The novel Last Resort is by a MAN, Andrew Lipstein! I know! It feels so weird to be reading fiction from a male perspective. The last book by a man I read was Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart, which I know some of you liked, but I thought was weak. In the last, I don’t know, thirty years or so women seem to have completely dominated book lists. Sure, there are still the James Pattersons and the Lee Childs and that strange, strange man with all his drawings of that horse but where are the Jay McInernys and the Alex Garlands and the (young) Ian McEwans?
Because I am no fun, I would say that it is probably due to economics. There has never been much money in novel-writing and I feel like now budgets are gambled on one or two Sure Thing blockbusters, (plot: there’s a group of old friends someone’s got a secret - why is no-one yet bored with this hideous, plodding storyline?), or something dark and quirky like Pine. Anyone else gets £2k and constantly dumped for meetings at the last moment because there was a rumour that EL James might walk through the office.
I know this is a horrible gender-stuff, but I just think women, oppressed for a billion years, are just much more likely to go for those odds, for this treatment, whereas men don’t put up with that horseshit and many budding male authors go and work in tech. If they are extremely motivated, they might write a book on the side but the chances of it getting picked up are so low I imagine they mostly don’t even bother doing that.
I absolutely love Jay McInerny. Story of My Life is utterly brilliant, if you haven’t read it, please, please do. Bright Lights, Big City - one of the very few novels written in the second person and the Brightness Falls series. UNGH. JAY, CALL ME!! Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis is in my top five best fiction. So I don’t hate writing from the male perspective but it doesn’t sing to my soul like women writing about women of a certain age behaving extremely badly does.
Last Resort doesn’t quite sing to my soul, but it is a very good book. Our hero-ish is Caleb, who accidentally-on-purpose steals his friend’s idea for a book and turns it into one of those novels that gets a $1m advance. The friend finds out! A sticky situation ensues. I don’t know what happens in the end because I am only half way through, but I am really enjoying it. It is not easy to write cliché-free, plot-light prose that still trips along and keeps you guessing, but Lipstein makes it look easy. I hope he got more than £2k for this. I hope he doesn’t go and work in tech.
Next, Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living. I keep this in my “nets bag” which is the bag I take to the heath, filled with a large blanket, sunscreen and this book, in order to supervise Sam while he’s practising leg spin bowling in the cricket nets, so I associate this book very heavily with cricket. But it’s got nothing to do with cricket. This is Levy’s post-divorce memoir, where she details her post-divorce life in her flat with her growing-up children, her writing shed in a crazy old granny’s garden and her new bicycle, with which she is passionately in love.
It is a very short book. The writing is HUGE and there is - I’m not joking - a 1in border around each page. It’s more like a pamphlet. I have never got on with other Levy books - that’s not a criticism, I think she often just writes over my head. I couldn’t bash through Hot Milk, although I’m sure it is a great book. I’m glad that she is so famous and well-regarded now that she can turn in this pamphlet and still get it published, because I’m sure many times in her career she has been treated like crap.
I do think, though, and I am going to have the courage of my convictions here, that sometimes Levy is impassably gnomic. There are long, rangy sentences featuring names like Kirkegaard and Wittgenstein and I know these people are philosophers, but I’ve got no idea what they stand for. And she rambles on a bit like this and I think, “I am completely lost”, but then she sticks me with a sentence so pertinent my face goes rigid, like: “Marguerite Duras did not have the ‘fatal patience’ that de Beauvoir rightly thought women who were mothers had learned to their detriment.”
That’s all, have a great day.
Oh no, wait - not quite all! Hacks Season 2 is out now on Amazon Prime! It’s completely held up, not quite as genius as Season 1, but still brilliant.
Now that’s all.
Two books
Nothing book related but I watched hacks on your recommendation and absolutely loved it. Just amazing and touching and so funny. Anyway will now go watch season 2 x
I've just finished reading Kingsley Amis's Letters which are compelling in a slightly repellent way. Yes, there is a frustrating dearth of emerging male writers currently, absolutely for the reasons you cite (also the majority of editors are women - the robust male editors who published McEwen, Martin Amis etc have retired. I've heard publicists saying that a debut male novelist wearing a suit will not draw the eye on This Morning... Graham Norton, Robert Webb, Richard Coles and Richard Osman can write a bit but it's their celebrity that ensured their deals. (I mention them because they don't have any truck with ghostwriters). I'm currently representing two debut male novelists who are both over 60 - which may also be tricky, but I firmly believe in their talent. And another one who has written his third after a ten year hiatus. Sigh...