The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Breakdowns that felt like breakthroughs
but this decade has revealed a thirst for ideas of all kinds. 2011 brought us Thinking Fast and Slow, a bestseller by the behavioural scientist Daniel Kahneman. More idea-led books followed, in the realms of economics (John Lanchester’s two non-fiction books Whoops!: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay and How to Speak Money), theoretical physics (Carlo Rovelli’s Seven Brief Lessons on Physics), nature (Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, and several books by Robert Macfarlane), medicine (Henry Marsh’s Do No Harm, Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, Adam Kay’s This is Going to Hurt) and psychoanalysis (Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life).
A literary editor once asked why book prizes didn’t reward “escapist” fiction more often. It was obvious what he meant, but good fiction of any kind is escapist, because it allows you a break from your own habits of thought. Whereas the decade’s top three bestsellers – Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed – have offered little respite from, say, the voting habits of certain anglophone nations, which in the very same period have tended towards masochism.
E L James began writing Fifty Shades as fan fiction (inspired by Twilight) and published it online in 2011. Nine years later fans have all the power: harnessing the strength of social media, publishers have enlisted them to create a giant hype machine. By the time Margaret Atwood came to write this year’s sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale, her fans had told her the name of her own protagonist, the television series based on it had given her an additional character, and a member of the public had got her name in the new book via a charity auction. So much about The Testaments was in response to popular demand that it could hardly fail to become a global event, and Atwood, with her wealth of wit, even seemed at times to be spoofing popular genres, as if writing fan fiction based on her own work.
Referring to oneself came into its own. “Autofiction”, a long and knowing tradition in Europe, became an Olympic-level sport. Competitive literary narcissism from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Rachel Cusk and Maggie Nelson has been serial and addictive. Meanwhile, another fever flared up around an author who refused to exist: Elena Ferrante, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels, translated by Ann Goldstein, gathered readers in the UK and US before her fame boomeranged back to Italy – and still no one really knows who she is.
Not long ago, a critic referred to Ali Smith, admiringly, as “the only novelist who understands that the novel is a problem”. Form
Jonathan Bate’s project is emblematic of a habit in biography that easily becomes irresponsible. Who is the biographer to judge someone else’s life, and how does that compromise the reader? was broken down and flipped around in Smith’s exceptional How to Be Both, and she generally leads the way in the felicitous questioning of form. Max Porter has followed with the hybrid works Grief is the Thing with Feathers and Lanny. The Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is a collaged masterpiece. Deborah Levy, a more restrained writer, is at the peak of her powers in fiction and nonfiction, reminding us – as these other authors do, often working in fragments – that stories can also be inquiries.
The past few years have given rise to a certain tone as well as a form, and its hallmark is a kind of muted ennui. Sally Rooney, Claire-Louise Bennett, Nicole Flattery and a few other young Irish writers are doing it, but I’d say David Szalay and the graphic novelist Nick Drnaso are too. To some readers it seems easy or artless. I think it’s skilful, but there’s a plainness to it that makes engagement feel more like voyeurism than reading. In a recent conversation someone I know said it read like the novels themselves were on antidepressants. A reply came from another part of the room: “Isn’t everyone?”
In 2013 I contributed to a panel of judges who selected Granta magazine’s once-a-decade Best of Young British Novelists list. It was a privilege to have my mind turned towards so many interesting writers, and a pleasure to feel excited all over again each time one of them has had a new book out since. Naomi Alderman, Tahmima Anam, Xiaolu Guo, Sarah Hall, Benjamin Markovits, Nadifa Mohamed, Helen Oyeyemi, Sunjeev Sahota, Kamila Shamsie, Zadie Smith, David Szalay, Adam Thirlwell, Evie Wyld: there isn’t room to name all 20 here, but they have proven, over the rest of this decade, that fiction in Britain is vibrant and varied.
In 2017 Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize, and said in his lecture that “if we are to get the best from the writers of today and tomorrow, I believe we must become more diverse.” He meant this, he said, in two senses: that we should make an effort to hear from voices beyond our comfort zone, and that we should not define too narrowly what constitutes good literature. “The next generation will come with all sorts of new, sometimes bewildering ways to tell important and wonderful stories. We must keep our minds open to them,” he said.
On the eve of 2020, I’ve heard Bernardine Evaristo and Elif Shafak, two novelists of very different backgrounds, cite the same two authors as influences: Audre Lorde and James Baldwin, both American civil rights activists. Meanwhile, the legendary publishing pioneer Margaret Busby has brought out a sequel to her 27-year-old anthology, Daughters of Africa; together the two volumes draw attention to the writing of more than 400 women of African descent, from Ancient Egypt to the present. To see those showcasings as restitution for the overlooked is somewhat patronising. But it’s all a widening of attention, and it’s from these broader interactions over time that the writers and thinkers of the next few decades will emerge.
The past few years have given rise to a certain tone in fiction, a sort of muted ennui