Crap Crit?

John Sutherland on the Guardian blog suggests some reasons why literary criticism is in such a state of decline. (He even goes so far as to call what's left of the savaged Los Angeles Times literary supplement, "crap-crit"!).

The first reason is that, apparently, lit-crit is inherently unsexy :

You can sex up every other section of the paper, but seldom, if ever, the literary pages. And sexy is the flavour of our times.

Secondly, because lit-crit has been ruined by the academics. While they come :

... dirt-cheap. ... They can be dull. Really dull. Increasingly the Great British Public doesn't want a bloody academic review. Sad, but again the spirit of the age.

And thirdly, a lot of reviewing has shifted to the internet and to blogs. Not necessarily a bad thing, but :

One's only reservation is that, writing against the clock, bloggers often write hastily and thoughtlessly. The blogosphere, under pressure, is doing for literary style - the elegance, for example, of a John Carey or an AS Byatt - what texting has done for punctuation.

Now then, I'm not sure why good book-reviews might be considered "un-sexy". But then I'm probably turned on by all the wrong things! The fact is that I really enjoy a well-written review though I tend to seek them out only after I've read the book in question.

No-one wants dull. But academics necessarily don't have to be! A good writer will always remember the audience they are writing for, and if it's a newspaper column for the general public, the piece needs to be entertaining as well as informative, accessible but not dumbed-down. I have really enjoyed some of the pieces written by Prof. Lim Chee Seng in Starmag, for example. Ultimately though it is the editor who is the gatekeeper and must make sure that a dull reviewer doesn't find space on the page.

As for litbloggers not giving the time and attention to a review that would go into a printed piece, I can only talk about this from my own perspective. I'm not at all defensive here, and it's true that sometimes I don't have much time to blog, but want to record something about a book I've read, so I am loath to even call such posts reviews when they are really just a reader's response.

But some of the pieces I post here are also published in newspapers and magazines, and they of course get more time and attention. (Someone is paying for them!) I've also tried to spend more time writing about local books I feel deserve the space, especially if there isn't much chance of them getting a newspaper review. (Having said that, I know I am woefully behind and am very sorry!)

Reviewing properly actually takes time (to read and more often than not reread the book) and a lot of cranking up the old brain. That amount of brain-power exerted in other parts of my life earns me pretty decent money!

But by and large, reviewers here are generally paid very badly (and the payment from one national newspaper has actually gone down by 25% in the time I've been writing for them!). Most folks who write them do it simply for the love of it. They have to.

Talking of reviews though, Amir Muhammad is writing some of the most engaging reviews of locally published books that I have read, in the Malay Mail (the reinvention of the once sleazy tabloid is now complete!) and yesterday he reviewed Sufian Abas' Kasut Biru Rubina very nicely indeed, noting that the collection of stories :

... juxtaposes, with studious glee, the pop-inflected banality of contemporary life with inspired surrealism. Some of the stories are melancholy but most are either macabre or misanthropic; the best combine all three.

You can enjoy all Amir's Pulp Friction columns from past issues here and read more of his literary relates musings here.

Bestseller Lists

John Sutherland traces the rise of the bestseller list in The Sunday Times :

Amazon has one, as do Waterstone’s and the Richard & Judy Book Club. There’s now even a website, www.noveltracker.com , that updates figures and positions of the bestselling books every hour. All will have recorded Delia Smith’s latest cookbook on its way to becoming the fastest-selling title ever. We are fascinated by these charts, but there was a time, not so long ago, when we had none at all.

On April 21, 1974, and in this place (The Sunday Times Review, as it then was), the UK’s first definitive weekly national bestseller list was published.Keeping a finger on the nation’s reading pulse in this way had been routine in America since the 1890s. Americans loved their bestseller lists. Why? Because US society is organised around winners and losers. The UK loathed bestseller lists. Why? Because they were unEnglish. Books, we believed, did not compete against each other. Paying attention to a book not for its quality but for the quantity it sold was Yankee philistinism.

