned socks. 'I find contemporary absorption in authorial tittle-tattle perplexing', she says, commenting in the Observer on Harvard University's purchase of the papers of Norman Mailer's lover. (Can't find a link, I'm afraid.) She goes on:

As a reader, I do not care what sort of rogue or philanderer wrote the books I love ...In fact, I do not especially care to know anything about the novelists whose work I admire for I've found that meeting most writers distracts, if not detracts, from their work ...the whole concept of publishing - I thought- was to draw a hard line between the public and the private.

She's dead right, in my view, but I do wonder if she's being a little disingenuous: in the real world of publishing to which as a HarperCollins author she most definitely belongs, it's de rigeur now for authors to present themselves as part of the publishing package. She does confess this:

When I mentioned idly to my publicist recently that I'd kept a journal from age 12, she asked if I'd like that archive accessed posthumously, and I blenched. Had I known what was good for me I'd have scurried home and burnt every last notebook in the back garden.

but the implication that she has not done it undercuts her somewhat heartfelt plea: 'Can we return to the days when writers had mystiques?'

Not that it isn't already blatantly undercut by her editors who apparently know better and illustrate her piece with headshots of Mailer himself and the glamorous mistress Shriver would rather not know about (not to mention the obligatory headshot of Ms Shriver herself). It was the same for Melissa Benn whose recent Guardian article complaining about autobiographical readings of her novels was illustrated by pics of the family she was trying to convince us weren't the one in her fiction.

I'm with these authorial complaints, though, and just because the system's got you in its grip doesn't mean you can't shout out. Here's Mark Ravenhill today reacting to an audience member's assumption that 'he must be so unhappy to write about such a horrible world' and to university teaching course moves to counsel students in whose writing violence emerges. I was more annoyed than Ravenhill admits to being when a reviewer said that the execution of one of my novels suffered 'because of my own pain'. Okay, I thought, my teeth grinding: if the novel doesn't work it doesn't work, but you have to be able to prove it by reference to the novel itself, not to my life (especially if, as in my case, you know nothing about it), and don't go criticizing a closeness between the work and the life which you manufactured in the first place!

Meanwhile, none of these worries affect Michel Houellebecq who, like Mailer, knows a good route to publicity when he sees one and has happily publicized the links between his life and fiction. Thing is, though, as ever, the 'facts' can be disputed, in life as well as in art, and today he and his mother make the front page in a spat which sadly bypasses the real matter of fiction: the language, the structure, and the emotional truth they convey.

Technology and Literature

In reviewing Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night for The Observer, Peter Conrad ponders the effect of the internet revolution on literature, and seems to accept Manguel's premise that the effect of ebooks will be negative:

A book read on a screen has dematerialised; we can neither own nor love it, and if we can't hold it in our hands how can we absorb it into our minds?

It's an interesting point which connects with Will Self's recent rejection of the computer as a tool for writing. Earlier this week I made fun of the way Self talked about this, but there's some serious matter here: Self was saying, I think, that the computer and the manual typewriter make for different ways of thinking, and that the latter, more physical tool makes for a more rigorous way and one that he can better 'own'. Personally, I can't even use a typewriter for a first draft of fiction: rightly or wrongly I feel like many writers that those dreams in my head can only come out first through my wrist and my fountain pen onto those lovely smooth Pukka pads.

But it's not true for all writers. And though it's true that historically as readers our experience of books and their contents has been inextricably bound up with the physical - with their feel and look and smell - how can we say with any certainty that things can't change, that we won't find a new way of 'owning' and loving and absorbing books?

I've written before about the potential for the web - in particular digitization - to prolong the life of books and revive those which may have been forgotten, but this book sounds a note of warning:

Manguel is old, wise and sad enough to know that the future belongs to the users of the Kindle reading device and to oafish librarians who discard books as landfill after transferring their contents to disks or CD-Roms that may be illegible in a decade.

