He gets paid for this
Robert McCrum informs us that: “For the past several years, the English and American novel has been going through a phase of hectic - at times, even ludicrous - innovation. This is partly thanks to the exuberance of a new generation, partly to the reckless overproduction of new fiction by all walks of publisher, both mainstream and experimental.”
He goes on: “During recent years, we’ve seen novels in verse; novels composed without the vowel ‘a’; novels narrated from the point of view of pets; novels of gothic slaughter; novels of colossal lust; novels heaving with obscenity. And, painful though it is to admit this, a lot of these books have been astonishingly bad, not to say frightful.”
He’s probably right. But how has this situation come about? Well, mainly because for the past several years (oh, and during recent years), unimaginative literary editors have given drearily predictable fiction an easy ride and, if not always ignored, marginalised the true inheritors of the tradition so lazily invoked in recklessly overproduced comment columns.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
