In case you hadn’t noticed, the London Book Fair has been gracing our nation’s capital this week, down in Earl’s Court. There, the publishers, agents and buyers of the literary globe (London is second only to Frankfurt in ‘book fair importance’) have been feverishly buying and selling the rights to hot new titles, hot new authors, maybe the odd lucky midlister, while identifying the trends, writers and genres that conceal the ultra-precious kernel of hotness to come.
In today’s market it’s likely that buyers have been looking for visually rich comic books for children – enjoying a resurgence – and anything in a newish genre called ‘romantasy’ (think Fifty Shades of Grey meets Game of Thrones, with more vampires and less spanking). But what the buyers and agents won’t be looking for is literary fiction.
This is, of course, not news. The decline of literary fiction – the highbrow novels published by imprints like Picador and Granta, the look-at-me books you were keen to be seen clutching in a café, or on the train – has long been noted. But now this esteemed literary niche has virtually disappeared.
Once upon a time, literary novelists such as John Updike, Richard Ford, A.S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Ondaatje and many others were viewed as the pyramidion of literature. Nowadays such writers are published – if published at all – by little imprints, who offer advances that would barely cover Tom Wolfe’s dry cleaning bill: a typical pro writer in 2024 earns around £7,000, half the income of a decade before. Royalties have likewise plunged as sales have fallen off the bookshelf. What’s more, when these books do come out, they are given reviews no one reads, and then they disappear – unless they are fortunate enough to win a major prize, in which case they disappear.
In other words, the literary novel has gone the way of poetry. There was a time when a new poem by Tennyson would garner a splash in the Times. I am old enough to remember when a new Ian McEwan novel actually made the TV news (back when people watched TV news). Such a thing seems laughable now.
It’s at this point that the lament for literary fiction usually takes a judgmental edge, as the observer notes the increasing imbecility of the modern reader, dulled by smartphones, dazzled by TikTok and cursed with the attention span of a jittery teenage gnat on crack. But I am not of that ilk. I say good riddance to literary fiction – it was a silly, self-defeating genre in the first place, putting posh books in a posh ghetto, walling itself off from everyday readers.
What makes this more poignant, for me, is that I once enjoyed this stuff. In my twenties and thirties I chortled over early Martin Amis, I admired Julian Barnes, I quite liked The World According to Garp, and I struggled manfully through Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Then, something happened, and that something was The Da Vinci Code. This book, which sold approximately 17 trillion copies, seemed to provoke an ire in literary folk out of all proportion to its possible merits. It made clever people weirdly angry. I particularly remember Stephen Fry saying it was ‘arse gravy’.
Could it really be that bad? One day I picked up The Da Vinci Code to see for myself. After about an hour of reading I was 150 pages in – and hooked. Not because of the prose, style or dialogue – that was all quite workmanlike – but because the book had a deviously intricate plot that kept you fiercely engaged, almost against your will. It had, in short, a cracking story.
And that’s when I decided I’d read pretty much my last work of literary fiction. Because when I read a novel what I really want is not beautiful sentences, but story. Indeed, we all want story. Why? Perhaps because human life is a story, with a definite beginning, middle and end. Perhaps because reality feels like a story.
I am old enough to remember when a new Ian McEwan novel actually made the TV news (back when people watched TV news)
Indeed, you could argue the entire universe is a brilliantly plotted thriller – it has the classic, violent inciting scene (the Big Bang), it has the turbulent, compelling and unpredictable middle – we’re in an especially riotous section right now – and the end is a mystery which we desperately wish to unravel. I hope it’s a wedding, not a funeral. Meanwhile, the author of the universe is more reclusive than J.D. Salinger.
How did literary fiction come to forsake story, plot and narrative? You could blame the modernists. Just as early 20th-century classical composers decided to abandon melody (the narrative of music) and thereby commercially cratered their art form, so modernist 20th-century writers decided to forego plot – with, in the end, similarly calamitous results.
Now, going plotless was OK if you were mid-season James Joyce writing Ulysses – because Joyce at his best wrote sentences better than God. The problem is 99.99997 per cent of writers are not James Joyce. There are some partial and noble exceptions – writers such as Kazuo Ishiguro, Donna Tartt, Cormac McCarthy, Douglas Stuart (Shuggie Bain) – who have managed to combine the joys of proper narrative with quite intellectual writing. But so many haven’t. Instead, they give us storyless literary fiction.
Will it one day return, the literary novel? The other day I decided to see if things have improved – by reading some recent litfic. I chose Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, as it is one of the most lauded novels of recent times. And what I found was a book that has a fine opening, with great promise… and then it takes the inevitable plotless turn, and it becomes a pointless, repetitive polyphony of discordant dead people shouting at poor old Abe. Reading it was like being trapped inside a Sir Harrison Birtwistle opera. And I speak as someone who has been trapped inside a Sir Harrison Birtwistle opera (seat F, row 9, Royal Opera House).
However, if this all sounds depressing, it shouldn’t. As the bustling London Book Fair shows, books are thriving – even if litfic is a dead star. People still crave stories, readers still open books with eager anticipation, there is still money, fun and fame to be made with your mind and mere words. Just make sure, if you’re a writer, that you don’t mistake prettiness for purpose, obscurity for profundity. And maybe insert a dead body around page 90.
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