oursin | Entries tagged with fiction

A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -

- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -

Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?

(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)

Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)

Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.

(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)

Have only just discovered that there is a new (came out in November) biography of Decca Mitford: Carla Kaplan, Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford.

Via a review in the latest Literary Review which is, alas, not fully online, sounds less than whelmed, and gives the impression that it may be a tad po-faced.

Yes, about Jessica Mitford, that great tease.

Can't find any other unpaywalled online reviews of any great credibility - there are some on GoodReads but they all sound to be from people who Nevererdofer previously.

So before I, that already have several of her own biographical works and essays, collections of letters etc upon my shelves, also the previous biography, spend moolah and time on this, I wonder if anyone has already read it and has opinions?

(Have just had thought that as far as I recall, Upton Sinclair's Lanny Budd did on at least one occasion encounter Unity Mitford, while undercover in Germany: but not, I think, Decca &/or Esmond, anywhere in his exploits.)

Or are they just more conscious about it, eh?

‘There’s only one bed’, ‘fake dating’ and ‘opposites attract’: how tropes took over romance

You know, I'm a lot happier about engaging with the work of someone who's aware of the tropes they're playing with and maybe riffing around with them, and that there is maybe a tradition? - rather than somebody who thinks they're doing something Rad and New and boy, is it Same Old Same Old.

(And just let's not go to Male Midlife Crisis novel....)

Maybe not so much in romance genre, but have I not whinged on mightily about crime fiction and the trope of the hawkshaw with complicated emotional backstory, substance abuse issues, difficulties with The Hierarchy, etc etc?

And honestly, while we are on crime fiction, can anyone tell me, with any plausible accuracy, how many works there are in which, literally, The Butler Actually Did It? Because whoah, massive cliche that I find it hard to match with my own reading. Though admittedly, over the years I have been reading, and some of that was very forgettable mysteries, maybe I have just elided from memory a whole swathe of murderous butlers.

Not OK? Booker winner Flesh ignites debate about state of masculinity

No, really, you don't say? Can it be that - once again, or perhaps, still MASCULINITY IS IN CRISIS?

Does it not sound as though the author goes in for 'dumb, dark, dull, bitter belly-tension'? (Sigh.)

I am sorry to discover that an excoriating retrospect on John Fowles with particular reference to The Magus by DJ Taylor in the latest Literary Review does not appear to be fully accessible online, chiz, chiz -

[E]ach of his novels when stripped of its fashionable appurtenances - The Magus, for example, is rife with Jungian animas - is ultimately about male entitlement.... the books are all about men expecting to get the things they want and being mortified by their absence.
....
[A] series of exercises in what Maurice Bowra called 'the higher bogus'.

I recently had the apercu, following my re-reading of The Golden Notebook, that besides being about the themes that Lessing found readers took from it - The Woman Question, the crisis of the Left at the period, mental health - surely it was also about Crisis of Masculinity/Men R Terribly Poor Stuff (I think Dame Rebecca remarked on that in her critical essay on younger woman writers). Which they were expressing/excusing largely in Freudianism terms (so many of them in analysis or had been). Wonder if current deployment of The Neurodiversity Plea is the current allotrope of He Couldn't Help It Because Reasons Beyond His Control (I suppose at least these do not blame Mummy, unless you are into to the What She Did That She Shouldn't When Pregnant narrative....).

I note that there was a BBC programme last night on the 'manosphere': young men who have drifted towards misogynist influencers – and finds them lonely, heartbreaking and on ‘semen retention journeys’ to control their sex drives. They sound rather sad and confused. (And historian is appalled at the persistence of a panic drummed up by an early C18th quack....)

Am trying to think of period when one could reliably say that masculinity was not in (some kind of) crisis.

Or, do the details matter?

Concede that sometimes they do, cue here whingeing from me and from others about historical inaccuracies anent the rules of succession, the laws on divorce, etc, which have completely undermined our belief in the narrative we were reading.

But exchange earlier today on bluesky about specific time/place cultural references, do they throw you out -

At which I was, have I not read books involving baseball, and, on reflection, elaborate gambling scams, and I do not understand these at all, but this does not interfere with my enjoyment of the story. Possibly we do need to feel that the author knows what they're writing about and is not commiting solecisms on the lines of 'All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke' - though apparently this is apocryphal.