The Sunday Times resolved to change all that. It was, historically, the right time to do so. The early 1970s was an era of change, much of it painful. The IRA was blowing up everything that didn’t have a shamrock painted on it. “Who governs Britain?” asked the prime minister, Ted Heath, plaintively from his bunker at No 10. We had a three-day week, energy cuts, double-digit inflation. Times Newspapers, which had dared to embrace technological pro-cesses marginally more advanced than William Caxton’s, was at war with the print unions.

The Brits Don't Read Neither

It seems that readers in Britain are reading less according to figures from the Office of National Statistics. The London Evening Standard reports that a quarter of Britons say they have not read a book in the past year and this goes up to almost half of males aged between 16 and 24.

Yet, and this is deliciously ironic, nearly half of those surveyed admit to lying about their reading to appear more intelligent, while a separate survey had shown a third of Britons read "challenging literature" in order to seem well-read and so they could "join in the conversation" ... even though they could not follow what the book was about!

Meanwhile, the government is launching the National Year of Reading campaign. Among the initiatives is the encouraging bosses to set up libraries in former workplace smoking rooms. (Hoping to replace one addiction with another?)

Sian Pattenden makes some reading suggestions for the unconvinced on the Guardian blog, though I find her sniffily dismissive of contemporary British fiction. (What was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka, Animal's People by Indra Sinha, Gifted by Nikita Lalwani ... what's not to like?)

John Crace in the Guardian, of course, recommends his forthcoming book of digested reads. (And reckons the average reader reads 60 pages an hour - by which measure I am very slow indeed!)

Denise Winterman on the BBC website asks - do you need to read a book to be clever? Not necessarily, when so much information comes to us in other ways.

What intrigues in this piece is Professor John Sutherland's suggesting that books have lost their chic:

If you try and sell your house, estate agents will tell you to get rid of the books, they are viewed as tired and middle aged.

*Gulp!*

I am feeling more and more like a dinosaur (called Bibliosaurus Text?)

Where Novels Thrive

(Novels) require a book world which can review, alert, display and advertise to the consumer, and dispose of and renew its stock several times a year. They require diverse network delivery systems to the end users (libraries, bookshops, book clubs). Those end users have to be habituated and habitual consumers - good for innumerable repeated orders. The consumer of fiction needs to be educated and literate. The advent of the novel, it is fair to say required a more sophisticated creation, distribution, reception and consumption apparatus than any other cultural form until the arrival in the 1890's, of the cinema. ... The novel is the product of a developed, institutionalised, and commercially advanced society. The abiltity to read a novel intelligently, I would maintain, is the mark of a mature personal culture.

I post this extract from John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel: A User's Guide as a sort of postscript to the previous entry about the growth of the Indian writing community.

I think that when we ask ourselves why so few novels are emerging from Malaysia and Singapore, we tend to focus narrowly only on the writer and publisher, not on all the rest of the complicated machinery that needs to be in place to make writing a novel a viable proposition. And the fact that we need to have an intelligent readership.

Sutherland makes the point that the novel (as opposed to the poem, play, or short story) is a product of an industrialised society, which is a slant that hadn't occured to me before.

It's a whole ecosystem, as I've already said, and pondering how the parts of it might be put in place giving me much happy mental exercise.

The Honourable Failure

A novel is a two-way street, in which the labour required on either side is, in the end, equal. Reading, done properly, is every bit as tough as writing - I really believe that. As for those people who align reading with the essentially passive experience of watching television, they only wish to debase reading and readers. The more accurate analogy is that of the amateur musician placing her sheet music on the stand and preparing to play. She must use her own, hard-won, skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift she gives the composer and the composer gives her.

This is a conception of "reading" we rarely hear now. And yet, when you practise reading, when you spend time with a book, the old moral of effort and reward is undeniable. Reading is a skill and an art and readers should take pride in their abilities and have no shame in cultivating them if for no other reason than the fact that writers need you. To respond to the ideal writer takes an ideal reader, the type of reader who is open enough to allow into their own mind a picture of human consciousness so radically different from their own as to be almost offensive to reason. The ideal reader steps up to the plate of the writer's style so that together writer and reader might hit the ball out of the park.

