The Author's Voice

As I said a few posts ago, I'm rarely thrilled by readings of fiction by actors, who have a tendency to 'do' characters' voices, while self-consciously imposing their own (often pretentious) voices on the 'narrative'. There's a strange effect: characters and 'narrative' become separated in a weird literalness, when together they ought to form one organic narrative voice.

This morning Radio 4's Woman's Hour featured Edna O'Brien, whose The Country Girls is currently being reissued. Now, Edna O'Brien does not have a young woman's voice. It was perhaps one of the most moving things I have heard: a palimpsest of storytelling which no young actor, attempting to approximate the voice of the young naive narrator, could ever have achieved.

Women, Publishers and Language

Laura Dietz asks if the ubiquitousness of unchallenging 'domestic' writing by women is the fault of women writers themselves, or of publishers who overlook the more challenging work of female writers. It looks like the latter, is her tentative conclusion, since the all-female winners of the New Writing prize - all of whom would have sent in their own best unpublished work - have been praised as innovative and bold, whereas the Orange prize, based on already-published books nominated by their publishers, tends, she says (or at least Muriel Gray, last year's chair, said), to be dominated by books which conform to traditional conventions.

One commenter on the post opens up the discussion of what in fact makes for challenging writing - subject matter or writing style and use of language - and states the opinion, with which I agree, that it's on the level of language and style which books can be the most challenging.

It would be nice to think that the appearance on this year's Booker shortlist of Anne Enright - a linguistically bold and innovative writer if I ever saw one - is a welcome sign of a reversal of the situation Dietz describes.

Book Reviews

Interesting post by Dan Green at The Reading Experience on the 'crisis in book reviewing'.

When is a Short Story Not a short Story?

Yesterday Julian Gough wrote in the Guardian about the current state of the short story, expanding on a view he touched on previously, via this blog: that while short stories may appear to have been squeezed from our present culture, in reality they survive, sometimes extended to novella length by writers such as Ian McEwan, at other times linked together, as in David Mitchell's books, to create what he says could be called the 'multistory novel'.

Gough presents these developments as meaning that the short story is after all alive and well (just a little bit hidden), and are a Good Thing: Our lives feel fragmented enough already, he says, and all short story writers need to do is come up with an 'organising principle'. But I don't think he even needs to make this case: Salt Publishing have just sent me a splendid leaflet detailing their new list of short story collections. And I can't help thinking that by doing so, and by implying that short stories are 'fragments', as a writer of (marvellous) stand-alone stories he's just shot himself, and the rest of us short-story writers, in the foot.

Depends What You're Judging

Any author would be a fool not to be glad of the exposure gained by winning a prize, but that should not prevent us from noting certain invidious aspects of the whole prize game. Notwithstanding the buzz of critical comment (especially on the web) each time the result of the Booker or any other literary competition is announced, there is an ingrained public acceptance, I think, that the winner has been judged The Best - with the danger of a consequent diminishing in the public perception of those works over which it has won.

Great then that Giles Foden, one of this year's Booker judges, has this to say about the judging process, now at shortlist stage:

Filters affect outcomes. If one looked only at literary style, Anne Enright or Ian McEwan would win. If one considered books as nothing but psychological mechanisms, Mohsin Hamid would be the victor: The Reluctant Fundamentalist does subtle things to manipulate its readers. For implicit polemic and strong portrayal of character, however, Indra Sinha would be the choice. If it's strangeness and beauty you're after, look no further than Nicola Barker's Darkmans. Then there is Lloyd Jones, the supposed new favourite and (according to some reports) an "unknown writer", whose Mister Pip would win if the sole criterion was the emotional impact of the story.

Judges in other years have revealed the way that some of these criteria can outweigh others, and other factors that come into play, such as compromise choices. One time that I was on the judging panel for a competition for an unpublished novel, the eventual winner hadn't even featured on most of the judges' personal shortlists.

Articles like Foden's contribute towards transparency, but I sometimes think it would be good if judging panels went the whole hog and officially owned up to their 'filters'. Though thinking back to that particular first-novel competition, you can see why they don't...