I also felt that when I was reading that Reacher novel the other day that perhaps we had a leeeetle more detail than we really required about his exact itinerary whenever he went anywhere - the street-by-street perambulations in NYC, for ex. I am sure one could trace them exactly on a map, and any one-way systems were correctly described, and the crossings in the right place.

Which is sort of the equivalent of where I got 'futtock-shroudery' from, which was reading Age of Sail novels with Alot of period nautical terminology. (On the whole I though O'Brian got the balance on this right.)

There has been a certain amount of querying expressed in the Dance to the Music of Time discussions about some of the significance of parts of London invoked by Nick Jenkins, which is not just geography but Class (there was at least one passage where I was getting strong Nancy Mitford's Lady Montdore dissing on Kensington vibes), connotations of bohemianism, etc.

Sometimes the detail is load-bearing. But often it's not, particularly.

This has me thinking (for that is the way I roll) 'who is the novelist that this has escaped from?': Alan Turing Institute accused of ‘toxic’ culture -

“The problems are deep-seated going back to the foundation,” said Lawrence. “If you create an institute that has a lot of money and spends that money on itself and a club of universities, you create a lot of politics.”

Could be a ponderous CP Snow tome, could be a Lodge or Bradbury send-up (Lodge of course already did academe/business collab, no?), or dear Sir Angus sniping acerbicly.

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A more cheerful thing: Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour saved for nation

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More on heritage and reconstructing the past: The museum where history keeps repeating itself:

The easiest mistake to make in historical re-enactment is to create an era that never quite existed, by playing too closely to period. At Beamish, there is a real thoughtfulness given to how every age is a sort of palimpsest.

However, it doesn't appear that the author of this piece (known to me) has actually ridden in a sedan-chair (where would you get the bearers, even if a museum would let you try out one?): Jolted and Jumbled: Riding in a Sedan Chair in the 18th Century

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And Dept, Here Comes the Silly Season:

This strikes me as in the fine old spirit of Stephen Potter and GamesManShip/LifeManShip etc: The Best Time I Pretended I Hadn’t Heard of Slavoj Žižek: One weird trick to frustrate the hell out of a Marxist bro:

My advice is intended only for special occasions. It is for when you have an itch to scratch, and that itch is called, “a puerile desire to get on other people’s nerves.” All you do is stonily deny any knowledge of a person or cultural touchstone that you should, by virtue of your other cultural reference points, be aware of.... The game works best when you choose something that is normally the prompt for a great deal of intellectual posturing, of talking in a loud, bored voice.... Don’t do this to anyone who will be hurt by it, as opposed to merely irritated.

(I think Potter's 'plonking' could be invoked here perhaps.)

Whereas this has escaped from the era of Ealing Comedy, surely? Daniel Jackson was just 14 when he and his friends saw a strip of forest between Serbia and Croatia, and decided to claim it. Now 20, he is the president of Verdis, but has been forced to live in exile:

[I]t seems that men are more inclined to start a new country: 70% of Verdis’s citizens, and all seven of its government ministers, are men. This is not because of any kind of meninist agenda, Jackson assures me, and it is something he would like to address, but “it’s a lot harder to find women who are interested in getting involved”.

We wonder how many of that 30% of the citizenry are girlfriends who have been signed up to the project....

Be respected literary novelists, that is?

Here be blokes going wah wah wah about the plight of the male novelist, lo, the voice of the Mybug B heard in the land, no?

Is this the death of the male novelist? The lonely life of a man writing fiction in 2025:

“Being a middle-aged white guy and working in this space today feels, to me, like what it must have felt to have been a poet at the end of the 20th century,” Niven tells me, laughing. “It’s a very niche, very recherché area, with a tiny audience. Men just don’t read fiction in anything like the same quantities they used to, and fewer of us, it seems, are writing it.”

You know, women are notably broader in their reading parameters? I'm not convinced by this argument:

He tells me a story about a friend – “with a big public profile” – who published his first novel a couple of years ago. “It was very good, but it was non-genre, and he’s a middle-aged white guy, so I did my best to manage his expectations.” The novel was turned down by every major publisher before eventually being picked up by a tiny independent. The book, once published, came and went, as so many do. “If it had been written by a woman, it would have sold six, seven times as many as it eventually did. But this is where we are today.”

Or maybe it just Wasn't All That?

And apparently at least one of the lairy 'scabrous, satirical, and vigorously male' novelists of the 90s who cannot catch a break these days:

["W]rites crime novels now. The last refuge of the scoundrel is the crime novel. And I get it! There’s a definable audience for crime fiction, but if you’re not writing genre fiction, then it’s difficult out there.”

