WHITE SPINES: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK COLLECTOR
A VERY NICE REJECTION LETTER by Chris Paling (Constable, £16.99)
by Nicholas Royle (Salt, £9.99)
“These days, one has to diversify in order to make even the humblest of livings. The era of being able to publish one book every couple of years, set off on an adulatory book signing tour and then have a six-month holiday (or ‘writing retreat’) is long gone”
Reviewed by Alexander Larman
T
o be a pale, male, middle-aged literary novelist is, as Jane Austen did not quite put it, to be very much not in possession of a fortune these days. The want of a wife, or otherwise, is largely immaterial. Many writers who these days are struggling to make a crust look back wistfully on the glory days of the eighties, when the likes of Julian Barnes, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan bestrode the literary world like tweed-jacketed Colossi, pocketing substantial six-figure advances and prizes for novels that were received with giddy adulation by the books sections of the newspapers and customers in their tens of thousands. Oh, how things change. The hottest writer of the day is Sally Rooney, the stern-faced 30-year old Marxist chronicler of millennial mores; humour and japes are seldom to be found within her intentionally po-faced work. Yet as publisher after
editor make their disinclination to publish literary novels by white men quite clear, the pickings that they find within the industry grow slimmer and less productive by the year. Time, in many cases, to find a different sideline altogether.
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