Every summer when the exam results come out, besides the obligatory photos of bouncing schoolgirls, there’s a story about a five-year-old who’s become the youngest person ever to pass a GCSE. Little Liam, his parents boast, has been doing sums since before he could talk and is now raking in the dosh from his million-selling iPhone app. His dream is to go to Oxford or, failing that, Cambridge. To stave off the nausea, you imagine Liam’s future — the bullying, the drugs, the gender confusion — until you get to the part where it says what grade he got. Hang on a minute, you think, he only got a D! A foetus could get a D in GCSE Maths. What were his numskull parents trying to prove by making him do it early and get a rubbish grade?
At 25, Ben Masters is not the youngest person to have written a novel, but his first book, Noughties, is a cautionary tale for those who aspire to youthful glory. It is also testament to publishing’s enduring faith in the power of an Oxbridge degree and a pretty face. It was no surprise to learn that the photogenic Masters, who has a first in English from Oxford and is now doing a PhD at Cambridge, shares an agent with Zadie Smith.
Divided into three sections (Pub, Bar, Club), Noughties follows bookish student Eliot Lamb on his last night at Oxford, in what its author describes as ‘tongue-in-cheek Miltonic descent’. At this point, I should probably admit I haven’t got round to reading Paradise Lost, so decide for yourself whether this negates everything I’m about to say. I have, however, read The Rachel Papers, to which this novel is a tender homage, complete with random etymological nuggets and detailed descriptions of bodily functions.
Martin Amis’s first book, which appeared when he was just 23, is not one of the finest coming-of-age novels ever written, but two things save it from being dismissed as juvenilia: its prose (of course) and, to a lesser extent, its humour.
Sadly, these are the two things Noughties doesn’t quite pull off. I don’t want to dwell on the lack of funniness, because it’s entirely subjective — no doubt some people will find the novel hilarious. What I will say is that, judging by this book anyway, Masters lacks the vicious streak that powers the young Amis’s acid observation. This isn’t a bad thing in itself (in fact, it’s a very good thing!) but it does mean you have to try that bit harder to make your characters entertaining. Charles Highway is misogynistic and in love with himself, but at least this makes him a vaguely interesting protagonist. The worst thing anyone could say about Eliot Lamb is that he is a tad introspective.
More problematic, especially for a novel that references other writers, is the prose. Masters is not a bad writer (his sentences flow, his writing has a certain energy) but his book does suffer from a staleness of image and an urge to overadorn. All he needs, I think, is a decent editor. An old-fashioned, hands-on editor who says things like this:
The experimental ‘textual interlude’ on pp130-1 is neither funny nor apposite — people haven’t used txt-spk since the advent of predictive text. That’s the third time you’ve compared a nightclub to hell, I think your readers will have got the Milton reference by now. That’s the thirty-eighth time you’ve used the word ‘veritable’, how about varying your intensifiers occasionally? Surely you can think of a more original way to describe someone’s monobrow than comparing it to a caterpillar?
Something Masters does get spot-on is the banality of undergraduate chatter, all who-pulled-who-last-night and endless would-you-rathers — ‘would you rather have a nipple on your chin or a chin on your nipple?’ This tallies closely with my own experience of noughties Oxford, where anytime someone tried to talk about current affairs or, God forbid, their subject, someone else (occasionally me) would squeal ‘OMIGOD we’re having an intellectual conversation!’ Strangely, mercifully some might say, Noughties chooses to ignore the lash-banter-chat-LAD lexicon so popular among male students.
The twenties are a perilous decade for a writer. On one hand you have buckets of zest and confidence, especially if you’ve been to Oxford. But this makes you more likely to dive into novel-writing without really thinking it through. It helps to consider not only the ‘how?’ of plot and character development, but the ‘who?’ of your potential readership. Younger writers are also more prone to cliché, of style and observation, something you can avoid only by reading a hell of a lot (and not just novels). It is the responsibility of editors to recognise these tendencies and rein them in. This can only happen, however, if publishers see beyond author and book as a marketable commodity, and realise that if they want to make money from an author long-term, they’re going to need to take a more active role in nurturing talent. Bringing a novelist into the world before he is fully gestated reflects badly on everyone.
Anna Baddeley is editor of the Omnivore.
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