It's Bookertime!

I've written in the past about how the Booker Prize, despite having different judges each year, does seem to have "phases" - at least in retrospect. Over the last three or four years there's been a definite sense that it is reverting to a middle-brown unsensationalism, perhaps the better for it. As a grand dame of literary prizes it can probably afford a step back from the 80s/90s frontline it sometimes seemed standing on the edge of. Also, as publishing appears ever more conservative, and exciting new names haven't really come zinging out of the traps, the sense of "entitlement" that used to grip the prize, particularly when some name was either included or excluded, is no more. So this year, its business as usual, a longlist of 13 books (a manageable number.) As ever, the books are rarely in the shops, never mind the public consciousness at the time of the longlist launch. Historical fiction is an ever-popular Booker trope and dominates again this year; though the lack of Indian writers this year may just be one of those things. (At Norwich recently Xu Xi had noted how Asian winners of the Booker tended to be first time or early career novelists.)

James Lever's appearance on the list for his faux biography "Me Cheeta" seems a little cheeky one way or another, yes, of course its fiction, but a fiction presented as celeb-biog. It kind of undermines the project to file it under literary fiction rather than biography... Perhaps the most interesting name on the list, outside of the Mantels, Toibins, Coetzees, Byatts was James Scudamore. I recognised the name, and was trying to remember where from. Then I remembered. On leaving Norwich after the Worlds festival I caught the train to London with writer Robin Hemley and he was seeing Scudamore whilst in London and had told me what a good novelist he was. I promised to keep an eye out. Well, promise kept. It seems Scudamore, with his Sao Paulo set second novel "Heliopolis," might be an intriguing dark horse.

Manchester Fiction Prize

I wasn't particularly inspired by the rules of the MMU's Manchester Poetry Prize, as its criteria, (number of lines/number of poems)seemed to preclude more interesting writing, (though the shortlisted poems are worth reading), so I'm pleased that this year, with the launch of the Manchester Fiction Prize, there's some reason for optimism. It's actually a short story prize, which is perhaps sensible, though makes the title a little disingenuous, (are good fiction and good stories the same thing?) and allows for stories up to 5000 words, which will enable the entry of short stories, rather than just stories that are short! I'm also excited by the judges: experienced editor and short story Nicholas Royle is joined by Sarah Hall and M. John Harrison, so a trio of writers who are not immune to more speculative forms of fiction. Sensibly, there appears to be no rules other than length. At a cost of £15 per entry its still a little like having a bet on the National, but I can't help but be excited by this, in a way I wasn't about the poetry prize, and given my recent luck with the National, better value for money. With a mid-August closing date, there's time to write something new, or hone something that you've been working on; with the Manchester Literature Festival as the all-too-appropriate time and place for the unveiling of the winners. With the shortlist for the Edge Hill Prize also announced recently, (for best collection), as well as the National Short Story prize, there's beginning to seem like a genuine infrastructure for promoting the form - that may mirror that available for poetry.

Although today's Guardian article on American women writers has much in it that needs saying, I can't help but think that Elaine Showalter's choices are a little too traditional; a little too in the mould of the "great American novel" template that she castigates for being too male. These are writers, she says, "with PhDs," (as if that is any judge of a good novelist), who seem mostly to have written alot of books, - and big books at that - and of a certain generation. Where is A.M. Homes or Suzanne Berne or Donna Tartt or Suri Hustvedt or Louise Erdrich or Lorrie Moore? Barbara Kingsolver is mentioned in passing, but surely "The Poisonwood Bible" would rate highly on any list of novels of the last twenty years? The article, of course, is an extract from her book, called "A jury of her peers," and Showalter, born in 1941, is probably doing an overdue service in reminding us of a female generation the equal of the Updikes-Bellows-Roths, but those male writers are undoubtedly giants, whatever their sex - there are few younger American male writers who would even aspire to that chimera, "the great American novel," and there's no doubt that a list of the best contemporary American fiction writers would feature female writers heavily.

Jay McInerney's "The Good Life"

If push comes to shove, I would have to say that Jay McInerney is one of my favourite living authors - though his books tend to creep up on me - a few years after they've come out - perhaps a legacy of that early fame with "Bright Lights, Big City." Anyway, given that I think that "Brightness Falls" is his masterpiece, I'm surprised that I've only just gone and bought the follow-up, "The Good Life." Intriguely, he revisits book editor Russell, and his wife Corrine, in the days surrounding 9/11. Given that "Brightness Falls" was such a New York novel, revisiting the Carraways a decade and a half on, must have seemed an obvious way to responding to 9/11. If "Brightness Falls" found our characters carried away by their personal and professional lives in the high octane early 90s, a decade on, these are lives that have remained somewhat static since. Whereas Russell was then attempting to buy-out the publishing company, in the newer book he's more jaded, a mildly successful editor, looking enviously on the richer friends in their circle. In this book its Corrine who is the focus - where, on joining a soup kitchen to help the rescue workers - she meets Luke, a broker who has downsized. The plot is simplicity itself, and it avoids some of the more extravagance tropes that made "Brightness Falls" so dazzling, instead concentrating - with some success - on middle age love, and the choices that it forces you to make. Like an urban "Bridges of Madison County" Luke and Corrine have found their soulmate, but the social mores of the circles they move in - though far more forgiving of infidelities than you'd find in Edith Wharton, for instance - are no less constricting. It's style is inevitably less jokey than some of his earlier works, and sometimes the writing is more like reportage from the marital frontline than fiction, but it remains an admirable work. Perhaps when it came out there was some cynicism in its use of 9/11 as a hook; but I think it gets away with it - since even for those in the vicinity when it happened, life would soon go back to something approaching normal: the immensity of the event causes McInerney's characters to act out-of-character, but like Fitzgerald's Tom and Daisy Buchanan, their social world slowly heals itself, and "the good life" (always an ironic title) goes on.