Too bloody writerly

Novelty alone — with writing as with condoms — should not ever be the overriding criterion when making an important selection. Unfortunately, in their introduction to New Writing 13, Toby Litt and Ali Smith make clear that they have only chosen authors practically squeaking with novelty: writers ‘for whom everything they write is a renewal — of language, of place, of the senses and of the contemporary’. As well as being an essentially meaningless piece of lit — or rather Litt — crit, it tells us that, in this book, newness is as much a question of aesthetics as chronology; it may also remind us that an approach that is so right-on is already a real turn-off.

Without this manifesto, it would be difficult to find in such a diverse collection (46 pieces, fiction and non-fiction, poetry and prose) a common theme to offer some sense of coherence for the reader. The editors have certainly gathered together a wide-ranging group of authors from the ranks of the justly and, on this evidence, unjustly familiar (David Mitchell, Muriel Spark on the one hand; Fay Weldon, John Berger, on the other) and of authors whom a reader may be encountering for the first time. Many, however, appear to be suffering from an affliction, apparently endemic in ‘new’ writing, that might be termed writeritis, a condition in which the subject develops an overweening awareness of their status as a writer and a correspondingly large blind spot: the sensibilities and interests of the reader.

The most noticeable symptom is the desperate bid for artificial significance in descriptive passages, which often become meaningless as a result. Take this extract from the bemusingly obtuse Islington by John Berger:

During the night each of us had put to sleep each other’s sex, not by satisfying it, or by denying it, but by following a different desire which even today is hard to name … We found in each other’s arms a way of leaving together, a transport elsewhere.