The Myth About Facts

It's an interesting paradox that in a culture hooked on the value of fact over fiction, there's a tendency not to allow certain facts to get in the way of a nice juicy story, especially if it involves a scapegoat to get everyone else off the hook.

This morning the Guardian prints an article by Suzanne Goldenberg reporting that James Frey is now to publish a novel as a novel, and not (as with his previous book) as a memoir. Not so long ago, the very same paper published a long profile of James Frey by Laura Barton, in which Frey claimed that he had never intended his first book as a memoir, but was pressured by publisher responses to sell it as such. Many authors would have recognized from personal experience - as indeed did the Bitch - a situation which is becoming all too familiar. After I wrote about it, an agent commented thus on my post:

As an agent, I feel quite strongly that Frey was shafted by his publisher and agent. Not only must they have known that embellishment was going on, they *did* know - I met an editor at Doubleday who told me, prior to the book's Oprah laurels, that he was sure some of the book wasn't true. It is deeply disingenuous of the professionals closely involved in the book's publication to claim they were duped by Frey, ruthless of them to drop him, and deeply immoral for them to continue to profit from the discredited works which they are merrily doing.

Yet this statement and Frey's Guardian claim are still apparently out of the equation, and the assumption that Frey simply and deceitfully duped his publishers, as well as the public, persists. Today's Guardian article replicates that version wholesale, damningly referring to 'his deceptions'. Goldenberg makes much of the fact that Frey made personal apologies on both the Oprah Winfrey show and in a new edition of the book, but to take that at face value is to show a monumental naivite, and to underestimate the vulnerability and powerlessness of authors. James Frey would not be the first author to be forced to issue a public apology for something for which he/she was not solely responsible - the Bitch is one, for a start, and her publisher was nothing like as powerful as Frey's - and to comply out of sheer dread of being dropped.

Funny how, in a world hooked on facts, some of the facts seem too slippery to hold. Seems then they need to be stated over and over again.

Too Old or Too Young?

Zoe Williams has a witty crack on the Guardian books blog at both the cult of youth and the supremacy of memoir over fiction in present-day publishing.

Il Gatto Mumificato

I think I've spelled that right - I don't have a good Italian dictionary!

Still on the theme of writers' lives (as opposed to their books), last Saturday Lucasta Miller wrote interestingly about visiting writers' houses. Virginia Woolf was ambivalent, she says, finding the Bronte's house touching yet vulgarising and detracting from the work, but Miller's own visit to the Wordsworths' house in Somerset added to her understanding of Dorothy.

Some years ago I visited Petrarch's house in Northern Italy. There was a lovely atmosphere, stone floors smoothed by the years to a polish, beautifully tinted rounded leaded panes, an orange grove outside I think, and things in glass display boxes - manuscripts, quill pens, pictures, I think - oh I don't know, I could hardly look at anything but Petrarch's cat: mummified and mounted on the wall! His cat! See, that's what I know about Petrarch now: he loved his cat!! And in spite of all the words I have spilled about writer's books being more important than their lives, that was something I was really glad to know, and the mummy seemed to me touching and not macabre at all!!

Off With Their Heads

The estimable Steerforth has, as far as I know, no writer's axe to grind, and his unsentimental bookseller's arguments for the need for marketability in fiction are always admirably reasoned. So I think we can take seriously his comment on my post below:

These days I'm often told that unless X's third novel works, they're going to be dropped. It can sometimes be shocking how many well-known names fall into that category.

Not Hot Enough to Handle?

Apparently, once upon a time Ian Rankin's early Rebus novels were not successes. Debi Alper points out that nowadays he'd be likely to be dropped rather than allowed the time to build such a following that those early editions are now collectors' items...

Scared of Interacting?

A Stevens asks in the Guardian books blog whether litblogs, with their scope for ready 'roastings', are making writers risk-averse. In the comments the matter discussed here recently comes up, ie whether some mystique surrounding writers would serve their books better. No way, says suzanabrams: as a result of the blogosphere, interactivity between writers and readers is here to stay.

Literature: Can't Face it.

