There’s more to life than adultery in north London

HAPPY NEW YEAR. So what do we do now? My reply, of course, is: “Read more literature, and hope for an answer”.
 
The idea seems to have occurred to The Sunday Times, too, which devoted this week’s main oped article to Jenni Russell’s assertion that the contemporary British novel is letting its readers down.
 
It fails, she argues, to engage with the concerns, dilemmas and tragedies of modern people living modern lives. It is not fulfilling its remit, it is not fit for purpose, there are too many arsey men writing too much arsey bloke stuff. Ian McEwan is grim and self-regarding and Julian Barnes is a stuffy old drip.
 
Whether you agree with her or not, it’s a question worth raising. Books, to most reasonably-educated people over 40, still signify civilisation.
 
And as more and more of civilisation’s qualities fall slowly away - how about, for starters, enlightenment, social equity, education, care for the sick, aid for the vulnerable, financial honour, access to justice, and so much more - we find ourselves looking to books for some kind of guidance on that most ancient of ethical questions: how should one live?
 
Much of the time all we can do is recognise wrong when we see it, whether it’s bankers scuttling away with the loot and their freshly-minted knighthoods, or the government - heedless of that most British of qualities, a quiet kindness - avenging their impotence on the poor and the sick.
 
But I’d say Jenni Russell - a good friend - is wrong on three counts.
 
First, we’re not going to get much blatant help from novelists, whose job is simply to tell stories. Second, most authors are about as engaged as it’s possible to be with contemporary life, whether they’re apparently writing about the here-and-now or not. And third, there’s no such thing as a “pure” novel, so we shouldn’t be misled by a book’s genre (unless it’s My Reality by Melissa Rycroft, reality TV contestant and former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader: to be published on 5 June and, like you, I’m already almost beside myself with excitement).
 
The engagement Russell seeks may not be found in the increasingly marginal middlebrow “literary fiction”, a.k.a. books in which not much happens to quite nice people. Try to write that now, and most of the time editors will press for a crime or a mystery to put spine into your musings and keep the reader moving along. After all, the person who puts the book down and turns out the light at the end of a chapter has to have a reason to pick it up again the next day.
 
Writers who embrace “genre fiction” perhaps have more to tell us about who, and how, we are. You want an Engels (or indeed a Marx) of our times, try China Miéville’s urban fantasies.  Scarlett Thomas writes about an imaginary Canterbury in a parallel universe. Crime fiction can be here and now (Ian Rankin), there and now (David Hewson’s Roman copper Nic Costa), there and then (Lindsey Davis’s Falco books, set in ancient Rome).
 
Comedy does the same work; it would be idiotic to exclude Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Sue Townsend or that plate-spinning straw-boater’d music-hall turn Anthony Burgess from the list of authors who show us ourselves. The same applies to historical fiction, SF and fantasy. C J Sansom’s 16th century rings as true to our times as William Boyd’s twentieth century, China Miéville’s  New Crobuzon is - cactus-people and all - as familiar and shaming as Engels’s (or our own) London, and Philip Pullman addressed almost nothing but the question ‘How should one live?’ in the trilogy His Dark Materials (as well as writing one of the most moving erotic scenes of all time).
 
And the great comic writers like Howard Jacobson and, on his day, Martin Amis, are right in there, not just mixing it but making it.
 
It’s ‘lit. fic.’ that has difficulties. Only a few, like Christopher Priest and Hilary Mantel, have the narrative genius to do it straight from the shoulder. The rest drift hopelessly into pink-embossed chick-lit or yet more nervous adultery in north London. With good reason. These are prissy times.
 
Jenni Russell’s exemplar of what we want is the fluent and cross-genre author William Nicholson; particularly his middle-class Sussex trilogy, beginning with The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life. People go to Glyndebourne. They do the school run. They fancy people on trains. Old flames re-ignite. They produce documentaries, have little secrets, drive SUVs. Beautifully done, but so not intense that after a bit you long for a murderer or a spaceship or something you haven’t encountered in reality.
 
We live in hard times, in a country whose motto is: No We Can’t. The Big Novel that Russell mourns is receding like a mirage. But it’ll recede even faster if what we want, as Russell seems to suggest, is to read about people Just Like Us. What we need to know about is people Just Like Others.

• The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life by William Nicholson, Quercus. ISBN 978-1849161954

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