Funny, only yesterday my eye happened to land on the stacks of cassettes in my study, my own plays for Radio 4, and it hit me forcibly me that that technology is now so out of date that my plays, some of them prize-winning, a body of several years' busy work, are in danger of fading away for ever. I have no idea whether the BBC has converted its archive into new technology - I stopped writing radio plays when 'heart-warming' became a prime commissioning requirement - but it wouldn't surprise me if it hasn't.

Will Self Is an Alien

Not of course that that's a bad thing. Maybe I'm wrong (I did get interrupted) but I got this impression from BBC's Open Book yesterday: while perfectly happy with his commendable novelistic ability to stand apart like a Martian from our crazy society and see it for what it is, Self has become dissatisfied with his new-found way of thinking 'on the screen' and has decided to return to the manual typewriter and the more human method of thinking: 'in the head'.

Test or Taste?

On the occasion of the anouncement of the Orange prize shortlist, Kirsty Lang, chair of the judges, sums up the dubious nature of literary prizes:

Kirsty Lang ... described the shortlisting process as "arbitrary". "Once you've whittled the books down and got rid of the obvious crap it becomes a question of taste, and books affect people differently ... there are books on this list that some judges hated."

Women: Stick to Your Knitting

While Tim Lott cries into his milk about perceived female hegemony in our literary culture, this week a male magazine staffer declines an offer of a short story of mine by addressing me as 'Mrs Baines.'

Mr Baines was unavailable to comment on behalf of his wife since he doesn't exist any more than she does, but Ms Baines was feeling pretty put out by the thought of some toffee-nosed male Oxford grad (who no doubt believes himself done down by the women in publishing) deciding, like one of the Telegraph commenters, that she ought to go back to her knitting like a good married woman. (See, two can play at that stereotyping game.)

Words Failed Me

Blogging: what's that all about? Literature? Oh yes, literature, funny how you saw it as all-important. There you were in a safe bubble, viewing words as precious stones you could smugly juggle, or as oxygen you breathed, but the bubble has burst and the vacuum's rushing in and there's the real stuff, in a canister on the ambulance wall and a mask across your partner's face, and the words dry pebbles scattering as the ambulance door slams and the wheels begin to turn.

And then the night in Casualty, and the needles and blood tests and drips, and your partner drifting in and out of consciousness, and all the green and blue uniforms coming and going, and the same questions and answers over and over, words drifting like grass seeds on a river of unknowing because no-one knows what's wrong. And then the move to the acute admissions ward, and the cheery young male staff nurse who explains all about the drips and cannulas and the rationale behind the testing, and the young male consultant in jeans who talks like a joker and tells you his suspicions (gall bladder, kidneys or a blockage in the gut, Squire), and the male orderly, if that's what they still call them, bringing you cups of tea and calling you love. And you can't believe you once published a novel condemning the formal and inhumane male hegemony of the medical profession and thought BBC's Casualty was unrealistic and quite sickeningly sentimental, because here they are bending over backwards to give you words like gifts, to give you comfort and what knowledge they have, but the trouble is it isn't much.

And then the days falling into a pattern, a routine of unknowing, the getting up in the morning still exhausted and collecting stuff together to take to the hospital, and talking on the phone to worried relatives, the journey on the bus with all the other visitors with their plastic bags of food and clean laundry, most of them old: you're in a kind of half-world of dependants, hopeful yet passive and resigned; and back at night on the last bus in the dark, with everyone else with their plastic bags of dirty laundry, and some of the hospital workers, and the bus driver, a dissolute-looking fella who drives one-handed while talking on his mobile phone, beginning a running joke with all the old codgers about you and him meeting like this every night while your partner's laid up. And still nothing new: the antibiotics still not working, the seat of the infection not found, and it's all you've talked and thought about all day, though you are reading a book, The Hours by Michael Cunningham, but because it's all about death you keep having to put it down. You begin to understand why books can be too much, and why so many people say they don't have time to read.

And then after three days the young consultant whips the curtain, a conjurer, and tells you they've found it, the cause. There it is, the knowledge, in a picture, not a word: a bright black diamond on the CT scan, a stone, a sharp crystal blocking the ureter and preventing the kidney from draining so that it's massively, life-threateningly infected.

