What's gone wrong with the modern novel?

Harry Mount and Michael Deacon talk about what's gone wrong with the modern novel?

Harry Mount:

I long to read good modern novels. A novel at its best is the best sort of reading. With the writers I like – Evelyn Waugh, Kingsley Amis, Philip Roth, Edith Wharton, Proust – every single paragraph, practically every single sentence, has something to it. Some insight into the human condition, something funny or sad or interesting, a beautiful piece of writing, or tremendously clever use of language.

You can read a lot of novels nowadays that are perfectly good – there's nothing particularly wrong with them. But there's also nothing particularly right with them, either. Their writers think it's enough to take a character from the sitting room to, say, the kitchen, describe their movements, and leave it at that. None of those sad, funny, interesting etc. elements required.

Michael Deacon:

Here's a selection of novels published in the period 1920-29: Ulysses, Decline and Fall, The Great Gatsby, The Castle, The Sun Also Rises, The Sound and the Fury, A Passage to India, Women in Love, Mrs Dalloway (actually I don't know why I cite that last one – Virginia Woolf makes me howl with boredom).
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The best writing I can think of from the past decade is TV writing.

Mount:

I completely agree about how superior the best telly is to most modern novels.
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Martin Amis got it right at the Hay Festival, when he talked about the fashion for "the unenjoyable novel" that wins prizes because the committee thinks, "Well it's not at all enjoyable, and it isn't funny, therefore it must be very serious."

But there are still things novels can do that even the best film can't do as well; particularly, say, the inner thoughts of characters, or a cynical/funny/sad view of a person or a place or a situation – the sort of thing that Evelyn Waugh did beautifully, in a way that has rarely been captured in his film adaptations. The Brideshead telly adaptation pulled it off, but only because practically the whole book was read out as a voiceover.

Deacon:

Roald Dahl described the typical Booker Prize novel as "beautifully boring".
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If you want to be "taken seriously", you apparently have to be serious, or, more accurately, joyless.
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Having said all this, I'd still probably slog through 500 pages of hype-inflated, prize-laden pretentiousness about a lesbian commune in 1930s Cork than the stuff that really sells today: Brown and Meyer. Have you any idea why they do so well? I'm not against bestsellers by any means: Stephen King can write, or so I thought when I last read him, i.e. at about the age of 15. But, dear Lord, surely even during the wrong-headed fug of adolescence I wouldn't have fallen for The Da Vinci Code or Twilight. Can you explain the success of this guff?

Mount:

Funnily enough, I've just been talking to a highly intelligent hedge-funder who wants to turn his hand to writing popular fiction. He's studied the whole thing in an analytical way, and looked at what all the Dan Browns and John Grishams have to say about the process.

The main thing is, that it is a process. Make sure you have several hundred scenes, each of around four pages, with enough separate plotlines and characters that then interact. One popular fiction writer said that he spent 85 per cent of his year working out his plot, and the other 15 per cent doing the writing.

Any over-introspection is disallowed; good must triumph; there mustn't be too much seamy immorality, otherwise the Midwest won't buy it. Make sure there is some inanimate object – money, a code, an antique, that must be tracked down, and ideally make that object into several different objects. And none of that show don't tell stuff; you must say how the characters feel at all times.

And make it long – around 4-600 pages.

Deacon:

I suppose in the end though it's the height of idleness to complain about the standard of modern novels – after all, if I dislike them so much, there's nothing to stop me writing one of my own. The trouble with doing that, of course, is that I would soon discover that novelists have a far harder job than I've given them credit for in this discussion, and so I'd have to relinquish my sniping prejudices and admit that the current lot - Christ, perhaps even Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer - aren't so bad after all. And there's nothing that horrifies a blogger more than the thought of having to relinquish his sniping prejudices. Hell, they're all we've got.

Oops! I've tried writing fiction. It worked when I was young but, as I got older, it became harder to immerse myself in the fantasy world of fiction. Maybe I'll give it another try now that I'm entering my second childhood.

Some of the most important influences in my life were novels. I learned to look at the world through different eyes. The novels of D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Foster and Aldous Huxley changed the course of my life.

PS I had to stop posting because Andy called Chas and me for dinner. When I told the boys about this post, Chas piped up and said: "Modern novels are about being a victim." Andy added: "That's because all of our college teachers are communists."

We all nodded sagely and went back to eating corn and steak and drinking Gnarly Head old vine zinfandel and talking about underage redneck chicks as usual.