What I'm saying is, a reader must have talent. Quite a lot of talent, actually, because even the most talented reader will find much of the land of literature tricky terrain. For how many of us feel the world to be as Kafka felt it, too impossibly foreshortened to ride from one village to the next? Or can imagine a world without nouns, as Borges did? How many are willing to be as emotionally generous as Dickens, or to take religious faith as seriously as did Graham Greene? Who among us have Zora Neale Hurston's capacity for joy or Douglas Coupland's strong stomach for the future? Who has the delicacy to tease out Flaubert's faintest nuance, or the patience and the will to follow David Foster Wallace down his intricate recursive spirals of thought? The skills that it takes to write it are required to read it. Readers fail writers just as often as writers fail readers. Readers fail when they allow themselves to believe the old mantra that fiction is the thing you relate to and writers the amenable people you seek out when you want to have your own version of the world confirmed and reinforced. That is certainly one of the many things fiction can do, but it's a conjurer's trick within a far deeper magic. To become better readers and writers we have to ask of each other a little bit more.

This from Zadie Smith's fascinating (but be warned, pretty demanding) essay in the Guardian today in which she ponders what makes a good writer, the duty of the novelist and why novelists are always bound to fail. There's much food for thought here and I'm off to read it a second, third, morth time. I reckon it's worth it.

And there's more to come next week.

It's interesting, by the way, that Zadie, just like John Sutherland in the extract I posted the other day, reckons reading a novel to be every bit as much a challenge as writing one.

For a long time reading was felt to be a "passive" activity. I know that educationalists are now talking much more about reading as a creative activity ... as they should. But as difficult as???

A Novel Guide to the Novel

How to Read a Novel : A User's Guide was one of my recent impulse purchases from Kinokuniya, but I'm awfully glad that I succumbed.

Written by John Sutherland who sure has the credentials (he's Lord Northcliffe professor of modern English literature at University College London and was the committee chairman for the 2005 Man Booker Prize), the book is not so much about how to appreciate literature, as about how to choose a book in the first place.

The irony is though, I suppose, that he's preaching to the converted. Anyone literate enough to find pleasure in his book must be a pretty convinced reader anyway!

But I quibble not. This was a bookaholics perfect read, entertaining and full of literary minutiae and fancy-thats and stuff I'm itching to blog about in separate posts. Sutherland gives a potted history of the book and the novel in particular, and then runs through the parts of a novel: (e.g. dedication, font, copyright date, dust jacket, title, blurb), before tackling more general aspects such as genre, reviews, films of the book.

Here's a snippet to whet the appetite:

Put William Caxton in HG Wells's time machine and transport him from his busy little stall by Westminster Abbey, 1480, to Oxford Street, London, or Fifth Avenue, New York, in summer 2006. The founder of our British book trade would, like the philosopher William James's newborn babe, find himself in a booming, buzzing mass of confusion. Everything would seem as strange as Mr Wells's chronomobile which transported him here. One thing, however, would be comfortingly familiar to the master printer: the contents of Waterstone's, Borders and Barnes & Noble. Master Caxton might not understand how Mr Wells's time machine, or any other machine, worked. But he would know (roughly) how the Penguin Classic edition of HG Wells's The Time Machine had been manufactured.

The physical book, the master printer would have been overjoyed to discover, had changed hardly a jot. He would even have found his own catalogue leader, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (c.1380s-90s), in the Classics section. Some physical aspects of the books on display would strike him as nifty improvements on the 15th-century commodity: dust jackets, indexes, covers (he, of course, sold his wares from his Westminster stall in quires), coated paper, italic print, perfect binding - all worth sticking in the boot of Mr Wells's machine for the trip back. Despite all these peripheral improvements to the book as a book, Master Caxton could, with his 15th-century technology, mock up the same product that the big W is currently pushing on its "3 for 2" tables.

