David Mitchell: A Litfic Praetorian

China Mieville has formulated an amusing, insightful but ultimately wrongheaded idea about where literary fiction can go next. The following three passages are from these respective pieces:
http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/14/china-mieville-life-writing-genre?cat=books&type=article
https://web.archive.org/web/20190628210836/http://archive.themanchesterreview.co.uk/content_item.php?id=311&page=4&issue=3
https://web.archive.org/web/20090620033346/http://www.omnivoracious.com/2009/06/neither-a-contract-nor-a-promise-five-movements-to-watch-out-for.html

It seemed to me that [Ian McEwan's] Saturday quite bolshily said, 'OK, you accuse us of a neurotic obsession with insularity and a certain milieu. I'm going to take the most extraordinary political event that has happened in Britain for however many years and I am going to doggedly interiorise it and depoliticise it with a certain type of limpid prose . . . It was a combative novel that met that sense of there being a crisis and de-crisised it through its absolute fidelity to a set of generic tropes.

I don’t like [McEwan's] novel, but I do respect it as an adversary.

Unlike much previous soi disant Literary Fiction, the LitFic Praetorians will understand i) that they are a genre among many, ii) that their esteemed position is under attack. And they will decide to take the fight to the enemy. [...] Thus, for example, the redemptive power of art will be affirmed in the bloody imperial rubble of Iraq; musings on the melancholy of age and the rediscovery of life-affirmation in the arms of somewhat younger women will unfold before a backdrop of polemical dream-logic; and poignant stories of family betrayal and infidelity among academics will be set during alien invasions.

It's not dissimilar from Zadie Smith's skewering of Joseph O'Neill's Netherland
(online here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/ )
 which Mieville has praised as a useful assault on an outdated type of writing. Smith argues that the "lyrical realism" that has dominated the novel since Flaubert appears to have reached crisis point, and that O'Neill's book displays anxiety about how valid the style of fiction it represents really is. She sees his as one of the most "masterful" examples of  a style of writing which she "cautiously" hopes will survive, but which nevertheless is unfairly allowed to dominate over the Avant-Garde.

The flaw with Mieville and Smith's arguments is that bad writing cannot be blamed on a genre. McEwan's Saturday fails because of the stupidity of its plotting, the clumsy attempts to hammer political opinions (and reactionary ones at that) into the shape of fiction and its deeply unconvincing characterisation. Smith can't quote such bad passages from Netherland - rightly noting the queasiness of reading a novelist's attempt to turn 9/11 into literary imagery when one would have thought those images were profound and horrifying enough enough - and then claim the book is a masterful example of the lyrical realist mode of fiction that tends to dominate the literary world. A writer's talent dictates his successes and failures, not the genre to which their book can be ascribed. Christopher Priest has a good response to Mieville (available here:
http://www.christopher-priest.co.uk/journal/410/14-may-2011/ )

Hang on, though — what’s all this anthropomorphism?
“… it doesn’t think it is“. Who or what is this thinking entity called it? How can “litfic” have any thought at all? How can it have a social crisis?
If it is anything, litfic is a number of novels and short stories by a number of writers.

For China Miéville to cite or create or claim a new genre, an alleged balance against another, an argument for one genre being an argument against the other, etc., only muddies the water. It adds a new wrong to an existing wrong, and fails to make a right. It’s all very well mounting a case against an under-achieving and over-praised writer like Ian McEwan, but how would that case stand up against (e.g.) Roberto Bolaño, Graham Greene, Jerzy Kosinski, John Fowles, Chuck Palahniuk, Ivan Bunin, Anna Kavan, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Richard Powers …? It’s obvious nonsense even to try.

Priest is right: after all, the reason the "Litfic Praetorians" idea is funny is because it supposes that the things that one finds irritating in certain literary novels are conscious tactics shared by a group determined to defeat Team Genre, but it's no truer than a suspicion that the level-crossing guard puts the barriers down earlier when he sees your car coming, or that The Inbetweeners was written and commissioned specifically to annoy me.

