Books
No reputation is more than snowfall
Published 07 January 2002
Jason Cowley on the new year in books
More than 116,000 books were published in Britain last year, most of which enjoyed only a flickering, evanescent public presence, and were certainly not reviewed, before beginning that short, brutal journey to the remainder bin - from where only the oblivion of the pulping pit awaits, the literary equivalent of the knacker's yard. If you have ever visited a pulping warehouse, as I did recently, you will understand the strange melancholy that accompanies the witnessing of such mechanised destruction, the destruction of books. Watching this happen, one thinks often of the American poet Delmore Schwartz, who, disillusioned by his own literary failure, wrote: "No reputation is more than snowfall; it vanishes."
Yet publishing is nothing if it is not about risk: it is a speculative business that thrives on experiment, the biannual renewal of hope and the unexpected. No publisher knows for sure which of its books, even those with a hefty marketing budget, will flourish, which explains why the phenomenon of word-of-mouth recommendation is so important to the book business. "The whole point about word-of-mouth bestsellers is that they are essentially a mystery," explains Christopher Gasson, the author of Bookselling in Britain. "As a result, and in desperation, more and more publishers are turning to the social sciences to explain why certain books keep on selling."
They are also turning, we are led to believe, to The Tipping Point (Little, Brown) - itself something of a word-of-mouth success - in which the New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell suggests that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves or the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, is to think of them as epidemics: "Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses." People contaminate one another with preferences and recommendations. The "tipping point" is the moment at which a social epidemic becomes contagious and crosses a threshold to reach critical mass, the point when nothing can stop it catching on and spreading. "The world of the tipping point," he writes, "is a place where the unexpected becomes expected, where radical change is more than a possibility. It is - contrary to all our expectations - a certainty."
It's a neat idea, but if only it were that simple. If publishers knew how to start and control what Gladwell calls "positive epidemics", then publishing wouldn't be the frustrating, often profligate business it is, a business in which it is estimated that less than 10 per cent of titles from any one list make a profit (which means that about 90 per cent of all books are published at a loss). But nor would publishing be capable of such glorious surprises.
So which books, among the tens of thousands to be published in the next six months, are worthy of special recommendation and thus possible contamination? Well, there are some strong fiction offerings, not least from J M Coetzee, twice winner of the Booker Prize, who returns in May with Youth (Secker & Warburg), a novel about a young South African student who arrives in London with a guilty secret. Other previous Booker-shortlisted authors returning in the new season include John McGahern, whose That They May Face the Rising Sun (Faber and Faber) is an extraordinarily subtle study of Irish family life, written with all his usual poise, precision and grace; Michael Frayn's Spies (Faber) is an amusing wartime story about two men who discover German secret agents living in their street; William Boyd's Any Human Heart (Hamish Hamilton) begins with the discovery of an old man's memoir; the marvellous Canadian stylist Carol Shields returns with Unless (Fourth Estate), a poignant portrayal of the relationship between a mother and her silent, inactive daughter; and in Irvine Welsh's Porno (Jonathan Cape), Sick Boy, whom we first met in Trainspotting, lives down to expectations by attempting to direct - yes, you guessed it - a pornographic film.
Of less established writers, I'm looking forward to Philip Hensher's The Mulberry Empire (Flamingo), a novel set during the years of the Great Game and the first Afghan wars, which may explain in an accessible way the long historical context to the present dismal conflict. Alan Warner - whose Morvern Callar, his supercharged vernacular account of murder and rave music in the Scottish Highlands, was one of the most stylish debuts of recent years - is back with The Man Who Walks (Cape), which is about a homeless drifter searching for his absent uncle and for a substantial quantity of missing money.
Less enticing is Who's Sorry Now (Cape), the usual tale of middle-aged angst and adultery from the ubiquitous, unashamedly bearded (and deeply tedious) Howard Jacobson. Lynda La Plante has another tale of crime and betrayal in Royal Flush (Pan Macmillan). And Allison Pearson has written the Bridget Jonesish I Don't Know How She Does It (Chatto & Windus), based on her pseudonymous column in the Daily Telegraph, the tale of a "thirtysomething career woman who tries to have it all". Can't wait for that one.
