Against grim-lit

Two years ago, while preparing to go on holiday, I encountered a problem many of you are going to face this summer. I was in an airport book-shop, hunting for something new to read. Like a lot of readers, I’m an omnivore. I read literary fiction, detective novels, thrillers, SF, children’s novels, biographies, science books and romances. However, as I browsed through the shelves with their wares displayed in tasteful sepia, boiled-sweet pink and embossed foil lettering, I realised with horror that there was nothing there that I either hadn’t read already or wanted to read.

Every summer, critics are asked to give their suggestions, and unless you’re an ardent follower of literary fashion most are useless. Are you going to lug the latest JM Coetzee through the airport? Well, only if you’re the sort of person who enjoys eating brussel sprouts. Are you going to be piling up the sort of fiction that comes in pastel pink with a flower on the jacket, or the cartoon of a girl? Only if you have a very sweet tooth. You don’t want to read the sort of novel that, if superbly written, offers an awful sort of consolation – the feeling that Life is even worse than you suspected. You want to read something that is not chick-lit, but sun-lit: something that is both literary and pleasurable, something that lifts the spirits while engaging the mind. Dr.Johnson observed that “the true end of literature is to enable the reader better to enjoy life or better to endure it.” While practically every Booker short-list, and the entire range of Granta’s new Best of Young British Novelists is strong on endurance, it remains extraordinarily hard to find novels that celebrate life, or at least leave you with a feeling that it might include laughter, joy or hope.

This is what I found to be drastically absent from those airport bookshelves. Every once in a while a literary novelist (usually female) writes such a book. AS Byatt’s Possession was one, as was Rose Tremain’s Music & Silence, Michele Roberts’s Sardines, Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith. Sun-lit novels do exist, and when they arrive they are greeted with cries of joy from readers. Yet despite these examples winning praise and prizes, more often than not the sun-lit novel is despised by critics.

Sun-lit authors are among the most distinguished in English fiction – Dickens, Trollope, Jane Austen, EM Forster and Alsion Lurie are among their ranks. Their novels are not just romances or thumping good reads. Yet to read them is to undergo that miraculous transformation of mood, so powerfully uplifting that Francis Spufford, in his book The Child the Books Built, compared it to taking a drug such as tobacco or opium. Once upon a time there was even a prize, the delightfully-named Femina Vie Heureuse Prize, famously won by Stella Gibbons for Cold Comfort Farm, which addressed precisely this kind of audience. Now, it no longer exists. Kingsley Amis, despite being best-known for his peerless comic novel Lucky Jim, would never have won the Booker for it. That was only given to him for The Old Devils, a dreary rant about bores in a pub.

“I think it’s true that comedy tends to be considered as lower than “serious” stuff” says the Curtis Brown agent Anna Davis. “From an industry point of view it’s all in the packaging and the manner of publishing. The very decision to publish in a commercial rather than a literary imprint (ie Arrow rather than Cape, Harpercollins rather than Flamingo, Michael Joseph rather than Viking) affects the way a book is perceived by reviewers, WH Smith and even its promotion in-house at the publishers. Literary authors always want bigger sales, and commercial authors want to be taken seriously but it seems difficult to have it both ways."

Granted, but there are “commercial” novelists such as Joanna Trollope, Nick Hornby and Joanne Harris who are every bit as incisive and intelligent as “literary” stars, yet who are unlikely ever to win prizes because they are simply too enjoyable and life-affirming.

“We’re all suffering from the Victorian purgative school of literature, which believes a good book must be like bran – good for you, but not something you enjoy,” says Joanne Harris. Although her novels, all of them best-sellers since Chocolat, are strikingly well-written and in the case of Five Quarters of the Orange address dark subject matters, she knows she is looked down upon by many critics because she presents the reader with hope rather than bleak despair. “I haven’t read a single piece of good literature that didn’t make me feel better, even if I’m crying my eyes out by the end,” she says, “but I do have a feeling that political worthiness is often a substitute for entertainment value. Some of it is genuinely-meant, but there are hypocrites riding that bandwagon.”

Being half-French means she has a detached, amused view of how “English people are afraid to feel good. They’re afraid to submit to pleasure. They do things because they’re good for you – so we get novels about 3 paraplegics committing suicide that we’re supposed to enjoy.”

Elizabeth Buchan, author of the best-selling ‘Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman’, agrees.

“While we were a predominantly Christian and patriarchal society, sobriety and morality was bound to be taken more seriously – though even so, it’s notable that readers voted with their feet and gravitated in droves towards the biting wit and comedy of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh.

As fiction editor of the Mail on Sunday’s YOU magazine, Buchan is bound by the nature of the magazine to avoid descriptions of violence and graphic sex. However, she points out that “sun-lit” authors such as Anne Tyler, Jane Hamilton, Maeve Binchy and Margaret Forster address subjects such as suicide, poverty and bereavement while bathing their readers in tenderness.

“You’re driven to anger, but not to suicide. You feel that suffering is affirmed by them, that they’re taking humanity under their wing.