Futhermore, Saturday doesn't quite meet the "Litfic Praetorians" criteria because, despite its Iraq War theme and its use of the anti-war protest march, it's a book as easy to mock as an Anita Brookner novel. The protagonist's preposterously talented children, the use of McEwan's house, wife and son, the cameo by one of his own books, the loan of both his real-life encounter with Blair to his protagonist and his friend Craig Raine's poetry to the protagonist's daughter and the monumentally misjudged denouement in which an on-the-spot recitation of Dover Beach repels invading members of the underclass have all rendered the book laughable since its publication. Even John Banville, author of the dullest book to win the Booker Prize, lambasted it as "dismayingly bad" in a famous review in The New York Review of Books (he also found it genuinely unconvincing that a neurosurgeon should not know who Matthew Arnold was, that the protagonist's wife wanted to gave sex with him, and that a father and son would have no Oedipal tension in their relationship: a true Litfic man, Banville) while mainstream hacks as various as Rod Liddle, Andrew Davies, John Crace, Private Eye's "Bookworm" and Anne Robinson have slated it. Of further embarrassment to its reputation is its status as one of both Cherie Blair and Alastair Campbell's favourite books.

A much more worthy candidate for leader of the Litfic Praetorians is David Mitchell. He's a a literary novelist through and through - no imagination, little interest in human beings or plotting, tin ear for dialogue, no real prose style, but a persistence in making his prose idiosyncratic enough to pass as worthy of book pundits' attention. Ampersands, unusual names, narrators with exotically hard-to-piece-together backstories, coyly paced first-person/present tense narration: these are the tools of his trade.

The difference is that Mitchell uses every possible technique to give the superficial impression that his novels are avant-garde, acutely 21st Century, futuristic, experimental and postmodern. Cloud Atlas spans several centuries and several genres - historical, detective, SF - and has an unconventional structure - six narratives which interrupt each other mid-sentence and resume in reverse order. Number9Dream opens in an exotic futuristic Tokyo, with a narrator who switches between reality and his own pulp-inspired daydreams. Once can understand Mitchell's admirers' mistake: how could his work be parochial, dull, enclosed, insular, tweedy, hermetically sealed? Everything about it screams postmodern, innovative, experimental, funky, cool.

However, literature is not about whatever it happens to be about. As David Lodge's Morris Zapp put it, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is not about animal cruelty. Jane Austen's novels are about human beings, not financial security and finding Mr Right. Every time we bemoan the modern novel for being too parochial, we confuse subject matter with the quality of the actual writing

The first chapter of Number9Dream contains several descriptions of the narrator's coffee. From the first page onwards, we get the lines "A galaxy of cream unribbons in my coffee cup," "My coffee cup stands empty in a moat of slops," and "The icebergs in my coffee fuse and chink. I pour in the juglets of syrup and cream and watch the liquids swirl and bleed." The logic that tells readers this is "literary" writing and "beautiful" prose is similar to the logic that says a picture of a kitten with a ball of string must be cute, or that a clown's big shoes must be funny. All these lines actually give us is the image of someone drinking coffee. Adding the words "bleed"- a straightforward metonym for suffering and mortality - and "galaxy" - an equally predictable syntagmatic choice, combining the cosmic with the mundanely contemporary - doesn't render it profound anymore than if the narrator had seen his very soul in the froth, just as adding "juglets" and promoting ice to "icebergs" reminds me of a passage in a bad crime novel I once skimmed in which the author attempted to make the experience of preparing a jacket potato in the microwave more interesting by using the word "nuked." These are dead sentences, as surely as "a shot rang out" or "It was a dark and stormy night."

I attempted Cloud Atlas at the same time I read Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim. The latter is set in and around a provincial red-brick university, with a linear, traditional plot and no overt experimental techniques. It fits the pattern of the parochial novel as surely as Cloud Atlas fits that of its opposite. However, I found myself rereading passages in Amis's book before I'd even finished it. The prose seduced me. Amis's curious style and his distinctive comic techniques stimulated my imagination: they didn't feel like writing. This passage in which Jim is brooding over an interminable article on ship-building he has to write for an academic journal is priceless:

"In considering this strangely neglected topic," it began. This what neglected topic? This strangely what topic? This strangely neglected what?