More to my taste, and one novel that I'm sure has an outside chance of "tipping" unexpectedly into the bestseller lists, is The Face by Phil Whitaker, a perplexing and haunting narrative of family secrets, hidden violence and self-deception set in present-day London and early 1970s Nottingham. It can also be read as a moving portrait of the relationship between fathers and daughters. Whitaker has an enterprising new publisher, Atlantic Books, the UK arm of the celebrated American independent Grove Atlantic, which has another of my new year favourites: Richard Flanaghan's Gould's Book of Fish, a verbally exotic tale of a white convict, in 19th-century Australia, who falls in love with a black woman and is punished for his "crime". The book is already a bestseller in Flanaghan's native Australia, and may well be here, too. I'd also recommend Gaveston (Faber), the sensuous and clever debut novel from Stephanie Merritt, deputy literary editor of the Observer.
Among non-fiction highlights are memoirs from the literary academic Terry Eagleton (The Gatekeeper, Allen Lane, The Penguin Press), the career controversialist Fay Weldon (Auto Da Fay, HarperCollins) and the grand old Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (A 20th-Century Life, HarperCollins). I like the sound of Living Dolls by the talented young journalist Gabby Wood, about our obsession with moving dolls and robots (Faber), and Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built (Faber), a memoir about the books we read as children - or not, as the case may be. And as if to prove that there's no such thing as a truly original idea, there will be not one, but two biographies of both Primo Levi - by Ian Thomson (Hutchinson) and Carol Angier (Penguin) - and Nietzsche - by Curtis Cate (Hutchinson) and Rudiger Safranski (Granta). David Gilmour's The Long Recessional: the imperial Rudyard Kipling (John Murray) is the third biography of Kipling to be published in less than three years, though it's certainly worth reading, and Lilian Pizzichini's Dead Men's Wages (Picador) and Melanie McGrath's Silvertown (Fourth Estate) are the best of what is becoming the thriving sub-genre of East End family memoirs. Anthony Beevor, the bestselling author of Stalingrad - now there's a book that contaminated readers - returns with the self-explanatory Berlin: the downfall 1945 (Viking), and the prolific Frank McLynn, one of our very best popular historians, returns with Wagons West: the pioneering years on the overland trails, 1841-1848 (Cape), which sounds like a Mastermind specialist subject, if ever there was one.
My own non-fiction choices include Bill Borrows's The Hurricane (Atlantic), a hard-edged account of the life and alcoholic decline of Alex Higgins, who, for a brief period, made the wretched snooker seem like a game worth taking seriously. Selina Hastings's Rosamund Lehmann (Chatto & Windus) will, I hope, introduce a new generation of readers to the subtle, elegiac work of one of our most underrated writers. In Post-Human Future (Profile), the great Francis Fukuyama - whose "End of History" is perhaps the most influential and contested essay of recent times - investigates the biotech revolution and its dangerous promises of a utopian future.
Narrative non-fiction is well served by Philip Gourevitch's investigation into a real-life American murder mystery in A Cold Case (Picador); and in All the Devils Are Here (Granta), David Seabrook travels to the coastal dead zones of Thanet and Medway in north Kent, among the most shadowy and economically depressed areas in the whole of the British Isles, but which here provide a rich source of literary and art-historical reflection in the style of Iain Sinclair (Turner, Dickens and Queen Victoria were all regular visitors to Thanet). The rancorous Italian-based Tim Parks has written an unconventional football book about his local team, A Season with Verona: travels around Italy, in search of illusion, national character and goals (Secker & Warburg). And, in the confessional The Art of Travel (Hamish Hamilton), Alain de Botton offers more quasi-philosophical whimsy about our desire to escape and to travel. Or so we are led to believe.
Later in the year, we can expect new novels from John Lanchester and Zadie Smith, the Tiger Woods of literature, and what is intriguingly being described as a "political memoir" from Martin Amis, in which he writes candidly about the labyrinthine tensions of the cold war and his own political odyssey. For now, though, there's more than enough to be going along with.
This round-up was first published on the Waterstone's/Amazon website
Post this article to
We want to encourage people to comment on our content and to exchange views with other readers and hope this will be done on a courteous basis. However, if you encounter posts which are offensive please let us know by emailing comments@newstatesman.co.uk and we will take swift action where necessary.