Comforting as Caxton would have found the individual items in the high street bookstore, he would have been overwhelmed by their profusion. Even Caxton's lifetime output of some 18,000 printed pages, regarded as formidable in the late 15th century, represents less than one day's production in 2006. Well into the 1600s the total number of books, new and old, available to the literate Englishman is reckoned to have been around 2,000.

If you could afford them (few could), were literate in old and new languages (few were) and lived a long life (few did), you could take in the lot. And a good life it would have been. Nowadays, books hit the market at the rate of over 2,000 titles a week. Unlike baked beans, loaves of bread or Fuji apples, books, once consumed, do not disappear. Despite political legend, they are extremely hard to burn. Books more properly deserve the label "consumer durables" than refrigerators or cars. Most books look better after 70 years than their owners. Certainly after 100 they do. "Consumer imperishables" might be the more accurate term.

It is, for some reason, harder, psychologically, to throw away a paperback than a magazine that may have cost as much. The internet and eBay have boosted the market for pre-owned, pre-read (that is, second-hand) books. A vast number stay in print on the easily accessible backlist. There are about three million novels in the British Library, which is being enlarged by some 50,000 new and reissued titles every year. The staff there will deliver any one of them to your desk in St Pancras in hours. And since the Library's populist reforms of 2005, restrictions on the acquisition of a reader's ticket have been lifted. For any citizen over the age of 18 the country's major copyright library is liberty hall.

For the reader of novels the question is: where to start? Is there any point in starting, or shaping one's reading experiences? How can one organise a curriculum? Ours is not, like the 1940s, an age of austerity: it is not money - expensive as new hardback novels, quite irrationally, seem - but time that is in short supply. How, then, to find the novels that you do have the time to invest in? As the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the original for Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout) observed: "Ninety per cent of science fiction is crap. But 90 per cent of everything is crap." How can we identify the 10 per cent, or less, of fiction available that is not crap? And while we are on the subject, is Ted Sturgeon's own work crap or caviare?

You can read the rest of this edited extract here and another (on the questions of copyright and authorship) here.

The book has come in for a fair bit of criticism from the press. Maureen Corrigan of the Washington Post reckons that the target audience for the book is women who belong to book groups:

We know this because Sutherland loses no opportunity to shower book groups with praise far more intoxicating than the wine usually served at their monthly gatherings. ... Most wince-making of all is this loony piece of readerly flattery that Sutherland flings out at the end of Chapter One: "It is, I would maintain, almost as difficult to read a novel well as to write one well."

And Sam Leith in the Telegraph catches some factual errors.

Those reservations apart, it's a guide I'm very pleased to have on my bookshelves!

So Who Do We Think We Are?

Whose book reviews carry most weight these days? Those of established critics in the mainstream press, or those of bloggers and on Amazon.com?

Apparently, critic John Sutherland (left) stoked the flames when he declared in the Sunday Telegraph a couple of weeks back that the online amateurs were invading the hallowed ground of the established literary press. (The article is not online unfortunately, though you can read a subsequent interview with Sutherland here.)

Novelist Susan Hill (right) quite rightly took Mr. Sutherland to task on her blog, but I think went too far when she declared:

... the traditional book pages of most of the national newspapers are largely irrelevant ...

The plot thickened rather when she received an apparently anonymous threat via e-mail telling Hill that her future books wouldn't be reviewed on the sender's literary pages.

I respect greatly the reviewers in the mainstream press and the best of them set a very high standard.

I've read equally excellent reviews on literary blogs. Susan Hill points out:

If I am writing about a new book or an old book for that matter, to recommend it, I hope I am taking as much care in writing the blog as I would have taken with a sub-editor breathing down my neck. ... The Bloggers – by which mean the true Bloggers, the independent ones, not the side-kicks of the press – are quietly, slowly but very surely, gaining power. And a lot of people do not like that one bit.