That's an extraordinary passage, in which playfulness with language, satire and characterisation are seamlessly mixed. That's literature. The same goes for Amis's remarkable gift for conveying speech, and his ability to turn comic motifs into thematic ones (the facepulling Jim indulges in, his desire to laugh at those he hates and the discrepancy between his mental language and the things he is forced to say aloud gradually turn from funny recurring gags into affecting and poignant imagery). There's a remarkable climactic moment when Jim, in a confrontation with Bertram, an embodiment of pretentiousness, finally has the guts to let his inner language invade his speech:

The bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation, Dixon thought. “You bloody old towser-faced boot-faced totem pole on a crap reservation,” he said.

That's what real literary prose looks like. The book has no timeshifts, no slavery metaphors, no mixing of genres, but if only one of the sentences in Cloud Atlas came to life the way that one - from a mere campus novel - does, how richer it would be...

Similarly, Muriel Spark's novels tend to take place in suburban or metropolitan settings and feature comfortably middle-class characters, yet there are few less parochial novelists, few more innovative and none with creepier imaginations. Those weird little masterpieces The Girls of Slender Means and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie take us further than the author of Cloud Atlas could ever dream of, create far more vivid and disturbing characters and do things with prose that make the English language seem brand new, but they're about a home for poor young girls and an Edinburgh schoolteacher respectively.

Cloud Atlas isn't about a history lecturer or a teacher at a girls' school and it's not set entirely in Kensington, but its big-fucking-deal Russian doll structure draws one's attention to just how dull these six narratives are. The protagonists in the second and third narratives read the journal and letters that respectively comprised the preceding sections. If both had found them to be exercises in tedium, Mitchell would have gained this reader's respect, and would certainly have created characters with which one could sympathise.

Adam Roberts, in a rare dissenting review available here
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/clarkes2005.htm
wonders:

What is the novel saying? It is saying that Racism is Bad; that we ought to take Care of The Environment; that People Can Sometimes Oppress Others and Be Nasty To Them and that this, like Racism, is A Bad Thing. And above all it is saying that, although it may not appear so to a superficial analysis, in fact We Are All Connected In This, Like, Cosmic Oneness That Transcends Time and Space Or Something.

The actual literary devices Mitchell uses to disguise these banal ideas are the kind of stuff that seems impressive when you're doing English at A-Level: a comet-shaped birthmark shared by several characters (such a winsomely literary icon, that: it bats its eyelashes at you and purrs, "make notes about me in the margin," like the oh-so-teasingly misremembered sorbet flavour in McEwan's Enduring Love) an attempt at sub-Riddley Walker broken English, a 19th-century journal ripe with ampersands,and letters from a ne're-do-well composer hiding out in 1920s Belgium who addresses his correspondent as "Sixsmith, you ass!"

Mitchell's least admired novel Black Swan Green offers none of these cosmetic details, and so in that book we find Mitchell's limitations quite nakedly on display. The book relies on an Infuriating habit of using casual 1980s pop-culture tidbits as referents: "Dad's got an answering machine like James Garner's in The Rockford Files with big reels of tape", Dad's swivelly chair's a lot like the Millennium Falcon's laser tower" "the girls screamed with laughter like the tv audience on Happy Days" - while the story itself suffocates us in Butterscotch Angel Delight, Creme Eggs, Paul Daniels, Open All Hours, The Great Escape, Moonraker, British Bulldogs, Lord of the Rings, Superman 2, Terry's Chocolate Oranges and Sesame Street. What's striking is not merely that the Adrian Mole books are so much funnier, but that they give us a far superior fictional response to the same period. Adrian's response to the Sunday Times's Hitler Diaries hoax and his slavish support for the launch of breakfast television with selina Scott and Frank Bough capture the 80s with far more wit than Mitchell's endless Stuart Maconie-esque namechecks, just as Adrian's grandmother coming round to check the fridge for Argentinian corned beef ("Grandmother has got a funny look in her eye. My mother says it is called Jingoism but I think it is more likely to be cataracts forming. We did them at school so I speak from knowledge"), Adrian failing to locate the Falklands on a map after a crumb conceals them, school bully Barry Kent wearing a union jack t-shirt to school, his shouting nasty names at two Asian kids and his unexpected membership of Rock Against Racism tell us so much more about the same period, and through far more engaging characters, than Mitchell's endless Falklands lip service.