Because the damselly laydeez never, ever dabble in the waters of crime or genre fiction....

Oh, wait.

I do wonder WHY they want to write SRS LTRY FIKSHUN??? is it all about the Kultural Kred? (Am currently reading Norma Clarke on Goldsmith and Grub Street, and how it was Not Gentlemanly to be a hack who wrote for filthy lucre, and the delicate balancing acts Georgian literary figures had to engage in.) And why are they all about being warty boys when they do so rather than being, oh, Henry James or Scott Fitzgerald or noted for their exquisite prose style? is it also about Macho Cred?

My own literary tastes among the Blokes of the Pen whose works you will tear from my cold dead hands have been discursed of here and they range widely. I can't help imagining several of them waxing satyrik about this lot.

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

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Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

Plus, this was the era of the baby boom, one imagines maternity wards may have been a bit swamped....

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A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

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I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

Okay, I mark him down a bit for the macho ' I don’t go to books for comfort', but still, not bad for a bloke, eh.

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

Naturally, I feared the worst from the headline: ‘Men need liberation too’: do we need more male novelists?, but apart from the guy who is the editor of this new imprint which is to encourage poor wittle male authors (Son of Mybug, well, I guess, Grandson? Great-Grandson? Distant Descendant discovered through sending his DNA to be tested?) they are all actually WTF, FFS, what are you talking about?

He moans on that the vast majority of commissioning editors in publishing are women, which I fancy is a situation that has historically pertained for Quite Some Time and did not happen just yesterday, and there have been Fabled Agents and Editors of Ye Fayre Sexxe who were the champions of Bloke Writers, some of whom were fairly toxic specimens (e.g. look at some of the authors with whom Diana Athill worked closely).

Come on down Anne Enright:

The majority female readership is generous to male writers, while male readers continue to be reluctant about reading and praising women.... More books are being published today than ever before, and this includes more books by men. I have seen publishers eat up novels by younger men (especially Irish men, I am glad to say). I have seen them fall on such books with relief that they exist and that they are good. I don’t see any problem with men getting published, when those men are not misogynistic, because it is actually misogyny that has gone out of fashion, not male writers. I worry about men who miss all that, and who miss the inflated, undeserved feeling of importance of the good old days.

Yay Leo Robson:

Anyone who knows anything about anything, or at least about the English novel, knows that it can never be “too female”.... There have been periods when male novelists consumed most of the attention: notably in the 1980s and early 1990s, when it was deemed necessary to found a women’s prize for fiction. But everyone knew that the leading English novelists were Penelope Fitzgerald and Iris Murdoch, who wrote often and brilliantly about men.... Of course I am exaggerating, slightly. There have been some decent male novelists. If this were not the case, it would have been somewhat presumptuous or arrogant to have attempted writing a novel myself.

Sarah Moss suggests maybe the problem is men as readers:

I suspect that if there is a problem with men’s literary fiction, it’s as much to do with reading as writing. The gender (im)balance of audiences at book events suggests that men much prefer to read nonfiction.... If patriarchy means that some men miss out on the joys of literature, that’s quite low on the list of its harms and also unlikely to be fixed by setting up a men’s publishing house. I wonder also how much this is a British problem, because I can immediately think of dozens of Irish men, established and emerging writers, publishing very well-received novels.... Many men, it seems, experience no curiosity about the female gaze, or women’s experiences. Maybe women, who always used to read men and buy their books, are beginning to return the compliment.

Since we are hoping to get to the Tirzah Garwood exhibition at Dulwich before it closes, I have finally got round to reading Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood (Persephone 2016).

I think my original interest was because I thought her arty circles would intersect a bit more with my fubsy progressives, but although a few familiar names surfaced less so than I had anticipated.

However, in an episode rather counter to the kind of narrative one expects in arty boho circles of the period, in 1942 she had a therapeutic abortion in the local hospital, which is a thing I have never come across among all the tales of pills, backstreet operators, sleazo Harley street docs, dodgy nursing homes, etc, pre the 67 Act. She had just had a mastectomy - this was in fact what led her to start writing the autobiography for her family - and became pregnant only a few months later (!!!???). This was deemed entirely grounds for a termination, but even so, doing ward rounds with medical students, the surgeon remarked that it was 'illegal' but that provided medical opinion agreed that continuing pregnancy and childbirth would be dangerous, No Jury Would Convict. This was very few years after the high-profile Aleck Bourne case, that docs were justified if the woman would be left a 'physical or mental wreck'.