But what I appreciate most about the reviews by other bloggers and Amazon commentators is that they are written by ordinary folks who read books and therefore are in a sense more to be trusted.

I also wonder about the politics involved in the book pages of the mainstream press. Not every book can be reviewed and I really wonder what kind of pressure publishers must exert to get a first time author reviewed. And I've seen on occasion some honestly less than brilliant fiction, hyped to the heavens and wondered just how impartial those review pages really are.

Bloggers and others bring a democratic voice to the debate about the merits of a book. And in Malaysia where fiction gets little exposure in the mainstream press, I think are even more important.

And if none of the newpapers want to review Ms. Hill's next novel, I will find space on my blog!

That Monster The Writer

Stephen King has written about zombies, vampires and the end of the world. He has imagined a killer car, a killer dog, a killer clown and killer cellphones. But when he really wants to put a scare into you, he brings on his most fearsome monster of all, that quivering mass of ego and insecurity known as ... the writer.

Very nice article about King's latest novel Lisey's Story ("about marriage, mourning and living a life of the imagination") in the New York Times, and you can also read the first chapter here.

And if you're too lazy to read it yourself, at the Times Online you can hear the man himself reading the first chapter and listen to a podcast interview. Several articles here pay tribute to the force of nature that's Stephen King.

As for the latest novel, John Sutherland writes in his appraisal of King's craft that Lisey's Story:

... looks as if it’s going to join that set of novels in which King allegorises the woes of his craft. In The Dark Half, a writer is stalked by his pseudonym. In Misery, a writer is imprisoned and made to write crap by his No 1 Fan. In Bag of Bones, a writer hits a block so solid that only a Faustian pact with the Devil can help. And Lisey’s Story — what woes of authorship will be dealt with there? I already have my first day delivery order in with Amazon.

I want to read it too.

Kiran Wins!

Kiran Desai has scooped the 2006 Man Booker Prize. The news of her win was broadcast last night on the BBC's 10 o'clock news, when the chair of the judges, Hermione Lee, called The Inheritance of Loss:

... a magnificent novel of humane breadth and wisdom, comic tenderness and powerful political acuteness.

And said that it:

... was chosen, after a long, passionate and generous debate, from a shortlist of five other strong and original voices.

In the Guardian, John Sutherland, chairman of last year's Man Booker said:

Desai's novel registers the multicultural reverberations of the new millennium, with the sensitive instrumentality of fiction, as Jhabvala and Rushdie did in previous eras. The setting moves between the Himalayas and the skyscrapers of New York - and it wins Britain's premier fiction prize. It is a globalised novel for a globalised world.

Me? I'm happy. Happy not just because the book thoroughly deserves its win, but because it's a book that will widely enjoyed (unlike Banville's the Sea, which deserved to win, but wasn't enjoyable for the general reader).

The Booker book of books should be the one which has the greatest literary merit. Of course. But many readers will only pick up literary fiction once a year when the prize result comes out and there's all the hype about it in the papers.

But amid all the celebration for Desai, this caution from John Ezard in the Guardian should give us pause for thought:

... the current book prize and publishing markets increasingly treat novelists as promotable contenders with their first and second books, mature talents by their third, and possibly old hat, no longer fashionable or burnt out, with their fourth and subsequent titles. After winning this year's Orange prize for her third novel, On Beauty, Zadie Smith, built up for six years as an ultra-celebrity, said at the age of 31 she felt she had no inspiration left for a next book. Among other well-thought of and, in some cases, strongly tipped novelists who fell in this authorial night of the long knives were the veterans Nadine Gordimer with her story Get a Life and Howard Jacobson with Kalooki Nights; James Lasdun with Seven Lies; Jon McGregor - in previous years considered a brilliant newcomer - with So Many Ways to Begin; Claire Messud with The Emperor's Children; Andrew O'Hagan with Be Near Me; and Barry Unsworth, once a joint winner of the award, with The Ruby in her Navel. After the initial surprise, few of those who have read all the titles disagree that the newcomers Matar, Desai and Hyland were well-merited choices. The question left by the contest is whether new talent is in danger of being overmarketed and overexposed too soon.