Similarly, the memory of what a better time one had  devouring William Gibson's splendid Neuromancer hangs over Number9Dream. Mitchell peppers his prose with words like bioborg, but they aren't allowed to become potent: he moves away from silly little genre to the Big Important Literary Stuff like Slavery, Destiny and Whatever's floating in his coffee cup. Number9Dream begins with the protagonist drinking coffee, then shifts him to a pulp scenario in which there are little hints that this isn't really anything as vulgar as SF or a thriller (a Walther PPK is called a Walther PK, Blade Runner-style Replicants are slightly misdefined and the film they come from is namechecked at the same time). It's a technique reminiscent of Ted's references to "Icey tea and Snoopy Snoopy Dogg Dogg" in Father Ted and Alan Partridge's to "The Steptoe Wives". It's then revealed that this was all a daydream and our hero is still in the cafe with his hot beverage. Juglet time again.

To read Gibson, by contrast, with his genuinely intriguing mirror-shaded, razor-fingernailed femme fatale, genuinely terrifying vat-grown Cloned Ninjas and his evocative and unsettling opening line "The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel", is to read a novelist who does justice to his ideas. Gibson doesn't need to pull the "that was just a dream" routine on us, because he knows a dream as powerful as this can tell us far more about reality than if his hero stays behind and gets lyrically caffeinated. Books like Neuromancer and Lauren Beukes's Zoo City have so much more guts than Number9Dream: their authors combine a sharp awareness of where the outside world is heading with the attentive prose, characterisation and structure that one requires of literature and a determination to make their genre figures (Gibson's ninjas and razor girls, Beukes's heroine with a sloth on her back and pair of heavies with a Maltese Cocker Spaniel and a Marabou Stork on theirs) irreducible and compelling in themselves. That old Stephen King analogy for genre vs litfic presents itself again: Mitchell's novels are cars with a lot of effort put into the paintwork, Gibson and Beukes's novels are cars with engines.

It's unlikely Mitchell will be read by future generations, but while he is in vogue, the enemies of good fiction - those for whom the main object of a work of literature should be for it to feel literary, for whom difficulty and scattergun idiosyncrasy are desirable in themselves rather than as a way of achieving something else, for whom good books are instantly recognisable rather than confounding or shocking, and for whom the delight in narrative is a vulgar concern - have the perfect leader of their Praetorian guard. David Mitchell really does write fiction for the 21st Century.

Whither the Middlebrows?

If, like me, you are in that strange hinterland between desire for intelligent writing and desire for entertainment, between a desire for narratives of danger and excitement and a desire for narratives that don’t insult the intelligence (that‘s right: a desire for both finger-steepling and sharks), you might wonder where your brethren are. You hungrily fall upon the literary criticism of people like Clive James, John Carey, George Orwell, Kingsley Amis, Nick Hornby and Zadie Smith - they’re more well-read than you are, but they have an interest in fiction that entertains. And yet…there’s something odd about the tension between their highbrow and popular tastes. Something that makes it hard to know exactly where they stand.

Let’s consider two interestingly different pieces by Zadie Smith. The first is her introduction to Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, available here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/sep/18/classics.grahamgreene

It’s worth reading in full, but this is a triumphant moment:

When Greene died in 1991, Kingsley Amis - a man not given to generous estimations of his peers - gave him a neat, fitting obituary: "He will be missed all over the world. Until today, he was our greatest living novelist." Amis's and Greene's vision of a great novelist was different from the present conception: it was of a working man with a pen. An unpretentious man, in and of the world, who wrote for readers and not critics, and produced as many words per day as a journalist. English writers these days work in spasms, both in quantity and quality, and so keen are they to separate "entertainments" from "literature" that they end up writing neither. This was one of the few distinctions Greene did not concern himself with.