I also find this rather resonant, in view of the current situation with women getting charged under the 1861 Act.

The other thing that struck me was that Garwood and her circles could easily be hanging out on the periphery of Dance to the Music of Time - every so often they get invited to a country house or interact with the local gentry, and at one point have to do with a socialist peer who has an encampment of Basque refugees on his estate....

(Not sure that's exactly what I mean....)

Anyway, I was virtually attending a seminar this pm (Teams - is Teams particularly crap? this had more than the usual significant amount of technical faff before actually starting) and towards the end the presenter remarked (though this had been implict throughout) that they had had a particular personal connection to the research upon which they were speaking, and some people did work on Thing to which they had that kind of connection and other people, well, didnt -

- and I refrained from jumping up, or at least posting in chat 'IT'S ALL MORE COMPLICATED!!!' because just because what one as a scholar works on may not look like it has any direct relevance to one's own Lived Experience there may nonetheless be some subterranean connection and personal resonance.

Similarly just because people are not writing memoir/autofiction/very lightly fictionalised autobiography doesn't mean that what they are writing is not deeply imbued with their own life and experiences.

Even if they are writing about the three-headed aliens of Planet Zog.

Especially if they are writing about the three-headed aliens of Planet Zog.

('Three-headed alien, c'est moi', he declared, pointing at his chest.)

That may be the only way they can deal with it.

Apropos of the Dance to the Music of Time reading group, and the recent sort-out of my desk drawers, I disinterred a CD on which I had a whole lot of saved emails from the late 90s-early 00s, including at least partial records of the listserv on which I was participating in discussion of DMT, back then.

Okay, from skimming through these generally, this seems to have traversed the period when I was having ISP issues and missing emails for the later volumes (though I think would also have been when I was travelling in NZ and Oz with rather intermittent internet access anyway). But still, interesting.

Also interesting, and a bit scary, honestly, that this was a fairly hectic period of my life work- and academic-wise, and yet I seem to have been heavily participating in a range of listservs in discussions which sometimes grew quite heated, strops thrown, etc. Also setting up my personal website.

But further on Powell-related matters, have just started A Buyer's Market and very early on we encounter the artist Deacon, who was 'a student of Esperanto (or, possibly, one of the lesser-known artificial languages)' - points there for knowing that there were a whole lot, well, several, competing artificial language systems at the period - and 'intermittently vegetarian'. Also into advocating decimal coinage, which hasn't featured so much among the concerns of my fubsy progressives, but is later found selling an anti-war tract. Though opposed to spelling reform (take that, GB Shaw!...). And wears sandals. (Also heavily gay-coded.)

This made me think of a thought I had had about the overlaps between various of these concerns of interwar progressives/eccentrics/life reformers, and I did actually look up Esperantist vegetarians and it was in fact A Thing from the early days.

So far at least no indication whether he is into anything like eurythmics/morris-dancing/yoga/etc.

I am not sure who is the novelist I would pick for this (okay You Could Not Make It Up? 'elderflower liqueur distillery' is, like, peak dilettante business, surely?): Earl sues parents over ‘trauma’ of not being gifted £85m estate, aw diddums, and we feel Nanny was falling down on her job of 'Mr I Want Doesn't Get', no? it doesn't seem to have taken.

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Again, not sure exactly who is novelist I would pick here, but it is surely not exactly ploughing fresh fields in the dystopican post-apocalyptic genre I think reviewers would say: Inside $300 Million Members-Only Luxury Doomsday Bunker With AI-Powered Medical Suites and Indoor Pools Where the 1% Can Seek Shelter From Apocalypse.

Totally wondering about where the materials for 'gourmet dining' are going to come from and is it really going to be prepared by AI? (I think actual chefs might form a resistance, hmmmmm?)

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On a more cheering and subversive note, How do Radical Ideas Go Mainstream? Secrets from 1970s Women's Magazines!!. While this is specifically about making 'feminism' and 'women's lib' palatable for a mainstream audience of women's magazine readers, I have noted before that at least in the UK there were certain women journalists working in that despised field in the preceding decades pushing a stealth feminist agenda. See also this lovely piece redeeming Mills and Boon romances and their writers from the condescension of posterity.