And now the battle to save the kidney: the emergency operation to drain it, the catheter, the urostomy bag for the blocked-off kidney to drain into, more drips, the ongoing search for the right antibiotic, the move to the urology ward. There's a garden here where the patients can wander, and the four blokes in this bay - your partner, a young animator, two chaps in their eighties, all waiting to see if their prostates and kidneys will recover - have set up some unlikely male bonding. Things are calmer. You begin to read the paper more, now and then you listen better to the radio when it's on. One morning you're having breakfast and John Mullen and Mark Thwaite are being interviewed about blog versus newspaper reviewing, and you have the space to be hooked. John Mullen's argument that newspaper reviewers are judicious while bloggers are merely emotional ranters is destroyed not only by Mark Thwaite's reasonableness and logicality, but by Mullen's own wilful misinterpretation: Thwaite explains that one can find worthwhile blogs by following the links from 'one to others like it' (meaning of course equally thoughtful) and Mullen jumps on this gleefully, taking it to mean that such bloggers on the contrary lack intellectual independence and echo one another's opinions. And annoyingly, the interview is ended on this note. You would write a quick sharp blog about this if you still lived in a world in which you blogged.

But you don't: you're rushing around getting stuff together again, and as you do you hear items on Start the Week on subjects you've blogged about before, and which might be worth blogging again - Mark Ravenhill on his series of short plays which yet build to an epic, Maggie Gee on teaching creative writing. But that would be in a different life from the one you're in now, and you only half-heard the items anyway.

But you do look at your email, and this day there's one from a blogger who's reviewed your latest book, and it's your job as a writer, after all, to blog about this, and before you have to run for the once-hourly bus you dash to the computer, and by the time you've done the links you're almost too late out of the door.

And then one day you open the paper and there's a big spread on a subject your blog has often revolved around: Melissa Benn writing, on the occasion of her new novel, about people's insistence on reading her fiction, and fiction in general, as autobiographical, alongside a brilliant piece by Linda Grant on the subject. But this is a day you have a big scare: the bad kidney isn't draining as much, which could mean that it's dying, and although you read the two articles avidly, talking about them on your blog is the last thing on your mind.

Next day there's an article on the semicolon, a subject close to your heart and over which you have waxed lyrical to A-level and Creative Writing students. You don't even read the article. You look at the huge semicolon on the front of G2: a stop, a hint of death, undercut by a comma, a shape a little like a kidney, a link to the future, a start again.

You start again. A CT scan shows that the release of pressure in the kidney has shifted the stop, the stone, which is now allowing some flow around it: this is why there's less drainage into the bag, and the kidney is not dying after all.

In fact, your partner can come home. In fact, the world that afternoon is a glittering place of mineral surfaces - sun on the glass of the hospital, on the top of the taxi zooming up to take you home together - and of words, solid yet shimmering with meaning once more. Maybe you will start blogging again.

The Reality of Literature

Apropos the issue of 'realism' and 'reality' in literature, there's an article in today's Guardian by Tom Sykes recalling how just as his memoir had been accepted for publication, the James Frey scandal broke, so he ended up being made by his publisher's lawyers to check details with everyone mentioned in the book. The joke here is that while no one seemed to mind being portrayed as cheats or dissolutes, they objected to what they saw as minor misrepresentations such as hair colour and verbal ticks, but this last does hinge on a crucial issue at the heart of the debates about both authenticity in memoirs and representation in fiction.

The thing is, what 'authenticity' are we talking about? And whose authenticity? OK, so Tom Sykes sees the beard of his husband's sister as ginger, and she sees it as blond. The acceptance of her objection to this is based on an assumption that there's an objective reality. What a joke! We all see things differently - some of us are even colourblind, and if I shut one eye I can see a particular red chair in my room as more orange than if I shut the other.