Now there’s a paragraph that left me hungry to read more of those writers (and obviously I include Smith herself), and with a penultimate sentence good enough to become a manifesto for contemporary fiction. However, a very different piece by Smith - “Two Paths for the Novel”, first published in the New York Review of Books and available in her recent collection of essays Changing My Mind as well as here

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/nov/20/two-paths-for-the-novel/?page=1 , presents a very different attitude to contemporary fiction. Ostensibly a review of Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland and Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, it starts off with a lament that “in healthy times, we cut multiple roads, allowing for the possibility of a Jean Genet as surely as a Graham Greene” but that “these aren’t particularly healthy times. A breed of lyrical Realism has had the freedom of the highway for some time now, with most other exits blocked”. It’s immediately striking to see the move from an argument lamenting the shortage of Graham Greenes, to one lamenting the shortage of alternatives. Just as striking is how the article takes it as a given that you understand its references and assumptions: it’s not easy to understand what Smith means by “lyrical realism”, and the way she introduces the concept with the highway metaphor indicates that not only should the reader know what it is, but that it is in such abundance we‘re getting bored with it. The essay also lists authors’ names so frequently - and with such little sense of what they mean to Smith, or how their actual work relates to her argument - that it means little to those who haven’t read all of them.

Another problem for the reader that admired her Greene piece (and indeed Zadie Smith’s novels) is this article’s interest in solipsism, and its assumption that solipsism and philosophical theory are at the heart of the question of fiction. Netherland, Smith states, “colonizes all space by way of voracious image“. Those of us more interested in fiction than in philosophical theories may wonder if this is a problem, but her analysis continues:

It wants to offer us the authentic story of a self. But is this really what having a self feels like? Do selves always seek their good, in the end? Are they never perverse? Do they always want meaning? Do they not sometimes want its opposite? And is this how memory works? Do our childhoods often return to us in in the form of coherent, lyrical reveries? Is this how time feels? Do the things of the world really come to us like this, embroidered in the verbal fancy of times past? Is this really Realism?

There are a great many words here that remind me of one of Orwell’s symptoms of the decline in writing in his magnificent essay Politics and the English Language: the increasing use of words that mean nothing. Examples that Orwell suggested were “plastic”, “vitality“, “natural“ ,“sentimental”, “Romantic“ and “living quality“; here we have a reliance on the word “self” and the equally tedious “authentic”. It’s hard to ignore the fact that James Wood’s latest piece - a review of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, uses the words “vital” or “vitality” five times, and Wood is a discernable influence on Smith in her Two Paths article (but not in the Greene introduction). Although in many ways her article is actually a rebuttal of Wood’s views (he’s an admirer of Netherland), the style clearly owes something to him, not least in its assumption that whole swathes of literature can be summed up in a two-word phrase: Wood bemoans “Hysterical Realism”, Smith focuses on “Lyrical Realism“.

Just as the reader wonders if this is the same Zadie Smith that wrote White Teeth and On Beauty, we are presented with this acknowledgement:

I have written in this tradition myself, and cautiously hope for its survival, but if it’s to survive, lyrical Realists will have to push a little harder on their subject.

Smith has just pulled off the extraordinary feat of being patronising towards her own work.

Two pieces written by the same author: one so engaging, and able to reach seasoned readers of Greene and those new to him alike; the other labyrinthine, aimed at those who already share its assumptions and preferences rather than those who might wish to learn of them for the first time - a piece for those who are getting a little tired of lyrical realism, not those interested in finding out what lyrical realism is.

A similar split can be found in a strange piece by Clive James. James has written some imperishably wonderful literary criticism: his pieces on Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin are both the best things written on their subjects, and in their own right wonderfully invigorating encapsulations of what literature can mean to a reader. His article “The Guidebook Detectives” for the New Yorker in 2007 - available on here under a different title

http://www.clivejames.com/crime-fiction - opens with this:

If you’ve spent a couple of years being unable to get past the opening chapter of one of the later novels of Henry James, it’s hard to resist the idea that there might be a more easily enjoyable version of literature: a crime novel, for example.

Anyone unfamiliar with Clive James’s literary criticism would find this a good start to an essay, and if they shared the sentiments expressed there, would naturally assume they’d found a soulmate. However, if you’ve read any of his criticism, you might notice right away that something is not quite right. First of all, Clive James has read and extolled the virtues of far more difficult authors than Henry James (just look at his book Cultural Amnesia, which makes you wonder if it’s by the same critic) - let’s not forget this is the reader that taught himself Russian because he “could no longer bear not to know something about how Pushkin sounded”. Amongst the many indispensable quotes his criticism has provided over the years is the splendid affirmation “Boring you rigid is just what literature sets out not to do” from his 1980 review of a book on the academic study of literature by Wayne Booth, yet this is oddly contradicted by the idea of wondering if there is “a more easily enjoyable form of literature” in the later article. Again, if you’re unaware of this discrepancy, then by the time the suggestion that the appeal of a good crime novel lies in the hope that “we can get the art thrill and the thriller thrill both at once”, your instinct may be to cheer - after all, we all want sharks and finger-steepling in the same book, right? That’s certainly what this blog is for. And James has a point about the tediousness of the first 13 pages of The Wings of the Dove.

