One of the funniest episodes of last month was a friend telling me that, coming on the Tube, he’d read one of the Poems on the Underground and hadn’t been impressed. More than unimpressed: he had actively taken agin it, he had wanted to stand in the middle of the carriage and say in a very loud voice: ‘Read that – does anyone think it’s good?? That’s the kind of poem that can put people off poetry for life.’ He sat down next to me and googled the poem on his phone and insisted on reading it aloud, exasperated by every line, and this was funny because I know his exasperation. My encounter with two recent, widely praised novels followed a similar trajectory: I began reading slowly, respectfully; I became impatient; I did some skim-reading; I placed them on my pile of books-to-take-to-the-Oxfam-shop.
The chorus of approval surrounding many new books begins pre-publication with puff quotes for the cover from other writers, with ‘books to look out for’ features in the Guardian, and with excited freelance reviewers posting pictures of their advance copies; post-publication, if there are good reviews and author interviews and ‘profiles’, the chorus can feel wraparound. Stifling. Airless. In this context, negative reviews have a thrilling whiff of iconoclasm, of smashing a statue in a church. Not negative reviews of books (and films, TV shows, restaurants) that are widely agreed to be pretty terrible, because their target is low-hanging fruit and the reviewers are saying little more than see how witty I am, but well-argued negative reviews of books that been praised elsewhere and get ‘likes’ all over the place and have won prizes. These are different; they feel personal.
Recent examples: Michael Hofmann’s TLS review of Colm Toíbín’s The Magician (‘Crap hat, no rabbit’) and Tom Crewe’s LRB review of Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (‘not a fruitful, poetic ambivalence, but sheer clumsiness’). Tom Crewe’s review begins by quoting some of the quotes on the paperback of Vuong’s previous novel: ‘A marvel … brilliant and remarkable … a masterpiece … staggeringly beautiful …’ And then he quotes some of the sentences that, starting to read the book, he stumbles on, and I can almost taste his own exasperation. You have paid for the dish of the day and it’s luke-warm and stodgy.
I am not a contrarian, which would be tedious, and I’m not, I think, a Grumpy Old Man (there are more than enough of those, and they’re getting grumpier). I think the Poems on the Underground scheme is terrific; I like many of the books that lots of other people like; there are new books every year that surprise and delight me, and they’re not always the ones I might be expected to like. It is, always, personal.
Actually I think choruses of approval – most of which are orchestrated: this what publishers’ publicity and marketing departments are paid to do – are seeing diminishing returns. How many masterpieces can there be? Even the informal choruses – the ‘likes’ on social media – result, in my own woodshed-corner experience, in fewer actual sales than they used to. People have less money (except those who have more, but they tend not to buy books). ‘Disposable income’ is a joke. People 'like' and move on and don’t follow through. I’m guilty as charged. What will happen next: more hype, more marketing, more of the same, an escalation of the arms race, because that’s how the system is set up. It’s all kinda silly but I am serious about this, otherwise there’d be no point.
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