Don’t write off literary fiction yet

I don’t intend to start a feud. Most of Sean Thomas’s essay on The Spectator’s website last week, titled ‘Good riddance to literary fiction’, I agree with. It’s true that the high-flown heavy hitters of the book biz get far less attention than in yesteryear – though ‘litfic’ has never been a big money-maker in publishing. It’s true that no one reads book reviews any longer, and I should know because I write book reviews.

I’ve no use for fiction exclusively powered by plot. If the words are flat and lifeless, I can’t read the book

It’s true, too, that literary prizes don’t trigger the massive surge in sales they once did, owing to a depreciation that awards judges have exacerbated by woking-out. Shortlists in the past decade have systematically over-represented the ‘under-represented’. This modern version of bend-over-backwards virtue has been so conspicuous that it’s called into question whether the books’ excellence really took priority over clumsy social engineering or the judges’ moral vanity. Book buyers aren’t all stupid.

I certainly agree that many contemporary authors have similarly self-harmed by regarding themselves as too sophisticated for plot. (Alternatively, some hifalutin novelists might fancy having a plot, but they’re rubbish at constructing one. Plotting is hard.) In our household, a formally inventive novel in which nothing happens constitutes fire-starter for our wood stove.

Still, I myself belong to this sidelined class of ‘literary novelists’. Someone should stick up for us a tad, and I bet no one else in this magazine will volunteer.

I know we’ve an often-well-earned rep as boring, pretentious, purposefully opaque and hard to read. But none of these qualities is definitive of my camp. The sole difference between standard commercial fiction and the convincingly literary kind is the prose. It’s all about language.