Your points are well made and are multi-stranded.

Books are dumbed down by the whole process of marketing them by genre (and then sub-genre, I give you 'steampunk'). Of putting zombies on the cover of Victorian Classics, the equivalent of an ideas-bankrupt Hollywood trawling 60's TV series for putting on the big screen. When the author's name on the book spine becomes the commodity rather than the content of their words... No longer are books allowed to speak for themselves, but have to be buzzed and promoted by the cult of the author personality: did anyone know what Don Delillo or Hubert Selby Jnr actually looked like back in the 70's & 80's?

The novel needs to be dragged kicking and screaming out of the nineteenth century form and 20th Century concerns and then maybe it might speak to its techno-savy, data-bombarded 21st century audience. The novel should be buttressed by all sorts of new images and metaphors provided for by the new science, theories of mind and the like, but authors have ceded the ground to the theoretical scientists who conjure up wonderfully imaginative metaphors to explain their abstruse equations, that put authors to shame. The sort of thing Kurt Vonnegut used to do.

The novel as intimated can deal with emotional complexity at greater length than other art forms. This is the ground that authors have ceded with their pop-psychology or psychoanalytical by numbers characters. It is time to astound and amaze readers once again with metaphorical leaps of the imagination. Everything should stem from lnguage, but langauge is a criminally under-valued element of today's author. it should be both marble and chisel in the hand of the writer, as it was with the likes of Faulkner or Joyce.

I think the writers are out there. Jonathan Lethem is one such, who delivers what the article calls for which is extraordinary insighht into humanity within each paragraph. It can be done, but my concern is for homegrown British authors to be doing it.

Posted by marc nash <sewell.d@googlemail,.com> at 4:18PM Monday 02 Aug 2010
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