What no one seems to be able to grasp is that books - not just fiction, but memoirs too - are never truly about factual reality but about one person's perception, skewed by such physical limitations, by emotion, and by that utterly unreliable factor, memory - and we are fools to expect them to be anything different.

I have written before about a similar experience of my own. I once wrote an autobiographical short story, far more autobiographical than anything else I had ever written. A chance came up to contribute to a collection of memoir pieces, and since at the time it was getting very difficult to place short stories, like a fool I sent it in. Well, my publisher too wanted to take the precaution of asking contributors to check with those who featured in our pieces, and I was forced to contact my sister. And guess what, she remembered things differently from the way I did, and I was forced to change it to her version, with the net result that the so-called 'memoir' I had published is less true to my memory, and therefore less autobiographical, than the piece would have been had I published it as fiction!

Which is why it seems obvious to me that memoirs as a literary form are pretty dubious, and as for fiction: there's no such thing as 'realism', as Will Self says - or at least beyond the reality of the author's psyche.

Believable Characters Are Unbelievable

As far as I'm concerned, Will Self puts his finger on the truth when he says that naturalistic novels, with their pretence of 'veracity', are thus 'more about an invented reality even than the things I write.'

Personally, I'm getting more and more impatient with the concept of 'character', and the fake authority of narratives which purport to anatomize the motivations of characters, so I smiled when I read him quoted as saying that even in life (leave alone books) 'people's motives are so often not just obscure to them, but absolutely fucking mad.'

Sour Grapes and Bitter Fare at the Orange Feast?

Question: Do we still need a prize for women writers?

Tim Lott doesn't think so. He objects strongly in the Telegraph to the notion that there's a need for the Orange Prize, but the bitterness of his piece and the tenor of some of the comments from men on the online piece fill one with the kind of female unease one thought one had long left behind. Lott reasons thus:

Women are predominant, in terms of numbers and power, in most of the major publishing houses and agencies. They sell most of the books, into a market that largely comprises women readers. They are favoured by what is overwhelmingly the most important prize (the Richard and Judy list), and comprise most of the reading groups that drive sales. Girls in schools are more literate than boys, and pupils are taught reading mainly by female teachers promoting mainly female writers.

Yet he also acknowledges this:

Despite 12 years of consciousness-raising by the Orange, the Booker still doesn't give women their mathematical due - a 3:10 ratio remains.

What we could conclude from this, in fact, is that even in a situation where men are in a minority, it is maleness which gets you the most institutionalized accolades (the Booker being our most institutionalized and status-filled literary accolade) - just as while more women than men are teachers, more headteachers are men than women. (And I do hope that the failure of my comment pointing this out to appear on the Telegraph site isn't down to anti-feminism!)

But doubt about the validity of it all isn't just confined to men, and has leaked from the female Orange judges themselves. Last year chair Muriel Gray castigated the entries, and by extension women's fiction in general, for being 'too domestic'. This year chair Kirsty Lang* agrees that a lot of the books were 'domestic dramas'. Asked by the Guardian if she had a problem with that she said not, since 'most readers of fiction are women and we like our reading to reflect our experience', yet this is somewhat undercut by her later statement: 'I would have liked to have seen bigger political themes.'

In other words, here we are again: women may be in the majority as the writers and readers of fiction, but they are identified (rightly or wrongly) with the domestic and the domestic is not valued. (It would be interesting to examine the perception and to look at the precise proportion of both women's and men's books that are either purely domestic or tackle political themes 'through the prism of the family', as Lang says some of the Orange novels do.) (And anyway, when did we go and forget that the personal is political?)

The Guardian focuses on another aspect of Lang's comments: the fact that in general the novels had been 'infected by misery memoirs'. It's not clear whether this is a direct quote from Lang, or a Guardian interpolation, but it's a pretty loaded bombshell, with the negative connotations of 'infected', and its smearing of women's fiction with the dubious moral and aesthetic status (much discussed on this blog) of a non-fiction genre which the Guardian indeed calls 'much derided.'

Perhaps this is the trouble with a prize for women's fiction: it means that any trends in contemporary fiction get blamed on the women, and guys like Edward St Aubyn get off scot-free.