You can read more opinions on Desai's win or post your own on the Guardian blog.

If you have had not time to read the shortlist, you might like to check out John Crace's very funny digested reads of all the Booker finalists here. An excellent piss-take!

I will post up links to other sources as I find them.

Update

The Guardian blog has a great round-up of what the papers are saying around the world about Kiran Desai's win.

I particularly love the one from the Times of India:

The novel, set in India, was written during trips to India. Kiran said: 'I went back to write the Indian bits in India, so it wasn't entirely from a distance.' Kiran's writer mother, Anita Desai, was not at the awards dinner as she was in India.

Erm ... is the author by any chance, Indian?

The blog also quotes the Australian Herald Sun which says that runners-up MJ Hyland and Kate Grenville expressed relief at not having won, which is probably not just putting a brave face on things. The pressure on a winner must be enormous, and being shortlisted perhaps enough reward in itself.

Thank you for your opinions in the comments to this post. I love the Booker and to me whether the best book is finally chosen in the end is not the issue (How do you judge "best" when the books are of such quality, anyway?) but the fact that it's got us all talking and arguing books.

We can argue some more later because the result of the Nobel Prize for Literature is going to be announced today! (12th)

Update lagi!

Kiran Desai talks to Laura Barton of the Guardian about her win and why her Indianess is so important to her.

Billy the Bard on the Booze?

This probably won't wash with purists who like to think of Billy the Bard as unassailably perched atop his pedestal, but it seems that some of the crappiest lines might have been written while he was hung over! Dominic Dromgoole, artistic director of the Globe reckons that there are "Monday morning lines" in Shakespeare's masterpieces.

So which lines were probably written under the influence? John Sutherland has a whole list of candidates in the Guardian.

More discussion of Shakespeare the Boozer on Michael Prescott's blog.

And I love this poem pete the parrot and shakespeare by humourist DonMarquis which depicts our Bill sobbing on Ben Johnson's shoulder down at the Mermaid Tavern, lamenting about how all he wants is to be a poet when he has to keep churning out plays. There could be some truth in it.

Judged by the Cover

The debate about the snob value of books continues in the Guardian with some timely advice delivered by John Sutherland. If you want to impress in Britain:

"Never, never, never be seen with a book which has a "3 for 2" or "£6 off" discount sticker on it."

(On the other hand fellow Malaysians might be impressed with your canny shopping skills.)

The best question to ask when not sure whether to purchase that new book or not:

"Does my sensibility look big in this?"

I think I looked rather fetching in the Bukowski.

And Now For The Shortlist

The Man Booker shortlist has just been announced:

JOHN BANVILLE, JULIAN BARNES, SEBASTIAN BARRY, KAZUO ISHIGURO, ALI SMITH and ZADIE SMITH are the six authors shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2005, the UK's best known literary award. The shortlist was announced by the chair of judges, John Sutherland, at a press conference at the Man Group offices in London today (Thursday 8 September).

Poor Tash - though he did so well to get this far with his first novel.

And McEwan is also out! He was the bookies favourite, remember? And Rushdie! And Coetzee. Am quite stunned.

The odds are now:

5/4 - Julian Barnes, Arthur and George
4/1 - Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go
5/1 - Zadie Smith, On Beauty
8/1 - Sebastian Barry, A Long Long Way
10/1 - John Banville, The Sea
12/1 - Ali Smith, The Accidental
Source: William Hill

Read more on the BBC website.

Looks like there's a very good chance of claiming my margueritas ...

And perhaps tomorrow I will got bookshopping in Kinokuniya with the 30% off vouchers I've collected.

Update:

What others make of the list - The Guardian and the Independent. Also worth reading are reader's comments on the Guardian blog. Our Eric has posted a comment there which he must have got in very soon after the list was announced!