NEGATIVE CAPABILITY

A DIARY OF SURVIVING

MICHELE ROBERTS

Sandstone Press, 288pp, £14.99, ebook £7.19

Michèle Roberts is a novelist whose latest book has been rejected.

Negative Capability is an account of 12 days, spaced out in the year which follows, as she rewrites her ‘difficult, experimental’ novel with its unfashionably ‘unrelatable’ characters. Most of the entries are about writing, and cooking. Friends creep in, and neighbours, and French farmers on tractors, and unsympathetic agents and publishers. Rachel Cooke in the Guardian found the journal ‘a radiant and absorbing account of her day-to-day life in her basement flat in Walworth, south London, and in her tiny, damp house in the Mayenne, in north-west France’.

Stuart Kelly in the Scotsman acknowledged ‘parts that are intriguing and parts that are lyrical and melancholy’. But he wondered ‘whether or not it would have been better to leave it in a drawer for a century or so, as it might then be read as a fascinating social document about the life of a writer in the early years of the 21st century… A problem with contemporary diaries is an awkward sense of voyeurism.’ Tristram Fane Saunders in the

Telegraph slotted the book into a dismaying new hierarchy – ‘autofiction beats imaginative fiction; memoir beats autofiction. This baffles me, as wonderful novels are so often written by pleasant but dull people. Roberts – by wide consensus a wonderful novelist – has here written a pleasant, dull book about her pleasant, dull life… it is very likely to outsell her last few novels’ – this conclusion made him ‘want to bury my head in a bucket of sand’.