*Sorry, at the risk of proving how inept women are, I confess that in an earlier version of this I called her Kirsty Wark.

Leave Me Out of It

David Jenkins writes in today's Guardian about the experience of finding yourself in someone's novel.

I wrote about it here.

The Trouble With Literary Prizes and Non-Edited Books

Another literary prize judge joins former Booker judges in commenting on the onerousness of the task. At the Wrexham Library launch of the long list for the Wales Book of the Year 2008 (on which I'm delighted to report that fellow Salt author Carys Davies appears), writer and broadcaster Mavis Nicholson reported that she and her two fellow judges had had to read 200 books, all so very different from each other - some sad, some funny - that it was very difficult to turn from one to another and know that you would be giving it a fair reading.

Nicholson's suggestion to the prize organizers for a solution to the problem was that entries should be filtered before the judges take over. In this particular case she felt it was justified as so many of the entries had been what she called 'fluffy' - presumably by this she meant commercial and non-serious, and clearly this award is aimed at literary works. However, as a principle I think this too has problems, as I've written before, and as I was discussing recently with Jen Hamilton-Emery of Salt books. It is at this early stage that the most sophisticated skill in judging or editing is required, the point at which conventional expectations can miss the oddball and innovative.

Nicholson also made a very strong complaint on behalf of all three judges. Too many of the books they had looked at had hardly been edited she said, and were full of spelling mistakes for instance, and it was clear to them that publishers were no longer properly editing books.

Joan Smith Tells Writers to Get Angry

Looks like it's not only me who thinks that writers have been cowed by the current commodification of literature. In an article printed in the latest newsletter of the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society and, I understand, that of the Society of Authors, she invites writers to get angry at last.

'No one likes us much; the general public imagines we're all earning as much as Dan Brown and if we aren't it's our own fault for not being popular enough. Publishers don't like us because we're not Dan Brown, and they don't know how to sell books by writers who aren't already bestselling authors.'

I'll skip over the bit where she says 'bloggers' loathe 'us' because 'they' are jealous of the small success 'we' have achieved and concentrate on the other, more insightful things she says:

'No one wants to hear about the things which have become standard, from barely civil rejections of manuscripts by editors who've loved previous books to incessant demands that books should be easier to read and make fewer demands on readers.

Twenty years ago, when I was writing Misogynies, I was able to include a discussion of the Yorkshire Ripper murders. No one suggested it was too dark or challenging but I very much doubt I'd be able to do it today; not long ago an editor at one of the country's leading publishing houses told me that readers expect even such subjects as sex-trafficking to be handled in a light way....

...Contemporary publishing is driven by an obsession with profit, celebrity and gimmicks, which has resulted in a cull of non-populist writers ... terrorised by accountants and marketing departments, mainstream publishers are desperately trying to work out what sells and the only way they can do it is by referring to something else ... I remember reading that one author's first novel had been reissued under a new title to maintain his 'brand' while another had her career mapped out for her - a string of bestsellers with imaginary publication dates - before her first novel was even in the bookshops.

The result of all this hype is a migration to small independent publishers by authors of the calibre of Francis King, Emma Tennant and Maureen Freely...

...We can react to this in two ways. One is as individuals, demoralised and struggling to find the energy to keep writing. The other is as professional writers who understand the vital role of literature in our culture, and how it's being undermined. When publishers stop doing their job, ours is to get angry and tell the world.

Opening It Up or Narrowing It Down?

You know me: my heart sank when I opened the Observer on Sunday and there was a double-page spread on the new pony race, the public vote for the best Booker book.

After listing some of its benefits -'the Booker stirs up literary debate and makes people who would otherwise go to bed with a biography or a thriller open a novel, probably by someone they've never heard of' and 'promotes a global readership of British fiction' and has come up with 'an impressive list of winners' - the article's author Robert McCrum concludes that while 'lotteries and literature go ill together' (here, here) ' the Booker probably does more good than harm.' ( I actually typed 'more harm than good' and had to edit it!)

