The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
When timeliness felt like an obligation
Leo Robson launches our literary review of the year by asking if an obsession with topicality is harming fiction
Judging the Booker Prize is never easy but it shouldn’t have been this hard. “Today we tried voting,” Peter Florence, the chairman of this year’s jury, explained last month, during his announcement of the 2019 winner. “Didn’t work.” The only solution – or so Florence decided, in defiance of the rule book – was to award two novels jointly: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (Chatto & Windus, £20) and Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99).
The resulting coverage – after the winners’ forgivably strained speeches – put an emphasis on contrast. Atwood, a former Booker winner, had written a wildly anticipated, much-preordered sequel to a 30-year-old bestseller and syllabus stalwart (The Handmaid’s Tale) which had recently become a memebreeding multi-series television show. If Atwood’s fame couldn’t be exaggerated, then Evaristo’s obscurity slightly was. Though her books about black and Afro-Caribbean experience throughout history haven’t made her a global sensation, she has been published by Penguin for nearly two decades. I studied her work at university. But for all the disparity in name-recognition, the books were alike in being nowish novels for a now-besotted moment – and seemingly embraced as such.
If timeliness, being “onmessage”, feels paramount, almost a moral obligation, how does a jury awarding a prize for the best anglophone novel know what to prioritise? In other words, what matters most: trans identity, Windrush, migrants, MeToo, the climate crisis, political populism? From a more narrowly literary perspective, how can they also pay lip service to the idea of formal novelty, which has been forced back on to the agenda in recent years by Eimear McBride and the other writers acknowledged by a rival award, the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction?
The joint award seemed a way of confronting, or perhaps shirking, that challenge – of covering a greater number of bases. Atwood was reviving a dystopian feminist classic, written against the backdrop of Cold War and Reaganite repression, for the age of Trump and MeToo. Evaristo, the first black woman to win the – or should that be “a”? – Booker, was dealing with the experience of black British females and transsexuals across several decades. But Girl, Woman, Other is also unorthodox in form, a verse novel or prose poem replete with rival voices. You feel that if the judges had been forced to choose a single winner – if the duty had been enforced – they would have plumped for Evaristo, and not only because her book was fresh and funny whereas Atwood’s was underpowered, oddly weighted, and had a whiff of opportunism.
It’s hard not to conclude, when looking at the Booker longlist, that a kind of opportunism was generally being rewarded. So John Lanchester made the cut for his uneven fable about totalitarianism The Wall (Faber, £8.99), as did Jeanette Winterson for the bold but rough Frankissstein: A Love Story (Jonathan Cape, £16.99), which used the idea of the malleable body to write about AI and trans – a double blast of topicality. Both books were a reminder that “the future” has to a large degree arrived. Salman Rushdie’s preposterous Quichotte (Jonathan Cape, £20) peddled the related message that what used to be fantasy is now our reality. It was as if Rushdie knew what the Booker jury wanted, and piled on Trumpist America, Brexit, freak weather, reality television, social media, migration, non-binary sexuality, fake news, the opioid crisis…
Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (Fourth Estate, £16.99), the Mexican writer’s first book written in English, was a rare novel on the longlist to approach a burning issue (child migrants) in a persuasive and original way, though the near-single-sentence thousand-page Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar, £13.99), by Lucy Ellmann, which made the shortlist, might also qualify, given that its narrator, while making a cherry tart in Ohio, finds the head space to ruminate on present-day America as well as everything else.
The game of rewriting classics was not only played by Rushdie and Winterson; it proved more popular than ever. Quite apart from publishers brandishing lucrative commissions for themed series, such as the Canongate Myth Series, The Austen Project, and Hogarth Shakespeare, novelists seem intent on doing it of their own accord. Ali Smith, in the third and best so far of her seasonal quartet, Spring (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99), produced not only a revival or update of familiar types and structures but applied them to the concerns, or at least headlines, of the present, in this case using Shakespeare’s Pericles, Prince of Tyre to depict migrants and private prisons. The same play inspired Mark Haddon’s defiantly odd The Porpoise (Chatto & Windus, £18.99).