Related to this, and befitting the day I suppose, two lists of romance novels: Classic Romance Novels: A Starter Pack, which does do a chronological sequence even if it could perhaps do more of the older material? and 25 of the Greatest Romance Novels of All Time which although they do not do that thing which is 'All Time as defined by the TikTok generation' still don't really go back all that far.

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And this also seems resonant:

In the 1950s, the philosopher Mary Midgley did something that, according to philosophical orthodoxy, she wasn’t supposed to do. In a BBC radio script for the Third Programme (the precursor of BBC Radio 3), she dared to point out that almost all the canonical figures in philosophy’s history had been unmarried men.
....
Midgley thought that by missing out on close meaningful relationships in their personal lives, many philosophers were encouraged to think of philosophy itself in a particular way – as the opposite of intimate and relational: abstract and remote. In short, Midgley thinks forms of social detachment may foster forms of philosophical detachment.
....
Her point is essentially this: certain philosophical problems seem important only because of the kinds of lives lived by the philosophers who thought about them.

Perhaps we could call it the Mybug Society for the Preservation of (Not Yet Quite Dead) White Male Writers?

Is this person SERIOUS??? The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone.

Have they, we ask ourselves, actually disappeared, or are they no longer writing Ye Trad Litry Novel? Maybe the author of that article is pining, poor thing, for a really finely-wrought analysis of the male midlife crisis or a sensitive coming of age tale, and oh dear, the blokes have all decided to pursue the (quite likely more remunerative) fields of thrillers, cosy mysteries (do the menz seem to have been moving in on this like whoa lately?), sff, horror, etc, without trying to pretend that they are Transcending the Field and writing Litfic which is alluding to e.g. the Noir Tradition.

I was also contemplating a possible approach to this problem, which is that these writers are just not getting enough EXPERIENCE under their belts like what the great canonical authors had, and we might consider internships in blacking factories, or being crimped on board whalers, or, you know, just a life outside MFA programmes???

'The concept of reading for pleasure implies reading for pain' -

- well, okay, having read some of the manifestos of Mr Self on Why He Writes we do not think he wants the reader to enjoy themself -

- and we have certainly come across other people, largely, funny that, of the masculine persuasion doing Big Thinks about reading in which it definitely sounds like it belongs with the getting up at an ungodly hour, the workout on the treadmill first thing before brekkers, which consists of a smoothie of some healthful but tasteless items....

But there is a lot of reading which is undertaken for purely utilitarian reasons in the course of one's day or one's job or one's pursuits and avocations, for which pleasure is not a required outcome.

I will also invoke the 'reading to feel superior' thing: came across this in World of Wonders, in which this is mentioned of a specific character:

fear you might be tricked into liking something that wasn't up to the standards of a handful of people you admired.

Thinking of things that are read because they make one feel, or look, clever, I was given to think quite a bit by this piece on Iris Murdoch (the author compares her effect to that of DH Lawrence, but I would say Aldous Huxley is a better analogy):

She wrote as a philosopher, but no one read her for the metaphysics. We read her for the plot and to figure out the relationship between high intelligence, emotional incontinence, erotic extremism, and moral virtue.... Before we were embarrassed by her, Murdoch was considered an elevating experience.... Like one of her mages, she had us under a spell whose power is now hard to explain.

I'm not sure how far she has faded, given that there is a her Society that holds conferences, but perhaps there is a small niche group of devotees and academic industry?

I like the point, however, in that piece, that she never really created a memorable character.

But I do wonder how far it is likely that a novelist who aims to entertain the reader is more likely to gain an enduring readership than one with Deep Intentions - this does not exclude being serious, but I noticed several people in recent online readings of Middlemarch being Wow! Humour! having expected something perhaps a bit more Casaubonny.

(I preface this whole thing with sighingly remarking that women have been putting up with this sort of thing - 'having details from his life appear in a bestselling novel has been confusing and unsettling' - for aeons and aeons and on the whole not getting their knickers in a twist about it.)

I also invoke that comment by Carolyn Heilbrun about her depictions of noxious male academics when writing as Amanda Cross and assumptions that these were portraits from the life of specific horrible professors she had been obliged to deal with in the course of her career. To which she responded that, in fact, there were such a lot of them and she had met so many that there was no difficulty in building a composite and if it resembled one or another, it was because they all had common features of pomposity, egotism, condescension, etc.