I've expressed my doubts previously as to how far such competitions open up people to literature generally. Geared as publisher's marketing campaigns are to them, don't they rather consist of a narrowing of buyers' and readers' focus to just a few books? And isn't this current exercise, along with the earlier Booker of Bookers, a narrowing of the cultural focus even further, in spite of the reports I've read of the publishers of previous but forgotten winners looking forward to a polishing of the backlists?

Interestingly, in the responses from a selection of interviewed previous judges, there emerge some other pretty powerful arguments against the validity of these kinds of competitions.

David Baddiel (2002): I found just reading those books soul-destroying. Your critical faculties get blunted... (my italics)

Rowan Pelling (2004): It's all a bit unfair because you don't read books in a vacuum. As I was having my little boy halfway through the process, the books I read before I gave birth were clouded by pregnancy, whereas I read The Line of Beauty when I was relaxing on holiday in the south of France.

Simon Armitage (2006): It's a hard slog - almost impossible. You have not much more than six months and at one stage, mathematically, it was a book every day and a half.

Adam Mars-Jones (1995): Books have a natural tempo and there can be a violation if you're making yourself read 60 pages an hour.

And Rowan Pelling again, most tellingly: When we were judging we tried three different voting systems and each time a different winner emerged.

And Adam Mars-Jones again, refusing to 'play the game', and telling us instead about the book which didn't win (and about which one wonders if it is still associated with the Booker in the popular mind): The book I genuinely liked best was Taking Apart the Poco Poco by Richard Francis, a family story told in strict equality by two parents, two children and the dog. But I couldn't convince anyone.

Perhaps the most pointed statement comes from the ever down-to-earth DJ Taylor with his eye, like McCrum's, on the paradoxes existing for writers and publishers nowadays:

The thing about serious writing is either it has to be part of the marketing circus or it has to exist in obscurity - there's no middle way.

The Web as the Saviour of Serious Literature

Faber publisher Stephen Page continues to urge the publishing world to embrace the web, which he sees as the saviour of serious literature in a book world

now experiencing a concentration on fewer books derived from an obsession with bestsellers and celebrity, and an increasing sense that what is good is that which sells large volumes. As a result most serious or marginal books now begin life with a decreasing exposure in bookshops.

The Misery-Memoir Saga Goes On

Here we go again: two more cases of a publisher refusing to let the smell of rat put them off a juicy misery 'memoir' (here and here) and then coming over all hoodwinked when it's unveiled as fake. (Thanks to The Accidental Blogger for the links.)

And here's John Crace with a How To guide for misery-memoir writers. This injunction of his best sums up for me what's invidious about the whole fashion for 'authenticity', and it's a point I've made myself before:

remember that readers won't be reading [your book] as you would hope. They are not identifying with your struggle; they are thanking their lucky stars that they aren't you.

The Artful Demotion of Literature

What the **** is going on? I keep coming across statements (usually in comment threads) that literature is not an art but a craft, and now my good friend Adrian Slatcher whose very own blog is named after Henry James's famous essay The Art of Fiction is having a crisis of confidence over the matter - though I suspect really he's artfully or even craftily pulling our legs.

The thing that really takes the biscuit is that the statement is never accompanied by a definition of the writer's terms (the word 'art' can of course carry different meanings). (Well I guess Adrian has a bash.)

Here are some of the Shorter OED definitions:

From Middle English, base meaning 'put together, join, fit'.

I. Skill ... 1. Skill as the result of knowledge and practice ... Technical or professional skill ... Human skill as opposed to nature. 2. The learning of the schools; scholarship (now archaic). 3. The application of skill according to aesthetic principles esp. in the production of visible works of imagination, imitation, or design (painting, sculpture, architecture etc); skilful execution of workmanship as an object in itself; the cultivation of the production of aesthetic objects in its principles, practice and results.

II. ... A pursuit or occupation in which the skill is directed towards the gratification of the aesthetic senses ; the product of any such pursuit.