It's as I was saying: it's a great shame that people can't take literature undiluted and have this urge to know about the author and see him or her in the flesh. And as I've said before, and as Alyssa McDonald says on the Guardian books blog, publishers ought to take note of the fact that too many author readings can put you right off a book. I can't agree with her about Simon Armitage, though, whom she thinks a terrible reader: like several of the commenters I find that the 'flatness' of which she complains in his reading allows him to avoid the melodramatics of which she also complains in other readers, and allows the work to breathe separate from his person. MacDonald advocates the use of actors, but I can never abide the readings of actors - they always privilege the 'characters' over the narrative voice - and some of them have such pretentious narrative voices - and as a performer myself I'm always worried that I'll do this too.

Some of the commenters suggest the Guardian uses a less unflattering photo of Armitage - but no one so far, I notice, has suggested taking it off altogether...

Grace Paley

I was saddened by the death of Grace Paley last week, which I first read about on a Susan Hill's blog, and not in a newspaper. Paley's greatness as a short story writer is clearly yet to be fully acknowledged - or maybe it's the continuing British misapprehension that short stories can never be great - but great she most certainly was. Linguistically tough and inventive yet poetic, political yet lyrical, her stories give voice to a multitude of American immigrant experiences, clear eyed about pain and yet singing with optimism, a combination brilliantly captured in the Sally Ducksbury paintings on those eighties Virago covers above. It was Paley who taught me about the true meaning of Voice in fiction, and she was one of my greatest inspirations as a short-story writer. Perhaps my favourite of her stories is A Conversation with My Father in which her father, on his death-bed, chides her for not writing good old fashioned linear stories like de Maupassant or Chekhov. Ever obliging and, like the real-life Paley open to every possibilty, the daughter in the story tries, but not without commenting on

'..the absolute line between two points which I've always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.'

You Stick with Your Reading, I'll Stick with Mine

Here's a quote from, would you believe it, the publicity for Atonement:

'A book is an illusion, a series of symbols on a page that create an narrative in your mind. There are as many different versions of the book as there are readers of it. I've made an adaptation of the book that happened in my head as I read it.' - Jo Wright, Director.

Well, yes, precisely my objection to screen adaptations of novels, as I've said before, and written about in more detail on my other blog, and the very reason I won't be rushing to see this one.

Coincidence or a Bad Girl Misbehaving?

As we've discussed on this blog before, you can't copyright ideas, and you'd be mad to want to, but it's riling when someone appears to have taken your idea and flown with it, and doesn't even acknowledge you...

Maybe this isn't at all what has happened in the case of the anthology, Bad Girls: 26 Writers Misbehave, edited by Ellen Sussman, newly published in the US and receiving a lot of publicity, most recently in the New York Times. This book is strikingly similar in concept to last year's UK Bitch Lit anthology from the non-profit Crocus Books (in which one of my stories appears), but apparently bears no acknowledgement of the similarity. It's perfectly possible that when in 2004 Mary Sharratt, Bitch Lit co-editor with Maya Chowdhry, went to Ellen Sussman with a proposal for a US Bitch Lit version, Sussman had already had the same original idea. Though you can't blame Sharratt for wondering why, if so, she didn't she mention it.

Normblog profile

I am honoured to have a Normblog profile up today.

Writers versus Books

Joseph Ridgwell writes on the Guardian books blog about ageism in British publishing, but spoils his own case with his suggestion, only half tongue-in-cheek I think, that people should be banned from publishing books before they are thirty.

The point which gets rather swamped in the comment debate he thus generates is that the age of a writer should be irrelevant. We should stop thinking in terms of the personal characterstics of writers and get back to thinking in terms of books.

Coming up with the Goods

It seems unanswerable, doesn't it, the statement made so often in response to complaints that nowadays good novels don't always find publishing homes: 'Publishing is a business, not a charity'?

How can you deny it? Why would anyone continue publishing if they had to make losses?