London poet accuses author Coco Mellors of basing Blue Sisters character on him.

(I think we also murmur sotto voce Streisand Effect, perchance?)

There was some discussion I saw today about people writing genre who don't read either outside that genre at all, or even outside the particular subgenre they write in, and how that shows in the depletion and impoverishment of works within the genre/subgenre - (even before you bring LLMs into the equation.) I think the referent was 'romantasy' in particular.

Though I wonder how much of this is not so much on the writers as on the publishers/reader demand for More Of The Same, the Next [whatever is the buzzy thing] rather than being an entirely New Buzzy Thing that they're not expecting and don't quite know what to do with.

Which gave me to think of a genre I was reading quite a lot at one point - and which I think I wrote a bit about here when I was doing a bit of a re-read to see what to keep and what to put into the charity-shop piles, which was woman-authored mysteries with women protags that came out during the 80s/90s -

And re-reading after some lapse of time boy did there appear to be certain recurrent tropes, although there were also some writers whose work still held up. On reflection one does wonder about the role of publishing and marketing in the whole (and I wasn't even reading particularly in 'cosy') woman in somewhat quirky occupation who nonetheless keeps falling over bodies genre.

I also noted with one writer I really liked who I thought had a fresh voice, and who had a protag who was a lawyer who could at least plausibly get involved in crime-related scenarios, that by the end of the series it looked as though somebody at the publishers had said 'Patricia Cornwell is the new hot thing, be more like Patricia', which was so missing the point and taking away what made that writer an individual voice.

There is probably a study to be written of genres which disappear, OR which only survive as the works of very specific authors and no-one realises anymore that they were part of a whole trend?

You are talking about a library in Bloomsbury....- there are contenders for the title of Weirdest Library pretty much within spitting distance, I used to work in one just up the road and boy, we had a fair amount of Weird Shit, I'm telling you.

Occult? Try upstairs! Inside the world’s weirdest library, now open to the public

Look at his little face! how many libraries has he even been into? How many libraries just round the corner does he even know about? E.g. Senate House has the Harry Price Library: the Swedenborg Society; etc etc.

Now, if you are reporting on an exhibition, this is the way to do it that demonstrates that you know about the subject rather than going gosh! and wow!:

Death of the Department Store, which is both 'end of an era' and 'here is the history' and 'Zola mucked about with the actual history in his novel'.

Thinking further about my mention of Anya Seton's Katherine as Important Reading Influence of my teenage years, I was at first tempted to go 'And that, children, was what turned me into A Historian!'

And then (are we surprised?) I realised that it was All More Complicated, and that if I recollect correctly, it was actually recommended to me by my parents when I had already done something in the way of having an outstanding mark in a history exam.

(I would have been, what 13? 14? at the time. 'It was a more innocent age....')

Anyway, that certainly set me on a track of reading historical novels - I do suspect that these came under the 'wolfskins and togas' getout clause that Naomi Mitchison remarked on when she came up against barriers in writing fiction with a contemporary setting -

As far as I recall, I preferred medieval to Tudor settings, also real historical rather than made-up characters, but I read a good deal more widely than that.

I don't think there were any books/authors who had the same effect on me as Katherine - none of Seton's other books had the same effect, come to that -

Maybe Renault, The King Must Die?

I could not read most of these works now - in fact, while I was devouring Jean Plaidy's oeuvre during my schooldays, I remember picking up one that my sister was reading when I was home during vacation from uni and not feeling it at all.

But I had acquired quite a lot of Useful Historical Information by this means, and was able to be commendably impressive during an inspector's visit to our history class on the basis of having very recently read Plaidy's highly-coloured accounts of the French court during the era of Catherine de Medici and her offspring.

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It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with fiction

Further Le Guin thoughts

Have any dr rdrz come across this?

Is it really only the scribbling sisterhood who do this, hmmmmm?

And lo, the song of the Mybug was once more heard in the land....

Futtock-shroudery

Assorted things

But why do they want to?

Some of these are downers and others not

I think this article is saying It's All More Complicated?

Actually, this was a lot less Mybuggery than I anticipated

Unexpected research usefulness

Caliban always sees his face in the mirror?

Dancing among memories of things past

A congeries

Should there be a preservation society?

I thought this was much too glib and insufficiently complicated....

The rage of Caliban seeing/not seeing his own face in a glass

Genres wearing out

Exhibitions and how to report them

Not sure about the influence there