It seems to me that the current opposition of 'art' and 'craft' on the web is a hierarchical one, and on the whole the thrust seems to be to value the notion of literature as 'craft' (and thus honest and straightforward) over the notion of literature as 'art' (airy-fairy and pretentious) - and the idea seems to be that those who consider their writing 'art' are being pretentious. Inherent in all this is a concept of literature as inferior to or at any rate different from the 'real' arts and of writers requiring less 'innate talent' for their chosen form (Adrian Slatcher) than do, say, musicians or painters.

But the OED definition of art I 1) would apply very well to any 'mere' or 'down-to-earth' craft. As for the last two definitions I've quoted, well, what I want to know is what good piece of literature is not a work of 'imagination, imitation or design' or not 'directed towards the gratification of the aesthetic senses'?

The deeper question to ask here is: why is there such a fear of the notion of literature as art? Is it linked to the general commodification of literature and does the fact that so many are expressing it mean that writers have finally been cowed?

How We Read

An article on Alan Sillitoe by DJ Taylor in The Guardian Review has set me thinking about the ways we read and about how far a consciousness of this affects the way we write. The comment of Taylor's which interests me was that Sillitoe's early depictions of working-class life were originally received by critics as anthropological insights, and as a result their artistry was overlooked or ignored.

My first reaction was surprise since it was Sillitoe's artistry which so forcibly struck me as a working-class but educated teenager (and which now, as Taylor says, strikes the critics) - and which indeed fuelled my desire to write. A moment's reflection, though, and it's not surprising at all, given that the literary establishment of the time was middle to upper class and if we accept that one of the main things that people want from books, rightly or wrongly and whether or not they are aware of it, is a sense of identification or inclusion.

Regular readers of this blog will know very well that I frequently rail against the lowest-common-denominator effects of a literary culture which panders too much to this impulse in readers, and argue with James Wood for the encouragement of a more mature reading of fiction, but I have to say that as a writer I take a different tack: I want to lure readers, and I can't assume they are my Ideal Readers, they're only human after all, and it's only human to want to identify with the characters and situations in books.

As a writer you simply can't afford to sneer as James Wood does at the 'book clubs up and down the country' where 'novels are denounced because some feeble reader "couldn't find any characters to identify with", or "didn't think that any of the characters 'grow" ' (my italics). It is as if for Wood these readers are not the real readers, but every writer knows that they are, and as for the literati and the critics, well those fifties critics of Sillitoe were hardly exempt from the 'sin'. For me evidence of the need to identify is everywhere, from my own feelings of exclusion as a teenager from the ethos and mentality of some middle-class novels to Sarfraz Manzoor's recent statement at a reading that he felt excluded from the biographies about 'non-ordinary' lives which he read as a teenager (an exclusion which indeed propelled him write his own memoir as redress). And the trouble is, as Taylor indicates, if you're stuck on that, on non-identification, as indeed were those fifties critics of Sillitoe, you can't easily get past to appreciate or enjoy the other elements of a novel, the artistry, the writing.

The prior experience of the reader ultimately determines - or at least inevitably affects - the reading. At present I'm reading Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky for my reading group and it struck me to wonder how much less vivid the descriptions of the North African landscape and villages (vivid as they are) would have been for me before I had travelled myself. There's another thing we read for besides identification (I'm sure Pierre Bayard must say it in his book How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read but I haven't read it - hah!). This is for an extension of our experience - it's what I think most children read for, and why as an aspirational teenager I did gobble up other middle-class books. But when as a nineteen-year-old steeped in images from The Odyssey and Euripedes I made my first trip to Greece, I was still shocked by the reality: so that's what the smell of eucalyptus trees is like! So that's what it's like to be buffeted in the face by a hot wind! So that's why it's called the wine-dark sea! And my re-readings afterwards were incomparably richer.

