Read a fancy-pantsy, poncy, pleased-with-its-uber-literary-self book?
Try thinking about it as a good book.
This week the Goldsmiths Prize for ‘fiction at its most novel’ announced its eleventh winner, and I was lucky enough to be at Foyles for the prizegiving. Notwithstanding the American election, and the troubles in the Humanities sector in general and Goldsmiths College in particular, the room was surprisingly - if a little defiantly - cheerful.
And the books are all fascinating, whether they’re to your taste or not: certainly this year’s winner, Rachel Cusk, is a classic marmite* writer.
The thing is, the Prize was established thanks to a passionate lover of Tristram Shandy (which explains a lot), to celebrate
the qualities of creative daring associated with the College and to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form. The annual prize of £10,000 is awarded to a book that is deemed genuinely novel and which embodies the spirit of invention that characterises the genre at its best.
In an earlier post, I suggested that if you find a book really bad, it’s worth pausing before you toss it aside, and asking yourself what good qualities it has: what satisfactions is this writer offering enough readers that a publisher would invest £20,000-£200,000 in publishing it and expect to earn that back in sales?
Of course, you’re at liberty to decide that the kind of readers who like that kind of book are not the readers you need and want to draw into your kind of book. But you can still learn a lot from it about what readers want and how they read, and to do that you’ll need to set aside your own lack of enjoyment, your sense of how the book is failing for you, and try to experience its merits.
But the Goldsmiths Prize books are not ‘bad’ in the common-or-garden sense of clichéd, lazy or cheaply sensational, snatching at the latest fashionable topic purely because it is fashionable, or ticking the genre boxes in the quickest and most minimal way.
When people don’t like very experimental and literary fiction (and many more thousands don’t like it, than do) it’s much more along the lines of
’ comment on my post about reading like a writer: the writer is showing off, being fancy, trying to win prizes, and above all ignoring the reader’s desire for a story in favour of their own desire to sound clever.There are undoubtedly some arrogant/snobbish/pleased-with-themselves** authors out there, no question, even if some of them do write books I love. But when we see a sports person or a musician trying to do something really difficult, even if they don’t quite pull it off, we don’t think they’re doing it to show off, do we? We don’t think they’re putting us down or making us feel stupid - let alone that we should therefore resist. It’s not personal, it’s just that person.
As in life, so in writing: I learn more, and get on better, if I abandon the narcissm which takes another person’s actions as being aimed at me, and instead choose to think that they, like me, are just doing their faulty, human best to do good work in whatever terms ‘good’ means to them. If it doesn’t mean ‘good’ to me, that’s just mismatch, not malice.
TLDR: you can learn so much more by reading as if a book and its author have good intentions, than by assuming they’re trying to insult you or ignore you.
So next time you pick up an unquestionably ‘literary’ book, it’s worth separating out your subjective pleasure, from the quest to work out what satisfactions this writer is offering enough readers that a publisher would invest £20,000 in publishing it in the expectation of earning that back… etc.
If you really want to explore the satisfactions of lit fic, my post about what literary fiction actually is has some suggestions - and I find Mark Lawson’s taxonomy of fiction into narrative, ideas and prose useful too.
Briefly, a literary novel is likely to do a good many of the following:
offer more originality, and less easily-grasped familiarity, in narrative, ideas and prose - perhaps at the cost of being harder to make sense of, or the need for a second read.
ask the reader to tolerate an unreliable narrator, read more and deeper between the lines of a viewpoint character’s perceptions, or be satisfied by an unresolved, ‘unsatisfactory’ ending.
ask the reader to read between the lines of extremely bare prose, be patient with very rich, baroque prose, or grapple with prose which plays fast and loose with spelling, grammar and punctuation.
ask the reader to read through close-packed metaphors, images, perhaps foreign languages, references to history, geography and the arts and get their significance.
take the reader into the heads of unlikeable, unpleasant or disgusting characters and enjoy being there.
expect the reader to dig deep in a story where ‘less happens’, or where the ethical framework - what you’re supposed to think, who you’re supposed to root for, what outcome you want - is unclear or unresolved.
work an established genre by challenging, denying, questioning, playing with or pastiching its conventional satisfactions and settings.
Don’t get me wrong - of course much commercial and book group fic does one or other of these. And there’s a trickle-down effect too: some characteristics of super-literary fiction fifty years ago (the non-linear narrative, for example) are now mainstream commercial. But the higher proportion of literary tendencies, the further into literary territory it tends to read.
And as the proportion of those more challenging qualities rises, the book becomes harder to read - but also stretches the boundaries of how fiction works and what it can do for the reader who wants the thrill of experiencing something genuinely new. And that’s the kind of book the Goldsmiths Prize is rewarding.
* For non-UK/NZ readers, marmite is a savory yeast-extract spread which, notoriously, people either adore or loathe; no one is indifferent to it. For the record, I’m in the loathe camp.
** I realise I might be dating and locating myself as a) born in the 20th century and b) English, that this phrase assumes that being pleased with oneself is a Bad Thing.
Speaking as someone who has been told my stories are probably towards literary end of things, and also who hears how unpopular literary is with literary agents (oh, the irony) and unlikely to find representation, it’s nice to read about the avant garde getting lauded every now and then. It’d be a dull old world if the only books to buy were police procedurals/psyche thrillers/romantasy (to name three bouyant genres off top of my head). I know literary works are rarely in the middle of the bell curve of life, but they should be appreciated for making the outer edges more interesting! 🙏😊
I am in the middle of writing about my take on this debate. I like both commercial and literary fiction but not all of either. Too much commercial fiction I find complete drivel while I understand why it was published. Publishers are not charities and employees and owners have to have enough money to keep their jobs and put money on the table to feed and warm the home. On the other hand, I was fortunate enough that when I read Engish Lit at Uni where I read enough fiction, poetry and drama to understand how to read critically, there wer not massive loans. My father earned enough to give me an allowance - the rest was a gift from the goveement.