So many questions. This post isn't supposed to be another thimbleful of boiling oil against the barbarian hordes, so I'll come to the main question: what is going on? The Guardian presents perhaps the foremost literary coverage of any newspaper in the UK, and it has a formidable online presence. So perhaps this prominence contributes to the apparently disproportionate number of book news articles, blogs and reviews it publishes that smell of literary anguish. Every week you can read of writer's frustration at being excluded from literary society ("Chick lit is almost a derogatory term") or a pitiful reader dreaming of the golden age of Dickens when literary fiction was mainstream (though never as mainstream as the penny dreadfuls they themselves would never dream of reading let alone calling literary). US literary coverage does not seem to exhibit such concern let alone pain. Something, it seems, is happening. It's more than the externalisation of literary snobbery (i.e. the example-free accusations that Chick lit is "a term of abuse for some, a back-handed compliment for others") and other than playing up to a readership wishing to feel good about itself for sucking on pap: it's an increasingly fraught, self-blinding search for gravity.
While Guy Dammann's report above finds ballast in metal and moneybags, a previous winner finds it in a surprising location: "a novel doesn't have to be unremittingly gloomy to be true to life" says Marian Keyes. Perhaps explaining why she no longer reads Anita Brookner novels, she adds: "I was sick of reading about women in huge shoulder pads striding to the boardroom and having sex on the table. [...] This is not my life." So then: a work is literary to the degree that it is true to life? This would be a turn-up: the work itself must be literary! Keyes' life comes as a surprise:
"I'm a recovering alcoholic and suffer from depression," she said. "I wake up every morning frightened. Fear is a primary emotion for human beings. I haven't drunk for 14 years, but some days getting out of bed and washing my hair is as much as I can manage. I feel incredibly afraid of being alive."Anita Sethi's blog reports that Keyes "draws on the dark periods of her own life" for her fiction. She has "also challenged the stigma of mental illness in our society: To have a mental illness is a taboo, which doesn't do us any favours. It is far better to embrace it than deny it." This is promising not because it suggests her novels "tackle" dark subjects but that they inhabit not just the sentences but the form. She seems to striving for more than fantasy wish-fulfilment: "[the genre] is about the 'dissonance between the self we present to the outside world and what is inside - the hopes, memories and longings that are rarely exposed.'" Would then fictional truth to life be this dissonant music? No wonder, as Lisa Jewells claims, "these are books that people don't just read, they devour them - they stay up into the early hours because they want to devour them." Real life might now be recognised as real only to the degree that it is like one of these books. However, we're told there's a boundary Keyes never crosses in her fiction.
Whatever horror, trauma and pain there is in her work, it is always balanced with lightheartedness, even in a novel that tackles domestic violence. [...] Keyes' sunnier view of life is just as realistic as the unrelenting misery of much contemporary literary fiction.Now who's using derogatory caricatures? Where are these unrelentingly miserable novels? I know that many of them make me miserable but not because of their subject matter. It's because they lack dissonant music; a lack caused, I think, by that conscious act of balancing. The writer's eye is on the reader rather than the truth or the logic of the novel. This has led to the calcification of genre and the so-called literary novel; not in respect of their immanent qualities but as art; their kinetic energy; their gravity.
Evidence: Last week, The Guardian reported that Stef Penny won the Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year Award despite her novel's status as a mainstream literary novel. One of the judges explained that "the distinction between crime and literary fiction is becoming increasingly blurred and irrelevant". And that must be right, yet only because the literary fiction as she understands it - and how it is generally understood - isn't literary at all. Remember, Robinson Crusoe, often recognised - as it is here - as the first English novel, is not a novel by Daniel Defoe but an account told by Crusoe himself. Nowhere on the original title page does it say "novel". It doesn't even give Defoe's name. Among other things, this tells us the novel emerged from the rejection of genre - or, perhaps more accurately, the invention of a new genre. It explains VS Naipaul's recent expression of weariness with contemporary novels and his belief that the great writers who before might have written novels have now moved on to other, non-fictional forms. While this has been interpreted as the death of the novel, it might better be read as a herald of its rebirth.
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