Their Lips Talk of Mischief
Alan Warner
Faber & Faber, 352pp, £14.99
In Patrick Marber’s 1997 play Closer, a doctor verbally assaults a novelist with what feels, in that moment, to be the most withering of put-downs: “You writer!” Those two words, delivered with such venom, are certain to sting the ego of anyone who derives a sense of self-worth from their work in fiction and its cultural worth as a medium. “Writer” – it just sounds so pathetic, so frivolous.
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