Which is why I have been known to state that ultimately any piece of fiction is necessarily what a reader makes of it. But that shouldn't stop us as writers trying to draw in as many readers as possible. The most obvious way to do this is to make readers 'like' characters, although this isn't always possible or desirable (and I suppose it's the insistence on this emotionally easy formula which Wood is attacking) but some means must be found to cause the reader to make an emotional investment in at least some of the apparatus of a story or novel - an investment which goes beyond mere anthropological interest if that is not yours as the writer. The point is to get the reader to share with you the emotional heart of the novel, wherever it lies for you as the author, and to do this you must create a spell.

One of the ways I try to do this - probably a result of my background as a teacher - is to follow Orwell's advice and 'never use a long word when a short one will do.' This is not to patronize readers but to strive to make every word immediately lucid in order not to spoil the flow for any reader and break the fictive spell. But then another thing I know is that some people like books with long, abstract or foreign words precisely because they read to have their egos flattered and feel clever...

Catch-up

A few things I think worth noting:

Kate Pullinger contributes a characteristically feisty article to today's Guardian drawing attention to the fact that authors are in danger of losing out in new contracts with publishers over digital rights. She points out that since digital books will make printing, warehousing and transport unnecessary,

'the primary function of a publishing house in the digital age is selection and branding, though even this is difficult to quantify and define: for the most part we don't buy a book because it is published by Penguin, we buy the book because we want to read that writer.

At the end of the day, the writer herself is a more valuable brand than the publishing house and it's time for writers to wake up to this fact: why should we sign contracts giving us a paltry 15% royalty in an industry where actual costs are being massively reduced overnight? Why aren't writers jumping up and down over this?'

Earlier this week, in the wake of William Sidelsky's Prospect article on newspaper review pages and in answer to earlier criticisms on the Guardian books blog, books editor Claire Armitstead set out her principles in drawing up The Review (and inevitably provoking further criticism from commenters).

Finally, I hope to god that Madame Arcati is writing a novel.

Is Contemporary Fiction Tired?

There's something in the air. The Guardian Review Diary reports (as did Vanessa Gebbie on her blog last week) that George Steiner has told a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature that contemporary fiction, and in particular British contemporary fiction, is 'in deep trouble'.

'The power of metaphor is located in constraint,' he is reported as saying, and 'now that anything can be said, fiction is in deep trouble ... I believe the narrative form is very tired.'

In the same edition of the Review, Gilbert Adair, paying tribute to the innovative novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet who died last week, expresses much the same opinion (although presumably he doesn't share Steiner's faith in metaphor as the defining characteristic of fiction, since Robbe-Grillet famously set out to 'emancipate literature from the seductive tyranny of metaphor which he accused of anthropomorphising the material world'.)

Adair says: 'Whatever the qualities of McEwan, the Smiths Zadie and Ali, and any other contemporary English-language writer one cares to cite, can it honestly be said of them that they have reinvented the novel?'

I have to say I'm a bit put out on behalf of Ali Smith and her fictive project (partly I guess because I'm currently trying to do something similar myself). Smith's fiction is specifically concerned with the contingency of narrative, both in subject matter and, quite brilliantly, in form. The titles of her novel sections (she eschews conventional 'chapters') indicate her concerns - 'past', 'present historic' etc (Hotel World), 'The beginning', 'The middle' (The Accidental) - and her books sing with the fluidities and uncertainties of being which no conventional narrative mode could convey, and thus are exhilarating and anything but tired.

Edited in:

I omitted Adair's concluding and most important point: he lays the blame for the conservatism of contemporary British fiction with the current market-driven literary culture in which publishers are forced to seek what they know sells:

'Literary fiction is thriving, so why tamper with it? Yet as the case of Alain Robbe-Grillet proved, the most influential artists are those who choose to fix something that no one else noticed was broken.'

Bad Publicity Turned to Good

I suggest that anyone who still thinks that not all publicity is good publicity takes a look at this site dedicated to 'disgraced' author James Frey. The email from his publishers John Murray alerting us to it specifically uses his 'bad publicity' as a hook, thus:

I'm not sure if you're familiar with the James Frey/'a million little pieces' controversy but if you are, then this site might be of interest!