However, as the article progresses, it becomes clear an irony not easy to fathom is at work. James talks about his voracious consumption of various crime writers, but suggests that John Banville’s Christine Falls - which unlike Banville’s Booker-friendly novels is published as a crime novel under the name Benjamin Black - “actually does face you with the question of whether you really want your crime writer to have that much literary talent”. He then argues that

As a form for real writers, the detective novel is bound to be a dry well in the end, because a detective novel, no matter how memorable in the detail, is written to be forgotten

and ends by affirming:

But that’s just an adventure holiday. The real adventure, less gripping but far more memorable, is waiting to begin again on page 14 [of The Wings of the Dove].

Adam Mars-Jones was also struck by the strange structure of this article in his review (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/07/revolt-pendulum-clive-james) of The Revolt of the Pendulum , a recent collection of Clive James‘s essays which included the piece:

[…] he pulls the rug from under the reader […]Doesn't he also pull the rug from under himself? (Clive) James's antipathy to Henry seems genuine, to judge by a reference to the style of The Awkward Age as "an invitation to suck up a sand dune through a straw". It seems perverse to defend high literary ambition while also rubbishing the book that you've chosen to represent it. […]

Mars-Jones also notes a:

civil war between cultivation and blokeishness inside Clive James, the inner aesthete and the inner mocker. Down-to-earth intellectual is not the easiest role to take on. When one of the competing strains appears in isolation, then the other is sure to be waiting in the wings.

What Mars-Jones has picked up on here is an enigma in James’s writing, and in Smith’s: a split personality between that of the well-read literary personality and that of the popularist. The structure of the article is repressive, as its author starts with one point-of-view and then seems to try and convince himself of its falseness. He starts off with an engaging and convincing attack on Henry James’s soporific prose and an infectious account of a hunger for crime fiction, and then abandons this line, even though his point that “He had not at present come down from his room, which she knew to be above the one they were in…” is a tedious sentence did not deserve to be abandoned - it may be Henry James, but it’s still ghastly writing. Perhaps the canonical figures are hard to criticise: like feudal overlords, they might stir rumbles of discontent, at the start of the article, but their power is reaffirmed in the closing paragraphs.

It’s highly appropriate that Larkin and Amis are strong passions for both the writers I’ve discussed (to complete this quartet, Zadie Smith once named Larkin as her favourite writer), as they pose a similar conundrum. These writers - themselves great friends - felt a profound affinity for populism. Larkin wrote some of the most beautiful and exquisitely crafted poetry of the twentieth century, and yet many of these poems - including some of his finest - are easily appreciable for general readers. Amis made fiction so enjoyable it’s a wonder the literati tolerated it.

They were educated men, but claimed to prefer entertainment to supposedly more cerebral writing. Both were passionate advocates of Dick Francis. Much has been made of Kingsley’s lack of patience with his son Martin’s novels, but it’s forgotten that he had the same problem with all of the novelists of Martin’s generation. There’s nothing wrong with their interest in Ian Fleming and Amis‘s passion for science-fiction (his books on the respective subjects, The James Bond Dossier and New Maps of Hell, remain unsurpassed in the way they combine an unpatronising, infectious love for their subjects with a refusal to abandon intelligent, unsparing analysis), but Amis’s absurd insistence, in an essay on Chandler, Hammett and Mickey Spillane, that Spillane is the best of the three leads one to wonder if what’s going on is some kind of alienation from the cultural scene rather than genuine incomprehension of difficult authors. An even stranger moment (in a review which can be found in the same book, Whatever Became of Jane Austen?) came when he referred to Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Blake, Dostoyevsky, Hemingway and numerous others as “all those characters you thought were discredited, or had never read, or (if you are like me) had never heard of”. Of course he had heard of them.