But as I read an edited version of Jeremy Paxman's Edinburgh Festival castigation of the BBC for a loss of standards, in which he stated: 'Youth... This is the great motive force in contemporary television. Why do they want to find it? The motive is the same everywhere. Money' - well, another thought popped into my head:

There's business and there's business and there's money and there's money. After all, you wouldn't defend a grocer or a food wholesaler for being so obsessed with money he drops his standards and cheats his customers, or even poisons them, would you?

The Long and the Short of It

Mark Ravenhill writes about the ‘hunger for the epic’, the apparent need in a world devoted to the soundbite and fleeting images, a world where ‘brevity is everything’, for something meatier: the doorstop novel (he cites Harry Potter), the epic movie (Pirates of the Caribbean) and the hours-long stage play (David Edgar’s popular adaptation of Nicholas Nickleby for the RSC).

Ravenhill has been presenting a series of breakfast-time plays at the Edinburgh festival. The fact that people have got up early (after late festival nights) to pack out his houses he sees as another example of this hunger, because the plays are interconnected and thus episodes in what he views as an epic project.

I think he’s looking at this the wrong way round. As Ravenhill himself comments, ‘Many critics pointed out how much the Harry Potter books would benefit from an editor’s pencil’. What does this mean? It means that those who read Harry Potter don’t mind this, probably don’t notice it, they read it passively, even unthinkingly, rushing on through the narrative in a way which is not at odds, as Ravenhill would have it, with an accelerated world and an impatient culture. It’s the short thing, the tightly-packed thing, the short story or the short play, which requires the leisured and thoughtful response and close attention to language, not the longer work, as Ravenhill claims.

Maybe Ravenhill is right that people are now hungering after more intellectually-challenging literary or theatrical experiences. But could it not be that the popularity of his festival plays is down to their shortness and the linguistic compactness which this allows, the piecemeal presentation which gives the audience the chance to breathe and think and ‘gradually see the rules and patterns’ of the larger project? And could this be why short stories now seem to be on the up?

Words for Free

Not so long ago, discussing the controversy over copyright and Google Booksearch, I described my feeling of pleasure when two out-of-print anthologies in which my work featured appeared on Google Booksearch, and my disappointment when they disappeared again (they have since been reinstated). As I stated then, although the actual contents of those books weren't available online I wouldn't have minded if they had been, since I didn't think it likely that many people would otherwise read the few copies available in libraries such as that of the University of Michigan.

Today Peter Finch, Chief Executive of the Welsh Academy, writes to Academy members (of which I'm one) about Welsh Journals Online, a proposal by the National Library of Wales to digitize the entire content of the majority of twentieth-century literary periodicals in Wales.

A member of a nation in which education and literature have always had pride of place, he acknowledges the excitingly democratic nature of library digitization projects:

No need any longer to visit the National Library at Aberystwyth to don white gloves and look at the ancient pages of Brut y Tywysogion. Log on and there are all the pages - viewable entirely for free and with no problem parking your car in order to get to see them. A service for the public has been created that is entirely in keeping with the spirit that founded the public library service

and as a gifted and serious writer himself, he understands my impulse above. Authors on Welsh Journals Online will not be paid and 'will be given the right to say no and not to participate but the reality is that most will want to be included. This will offer some of them an opportunity to see work from years past appear again to re-read and re-evaluate'.

However, he points out this project has been funded:

In a society rich enough to pay for civic flowerbeds to be weeded and town centres to be illuminated 24/7 then authors should get something for what they do. In the whole digitisation process staffers working on the project at the National Library of Wales will be paid. So too the funders and Welsh Assembly Government and JISC. The operators of the internet servers on which the final project is to be stored will also receive financial consideration, as will the owners of the telephone lines down which the information will travel and the manufacturers of the equipment with which users will access it. But the creators of the works being read, the raison d'etre for the whole enterprise, they'll get nothing.

He has a big point there, I reckon. There is something pretty amazing about the ubiquitous idea that, as far as literature is concerned, if there is ever any money going, the last people it should go to are the primary providers. So we do it for the love of it? Should we stop paying doctors or teachers or plumbers if they heal or teach or plumb for the love of it? As Finch says, it's too late to do anything about this project - the money has already been allocated - but in the rush towards digitization this assumption must be challenged.