The Bookseller.com

2nd December 2008

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Walsh: turned off by serious fiction

15.09.08

We buy fewer and fewer works of serious fiction, writes John Walsh as part of a supplement in the Independent on Sunday, devoted to publishing.

"Twenty-five years ago, when the Amis-Barnes-Rushdie generation was getting under way, readers seemed to have no problem being steered towards experimental, inward-looking, linguistically challenging fiction. Flaubert's Parrot sold well, despite its metafictional games with biography, as did Amis's Money, despite its torrentially exhausting Amer-English prose style. Graham Swift's Waterland, now on school English syllabuses, flew out of bookshops in its Picador paperback livery, as did One Hundred Years of Solitude and Midnight's Children. Now, many serious writers complain, challenging fiction doesn't appeal."

"It seems oddly coincidental that the e-book is coming into our reading lives around now. With its hand-tooled leather binding, its don't-be-scared page dimensions (two-thirds the size of a standard paperback), its flexible typeface and typesize formats, and the astounding capacity of its memory (it can store up to 160 standard-size titles), it is user-friendly, glossy, rather pretty in its ingénue novelty. But its callowness makes you weep."

The Books Special includes contributions from eight experts, who were asked to predict the future, including Clare Alexander, who doesn't believe that publishing will have an iPod moment, and Tracy Chevalier, who believes that the future is a case of broadening the types of books that are written.

Independent on Sunday

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