Perhaps, like Clive James’s too-brief rebellion against Henry James, they felt the need for a cultural pressure-valve, a momentary relapse from lives built around studying, reviewing, writing and reading literature. John Carey once wondered if Larkin’s delightful reply, in his Paris Review interview, to a question about Jorge Luis Borges - “Who is Jorge Luis Borges?“ - was mischievous. Anthony Powell, a friend and contemporary of Amis and Larkin, observed that “a wish for non-affectation [in] revolt against Eliot’s saying modern poets must be obscure [is] like a breath of fresh air first of all. Eventually, if carried too far, [it] becomes a sort of tyrannical Puritanism.” James himself understood this very well, suggesting in his Wayne Booth review that due to the overabundance of bad literary theory:

The best route to success for a dull artist might be to create a work that needs interpretation. On the other hand, the bright artist might go out of his way to avoid the attentions of the waiting owls. The result could be a seriously split literary culture, with the dummies pretending to be clever and the clever people masquerading as oafs. We have seen something like this in the determination of Amis and Larkin - both of them deeply cultivated - to sound like philistines rather than co-operate with the kind of academic industrialisation which separates the work of art from the common people.

The final figure to consider in this light is Nick Hornby, whose endeavours in this field gave this blog its name. In his “Stuff I’ve Been Reading” columns for The Believer magazine (collected in The Polysyllabic Spree and its sequels), Hornby offers an alternative to literary criticism, as he breezily discusses the books he has read or tried to read, making perceptive points along the way, and refreshingly discussing the practicalities and difficulties of reading itself as well as the books. Yet again there’s sometimes a tension between the passionate belief expressed that people don’t need to worry about wrestling with books they find tedious and views Hornby has expressed elsewhere, such as his 1991 review of JG Ballard’s The Kindness of Woman, a summary and quotes from which are available at

http://www.jgballard.ca/pringle_news_from_the_sun/news_from_sun22.html

those who have no time for Ballard's 'weird stuff' (although of course books such as Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are among the most literate, challenging and provocative of the past 30 years) will be perplexed

Again, Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition are far more difficult and challenging books than the “literary” novels that Hornby assures his readers they are not alone in struggling with. It is of course unfair to label critics: you will never find one that likes all the things you like, and struggles with the same things you struggle with, but it’s hard not to see this as evidence of the same thing James warned of: intelligent writers like Hornby, Smith and James himself are so understandably anxious to break away from the “literary” culture that has dogged postwar literature, that they are overlooking their own indulgences or preferences amongst “literary” writers or texts. To move back a generation or so, the strength of Anthony Burgess as a figure on the literary horizon was that while he was no snob, contributing a delightful celebration of Ian Fleming in the form of his 1990s Preface to the Bond novels and his equally informed championing of Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan in his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classic edition, he didn’t feel the need to hide his admiration for supposedly more highbrow figures - happily declaring Finnegan’s Wake one of the world’s most enjoyable books. Perhaps, then, the biggest hero of this piece (for all the people I’ve discussed are cherishable) is AS Byatt. Byatt has won the Booker Prize, and her fiction belongs to the tradition of George Eliot and Iris Murdoch - uncompromising, highly “literary” novels of ideas. And yet she is also the finest critic of Terry Pratchett, championing him as a genuinely original writer of books of rare undiluted imaginative power. She is also the author of the best piece ever written on the Harry Potter books, which was unfairly called snobbish despite championing Pratchett, Alan Garner, Susan Cooper and Diana Wynn-Jones as superior writers. One is reminded of China Mieville’s praise for Doris Lessing

(available here:

http://www.believermag.com/issues/200504/?read=interview_mieville) as a writer:

who comes from outside genre but understands it and respects it. In the middle of a big literary festival, Doris Lessing, one of the great writers of the twentieth century, fêted by the literary establishment, was talking about this great book she’d read by Greg Bear. This is a woman who really keeps up with genre SF and is not embarrassed to say so.

The value of Byatt and Lessing’s contributions here is that like Burgess they don’t pretend not to be intellectuals, they just understand that there are popular forms of fiction which deserve unpatronising and fully appreciative literary attention.

Is everyone a closet intellectual? Has the lover of stories no-one to turn to? Who can tell. Just don’t get too excited if your favourite writer tells you they find Moby Dick boring - I guarantee you you’ll find them eulogising Conrad before long.