One hesitates to accuse the author of the masturbatory masterpiece Portnoy’s Complaint of dewy-eyed innocence but, man, you thought reality was too crazy in 1961? Try President Trump, machines that write poetry, the zombification of the greater portion of humanity by electronic screens, the chainsaw-wielding president of Argentina, Nigel Farage in the jungle …
But Roth was, however precipitately, on to something. With every passing year, reality gets stranger and fiction declines in prestige and relevance. This week may be remembered as the first time that a really bad novel — Paul Lynch’s chronically overwritten Prophet Song — won the Booker prize. It is certainly the first year that none of the shortlisted novels made the newspaper bestseller lists.
Literary fiction, one of the centrepieces of 20th-century culture, is in a decade-long collapse. A miasma of indifference hangs over the genre. Novelists will soon be as indigent and overlooked as poets.
“There are plenty of great political novels, but they start off with the story, not the message.”
Dystopian novels are a literary mixed bag. Done well they can transform tiny seeds of present danger into a living, breathing, terrifying vision of a future. Done badly and they feel hammy, didactic, just a little bit YA.
[…]
And if I had to judge Prophet Song on conveying this political message, I would say it had succeeded. But I have to judge it on its value as a novel, and this is where things get trickier. Printed on the back of the book is a glowing blurb by the author Samantha Harvey. Reading Prophet Song, she says, “you remember why fiction matters”. So why does fiction matter? Should it influence hearts and minds, provoke political change? Or should it do more? Should it, as Nabokov famously said, provide “aesthetic bliss”, invoking a little shiver of pleasure in our spines?
There are plenty of great political novels, but they start off with the story, not the message.
[…]
But these remain rare glimpses of Lynch’s talent, of what the novel could have been. It’s a pity that it becomes an exercise in totalitarianism-by-numbers.
“To write a good book you have to have certain qualities”
To write a good book you have to have certain qualities. Great art is connected with courage and truthfulness. There is a conception of truth, a lack of illusion, an ability to overcome selfish obsessions, which goes with good art, and the artist has got to have that particular sort of moral stamina. Good art, whatever its style, has qualities of hardness, firmness, realism, clarity, detachment, justice, truth. It is the work of a free, unfettered, uncorrupted imagination. Whereas bad art is the soft, messy self-indulgent work of an enslaved fantasy. Pornography is at one end of that scale, great art at the other end.
“Alternatively, you could invite them all to spend a week in Wyoming. But that would be science fiction.”
As any reader of Jane Austen will argue, a small dramatic arena is no handicap, and it can become the stage for the most expansive passions. I confess, however, that there were moments in this new film when I prayed for Beth, Don, and the gang to be harried down Madison Avenue by cybernetic pterosaurs firing Sidewinder missiles tipped with alien venom. Alternatively, you could invite them all to spend a week in Wyoming. But that would be science fiction.
“The whole exercise is nonsense”
The publicity mechanisms by which books are brought to the paying public have become — to use another jargon word from the creative writing seminars — “performative”, a kind of ceremonious ritual in which all of those involved delightedly play up to the parts created for them.
Books have to have their sponsors. Authors are flattered to have their manuscripts sent out for peer review. Peer reviewers are gratified to be asked, and no one would ever dare to turn captious (how many professional writers sent a book by another professional writer to commend ever feel like saying that, alas, they didn’t think it was any good?).
The result is an orchestrated exercise not so much in mass deception as in enthusiastic lily-gilding, epitomised by the appearance of Zadie Smith on the cover of a Karl Ove Knausgaard novel comparing the experience of reading his darling work to being addicted to crack cocaine.
As with Amy Hempel and her “every word is essential” or Tash Aw with his “all that is vital to human existence”, this is meaningless. Has Zadie Smith ever taken crack cocaine (you hope not)? Or, to invert the compliment, would anyone addicted to crack cocaine feel like comparing it to reading a book by Karl Ove Knausgaard?
No, the whole exercise is nonsense, made worse by the fact that Ms Smith knows it is nonsense and is simply playing along. One would have been far more beguiled by a modest statement to the effect that “I liked this book a lot, and you might, too.” Sadly, magical acts of empathetic ventriloquy and engrossing immersions have the book world in their thrall.