Winterson, in repurposing Frankenstein on its bicentenary, wrote about a transgender or “hybrid” doctor, Ry (formerly Mary) Shelley, and the tech guru Professor Victor Stein. Rushdie’s moan about the contents of his Twitter feed was framed as a rewriting of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, though it also owed a clear debt to both Lolita and Ionesco’s Rhinoceros. Ian McEwan, in The Cockroach (Vintage, £7.99), adapted the opening pages and basic premise of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis to Brexit, with an insect finding himself in the body of an embattled Prime Minister, and the decision to leave the EU recast as a referendum vote over an economic theory where buying and selling are inverted.
These novels couldn’t be said to offer any concrete insight you wouldn’t find in a newspaper column, but at least McEwan’s book was a self-conscious squib, written over the summer and rushed out as a skinny paperback. Quichotte, by contrast, went on and on, pin-balling about in time and place, yet was somehow shortlisted for the Booker, a decision that merits a public inquest. (At least we know it wasn’t the judges’ second favourite.) One might add, in the case for McEwan’s defence, that his other 2019 novel, Machines Like Me (Jonathan
Cape, £18.99), was a far solider exercise on similar lines, using ideas from The Tempest (and one or
Atwood’s novel was underpowered, oddly weighted, and had a whiff of opportunism
two other texts) to consider Brexit, AI, populism and MeToo through an alternative Eighties in which the Falklands War has been lost, Alan Turing is still alive, and Tony Benn leads the Labour Party.
The American crime writer James Ellroy provides an interesting case study of literary culture, or chatter, in 2019. While promoting This Storm (William Heinemann, £20), the second volume of his second Los Angeles quartet, Ellroy repeatedly told interviewers that his story of Nazism and racial intolerance in America during the Second World War had no applicability to the present. He rightly predicted that, like virtually all writers of historical fiction, he would be “inundated” with questions about topics like Trump and populism, about which he asserted – though in more colourful terms – that he knew absolutely nothing. This Storm had more obvious topical resonances than his earlier successes LA Confidential (earlyFifties Hollywood) or American Tabloid (the heyday of the Kennedys), despite being set more distantly in the past. But Ellroy kept that door firmly closed.
Even so, American novels, as much as British ones, seemed to sink or swim in proportion to their topicality. Tayari Jones won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction with a tale of modern racial injustice, An American Marriage (Oneworld, £8.99). But work of less overt relevance, though ranking as minor literary phenomena and even touching the bestseller lists, struggled to register as cultural news. Social panorama, historical portraiture and generational saga
The decision to shortlist Rushdie for the Booker merits a public inquest
were to be found in Ann Patchett’s The Dutch House (Bloomsbury, £18.99), Elizabeth Strout’s Olive, Again (Viking, £14.99), Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (Fleet, £16.99) and Elizabeth Gilbert’s City of Girls (Bloomsbury, £16.99), but none made the expected impact. Short story collections, embattled at the best of times, stood even less of a chance, though lovers of the form were spoilt, with new books by Deborah Eisenberg (Your Duck Is My Duck, Europa, £12.99) and Nicole Flattery (Show Them a Good Time, Bloomsbury, £14.99). The justly revered Mary Gaitskill, also produced a sparkling MeToo novella, This Is Pleasure (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99).
Not enough people have heard of Isabel Waidner’s We Are Made of Diamond Stuff (Dostoevsky Wannabe, £4), a garrulous comedy about a pair of trans migrants working at a “no star” hotel in Ryde, on the Isle of Wight, against a magical-realist, Brexittinged backdrop. (The borrowings from B S Johnson’s 1971 House Mother Normal make it – almost – another rewriting of a classic.) Nicola Barker, who won the Goldsmiths Prize for H(A)PPY, has yet to receive the praise she deserves for her astonishingly intricate new novella, or long story, I Am Sovereign (William Heinemann, £12.99), in which an estate agent, a homeowner, and a prospective buyer and her daughter at a house viewing find different ways of conceiving of self-development.
The novelists from either side of the Atlantic who have inspired the most plaudits this decade both produced books that, while not remotely cloistered or abstract, gave a gentle reminder that what matters most in fiction is not timeliness but structure, characters and ideas. Ben Lerner moved away from first-person