To listen to some of the literary gloom-mongers huffing and puffing you'd think that Faber, Cape, Canongate and their ilk hadn't issued a book between them for years, whereas if you'd peered into the bag which I toted home from Foyles last week (15% discount to members of the Society of Authors) you'd have seen that's not true. It simply isn't true that no one's writing and publishing good literary fiction any more. But it is true that "Publishers, however, are consistently and in vast quantity turning down well-written literary fiction that is ‘too quiet.’" That quote comes from the always-interesting Two Ravens Press blog, where Sharon Blackie has been talking about why some literary fiction does get published but so much fundamentally good writing never makes it over the bar into publication. And from my much more limited experience with novels I read for editorial reports, not to mention what I see on the bookshop tables, I know exactly what she means.
Now, before anyone else huffs and puffs, when she says 'too quiet', Sharon's not talking about a shortage of bomb-blasts and orgasmic shrieks, nor a metaphorical bang-bang-bang of non-stop action. I have to say first that many rejections under the 'too quiet' heading may well be what my agent calls 'high competence' - the technically sound, interesting, nicely done book which somehow doesn't make it to irresistibility. In other words, 'Too quiet' is a friendly, non-specific rejection for a hard-to-specify problem. The kind of rejection which breaks the aspiring writer's heart, in other words, because it's so hard to know what to do about it. But it seems to me that what Sharon's talking about is something more specific. As she puts it
I was reading a novel recently that the author had said was very much a novel of ideas, because it dealt in a major way with the theme of betrayal. I read it - and it didn’t. It was a novel in which a lot of people betrayed other people… but in order to be a novel of ideas, a novel that dealt with the theme of betrayal, it would have had to have something interesting, new, challenging to say about betrayal. It would have had to make some point other than the entirely predictable and obvious one that sometimes people betray other people and that can be quite painful. And so the lack of anything new to say about betrayal meant that, along with a perfectly competent but not especially interesting writing style, it fell firmly into the category of ‘too quiet’.
Mind you, how often have you seen something in a book your best friend didn't get, or vice versa? It's entirely possible that another editor would have found something broader and more general - more interesting - in the stories told here; this business is nothing if not subjective. As Sharon suggests, it's also entirely possible that if the writing had been truly compelling, original, or just absolutely and completely crystal-perfect, that in itself would have made the story and characters come so vividly alive that the the novel was irresistible. But failing wonderful, life-enhancing writing which gives the reader a new pair of eyes through which to watch an old (aka classic) story, the book needs to offer a new kind of thinking about that story: not only a demonstration about how betrayal happens and how it works, but something which makes you think again, recognise your preconceptions for what they are, even change your mind.
I posted this link on a forum, and a howl went up from many members (including some who'd had that very class of rejection) 'But I like quiet books.' So do I, and who knows how mistaken their rejector was? And it doesn't mean that in your novel you should replace all thoughtful walks in the park with nightmarish chases through the mountains. What it means is that a) we writers are probably the worst judge of whether the kind of subtle point or theme that quiet books do so well is actually getting across in our work, which is where those trusted readers come in handy. And b) one way or another, to keep people reading a story must not only be doing something, but be seen, as it were, to be doing it. According to the the great philospher Ricoeur (secondhand, admittedly, via Kearney's On Stories), the way narrative works is that audiences have a 'pre-figured' world, a storyteller takes elements of it and 'con-figures' them in a new way, so that afterwards the audience's world is in some way 're-figured' for them. That's what good books do, isn't it? When we emerge we see our own world differently. To keep reading the book we need to keep feeling that re-configuring happening, sentence by sentence, chapter by chapter. That's what we need, if you like, to hear: the click and whoosh of our own minds being re-jigged, ever so slightly. If we can't hear that, the book's too quiet.