“Reading does, in some way, hold us together”
Reading does, in some way, hold us together. According to the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, it is connective across various neural circuits and involves large areas of the brain. Our understanding is predictive and feels instantaneous; it can also be metacognitive, co-creative and generative. My mother taught me how to do all this, using those same patterns of mimicry and hesitation, when I was three years old. Or she taught me how to start all this: reading is an evolving skill which begins with simple decoding and ends, according to Wolf, with empathy and those ‘blessed moments’ afforded by immersion in which we attain insight, or new levels of understanding.
“Only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul”
Watching Sharp Stick is like encountering that pain box that Paul Atreides faces in Dune, only instead of a hand it’s your entire soul. Every moment is awkward, phony, excruciating, and just so unbelievably bad.
“How does one account for the terrific success of drivel like this?”
Some may feel that to point out that The House of Fortune is a bad novel is mean-spirited and unsporting. Mindless fodder is supposed to be this bad, they will say. There is, though, something cynical about the manner in which novels such as Burton’s are pressed on the public — marketed in the lucrative intersection of commercial and literary fiction, their potboiler credentials laundered by a superficially researched historical setting and overripe prose.
At the sentence level, The House of Fortune is a disaster zone of overwriting: “Nella watches Jacob lift the teapot . . . the hot liquid falling from the spout, as impossible to push back as a waterfall”; “the dregs of her wine [are] an unfathomable ocean”; “Nella has no clue who she is . . . inwardly she is a watery person who could be swept away or dragged into a lake” (yes please); “she is very still, like a chess piece waiting to move herself”. “The land [is] biblical in its vibrant abundance”; the morning is “bird-drenched”; “the wind is a frozen finger”. “A sense of the city’s pinched withdrawal outside pervades the interior.” (How exactly does a sense of external withdrawal pervade an interior?) Losing her virginity, Thea finds “her body is singing, and the place between her legs singing most of all” — and, as for “the sensation that lies within that sensation”, the reader will be relieved to learn that “there are no words for it”.
Upset, Nella “[puts] her head into her hands as if she’s carrying a heavy stone”, but mostly she finds she has taken to her domestic “confinement like a duck to water” (an intriguing choice of image that suggests the very opposite of confinement). Flagstones, “huge and cold, greet the pressure of [Nella’s] feet like an old friend” (poor friends). “Shakespeare, were he still living,” the reader is invited to reflect, “would have done well to pay attention to this plot”; on the contrary, Shakespeare, being dead, seems to have been thinking ahead.
This is a book that deals not only in clichés of expression, but clichés of structure and thought too. The characters’ 21st-century sensibilities are ill adapted to their historical setting. As with homosexuality in The Miniaturist, the protagonists’ unaccountably progressive attitudes about race strike the reader as frivolous anachronism in the service of lazily sympathetic characterisation.
As Nella seems to realise, this puts them in a very awkward place: she “feels as if she is not the protagonist in this scene at all, as if she could be watching it unfold from the mantelpiece” (intrusions such as these make one wonder whether helpful editorial comments haven’t been accidentally incorporated into the final draft of the book by some malfunction of Microsoft Word).
How does one account for the terrific success of drivel like this? The lesson is a salutary and familiar one: not only can millions of readers be wrong, they in fact make something of a habit of it.
“Just like a space fool”
We took a turbolift to the Crown of Corellia Dining Room, a vast hall flanked by a stage and a lunch buffet. Half a dozen Lukes, Obi-Wans, and Han Solos sat beneath iridescent light fixtures. At the buffet, a Luke attired in a white karate gi grabbed a plate of salmon as other passengers poured cups of blue milk, a delicacy on Tatooine. There were also people in Earth clothes. “I got this space food,” a man in a black T-shirt at a banquette said to himself. “I’m about to space-eat. Just like a space fool.”
“The longer I read SF, the more I demand from it”
The longer I read SF, the more I demand from it. I demand rigour, not in relation to scientific accuracy but in intellectual engagement. I demand beauty, not in terms of sense of wonder but in relation to language and form. I demand ambition, not in relation to copies sold, but in terms of how far the author is prepared to push against the boundary of their own abilities. I want books that risk failure in their pursuit of excellence. I want science fiction that fulfils the radical potential that is inherent in the very idea of SF.
I am reading therefore I am 