“I think it’s a very female thing, akin to what women do in the home, which is why it’s so spat on by male critics,” she says. “Love and care comes into the writing, so that you laugh and cry. It doesn’t mean avoiding tragedy – Shena McKay’s The Orchard on Fire is about a difficult 1950s childhood, but it’s absolutely sunlit, irradiated by joy and tenderness. Very few male authors seem to have that sensibility, though Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things has it.”

It is notable that America doesn’t suffer from the attitude that only the solemn is serious and good. Perhaps it’s having the right to pursue happiness written into their constitution, but Alison Lurie won the Pulitzer Prize, their equivalent to the Booker, and Anne Tyler, Elinor Lipman and Lorrie Moore are no less loved, respected and rewarded for being perceived as predominantly “sun-lit” novelists. The great Canadians, Robertson Davies and Carol Shields, were both short-listed for the Booker Prize here, but Shields in particular was repeatedly attacked by critics for being a “feel-good novelist” – an accusation that relented only when it became known she is terminally ill with cancer.

“I think it stems from the feeling that if you’re reading for escapism, it can’t be art,” says Kate Saunders. A literary novelist and former Booker judge who crossed the divide to become a best-selling author of romantic comedies such as The Marrying Game, she points out that although “it’s easier to imagine the lowest depths than the highest heights, enjoyment is not a good reason to read a book. People tend to overlook how ferociously well-written Cold Comfort Farm, Diary of a Nobody or PG Wodehouse are – they deserved to be treated with far greater respect. If you look at Cranford, it looks like a tiny little novel besides Middlemarch but it has a rival greatness. It’s set in almost the same period and is also about a slice of life in an early Victorian town, but because it cheers you up Mrs. Gaskell isn’t taken seriously as George Eliot is.”

She thinks that while readers are always looking for the “lost Eden” of pleasure they found in children’s literature, they are made to feel that this isn’t respectable. “There’s a lot of solemnity in crap.”

“You get far more solemn pats on the back for reading Frank McCourt than Nancy Mitford,” Joanna Trollope adds. Her best-selling novels were dubbed “aga sagas” in the 1980s, a dismissive term that does not begin to address their complexity, seriousness and skill. “It would be easy to put down our fear of hope or happiness in fiction to national philistinism it to intellectual snobbery, but I think the trouble goes deeper than that. I think our ingrained Puritanism makes us deeply apprehensive of anything approaching luxury, and we see hope as just such a luxury. There is not just a moral merit in suffering but a kind of security too – we’ll get applauded, we won’t need to fear being reprimanded for failing the moral standard.”

Yet publishers themselves are perceiving a shift in the market. Richard Beswick at Little,Brown publishes novelists such as Beryl Bainbridge, Anita Shreve and Jane Gardam. He says he is “increasingly allergic to ‘grim-lit’. Apart from anything else, it doesn’t sell unless it’s tragic or quite brilliantly done.” This view is echoed by Alexandra Pringle at Bloomsbury, whose list encompasses Margaret Attwood, Jeanette Winterson and, most famously, JK Rowling.

“I think the English have a problem with anything remotely jolly,” she says. “We’re all intent on being seen as serious and school swots. Personally, I love books that make you feel good – writers such as Raffaela Barker, Will Sutcliffe and Rebecca Smith, who have an acute eye and a sharp wit, who have no pretension and who write like young angels.” Yet there is, she agrees, a “faint literary embarrassment” lingering around such novels, even if there is no shortage of appetite for them.

Marianne Velmans, publisher of Doubleday (Transworld), is as indignant as many authors at the perception that literature only qualifies as such if it is gloomy. “Isn’t there a confusion about the meaning of serious? I’m not sure anyone looks down on comedy, or stories with a happy ending, except the critics. Are Fay Weldon, Allison Pearson and Joanna Trollope too popular to qualify as serious literary novelists – or is it because they happen to write about issues that concern women?”

Yet even if Joanne Harris was once short-listed for the Whitbread, she was never going to be on the Granta Best of Young British list for 2003; like JK Rowling, she is perceived as sun-lit. Beryl Bainbridge, despite five short-listings for the Booker, has yet to win it, and novelists such as Fay Weldon and Deborah Moggach despite immensely distinguished outputs, have not been awarded a single prize. Such neglect is a disgrace. The Orange, which was supposed to do so much for women novelists, has continued to support the same grim litany: incest, murder, madness and misery are what its judges prefer.

“There’s no chance of Fay Weldon or Vikram Seth , two of the most sparkling novelists of recent decades, winning the Booker Prize,” says the leading agent Giles Gordon. “Since the 19th century, the literary establishment has liked to believe that novel is an art form which should make us feel guilty. Instead, at its best, it should be a glorious celebration of mankind.”

If these attitudes are being driven by critics rather than publishers and readers, why not bring back the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize to celebrate happiness? Why should we celebrate mankind at its darkest, rather than lit by the radiance of the sun? And, when so many of the best sun-lit writers are women, why should we continue to accept the strictures and standards of grumpy old men?

Amanda Craig’s fifth novel, Love in Idleness is a modern version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It will be published by Little,Brown on July 28. Her website address is www.amandacraig.com.

Mslexia, Spring issue 2003