I share Jonathan Franzen’s reaction to the joyless slog represented (for him) by William Gaddis’s JR but I don’t want the kind of good time that ends up feeling like a waste of time. Obviously, I still want to have a good time. Which was an incentive to read more.ĭavid Hare: ‘The two most depressing words in the English language are “literary fiction”’ Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The GuardianĪs a consequence, the one thing I don’t go to fiction for, these days, is entertainment. The downside was that I retained so little. I learned so much from books like these – while I was reading them. Meanwhile, my attention was fully employed by shoebox-sized nonfiction classics such as Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Robert Caro’s life of Robert Moses, The Power Broker, or Taylor Branch’s trilogy about “America in the King Years”: Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, At Canaan’s Edge. Great novels still held me in their thrall, but a masterpiece such as Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus made the pleasures of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin seem fairly redundant. Nonfiction began taking up more of the slack and, as it did, so the drift away from fiction accelerated. And then, gradually, increasing numbers of them failed to deliver – or delivered only decreasing amounts of what I went to them for. They were fun, they taught me about psychology, behaviour and ethics. And so, for a sizeable chunk of my reading life, novels provided pretty much all the nutrition and flavour I needed. Whether the subject matter was alluring or off-putting, fiction was the arena where style was more obviously expected, sometimes conspicuously displayed and occasionally rewarded. In a realm where style was often functional, nonfiction books were – are – praised for being “well written”, as though that were an inessential extra, like some optional finish on a reliable car.
Interest in India or Kerala, however, was no more a precondition for reading Roy’s novel than a fondness for underage girls was a necessary starting point for enjoying Lolita. You read Beevor’s book because you were interested in the second world war, the eastern front. Basically, you went to nonfiction for the content, the subject. On the other, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. On one side of the fence, to put it metonymically, we had Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad. On one side sat the Samuel Johnson prize, on the other the Booker. That’s the situation now with regard to fiction and nonfiction.įor many years this was a peaceful, uncontested and pretty deserted space.
Occasionally, though, the border is the frontier. Borders are policed, often tense if they become too porous then they’re not doing the job for which they were intended. The frontier is an exciting, demanding – and frequently lawless – place to be. Borders are fixed, man-made, squabbled about and jealously fought over. Frontiers are always changing, advancing.
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