Symposium

symposium

SYMPOSIUM

THE STATE OF AUSTRALIAN FICTION:

IS THERE TOO MUCH MEDIOCRE FICTION BEING PUBLISHED?

Ramona Koval: Radio National

The state of Australian publishing has driven me back to the Classics, which is no bad thing for me. But not so good for those Australian writers who have been badly served by their publishers. So much of the new fiction is a combination of good ideas badly executed, a literature awash with first drafts. Why have publishers pushed money into marketing for dump-bins, posters and covers, while neglecting the stuff printed on the pages? Where have all the great editors gone? Why have miniscule amounts of cash been allocated to simple copy editing while the real work of structural editing goes by the way? Answer: Greed and Ignorance. They may as well be selling sausages for all the interest taken in language, ideas and quality. One gets the sense that you are reading either a novel workshopped in one of those ubiquitous creative writing classes (Everyone's A Writer! was the catchcry at this year's Sydney Writers' Festival) or else a book written by a celebrity which publishers know will sell quite a few copies from the name on the cover. This is flattering for the Celebrity but does no good for them in the long-term, if they are serious about writing. There are only a handful of publishers in this country who even seem to be seriously literate. The pity is that the industry drives the Festival lists which drives the media which drives me to despair. Back to the Classics.

Andrew Riemer: critic

Is there too much mediocre fiction? Probably -- but it has always been like that. Most novels are ephemera, of some value as entertainment or capable of reflecting current interests and preoccupations but, in the great scheme of things, essentially forgettable -- and ultimately forgotten in most cases. One question arises: is there room for improvement in contemporary novels of this kind? I think there is. I am not demanding that they should aspire to the status of great art. All I am asking is that they should be more carefully written -- or, more to the point, edited. At the very least, novelists and editors should pay much more attention to such fuddy-duddy concerns as consistency and accuracy of fact, spelling and grammar.
The more important issue is this: where have bold, innovative young writers gone? It is at the top that the mediocrity of contemporary Australian fiction becomes most evident. When did the Vogel, for instance, last come up with a Kate Grenville, a Tim Winton or a Brian Castro? Are we going through a bad patch at present, as happens from time to time? Or is it -- and I suspect this is closer to the truth -- that our publishers' obsession with marketing and what they deem to be fashionable is silencing voices that could become vital and compelling? I know of one quite remarkable work of fiction by a youngish writer which has never reached print. I wonder how many manuscripts like that are gathering dust, disfigured by rejection slips.

Gerard Windsor: critic

Delia Falconer's The Service of Clouds was grossly overwritten, to the point of unreadable, but who told me so before I bought it? Tom Gilling's The Sooterkin was an unresolved pastiche, but it had its long day in the sun. Every author, every publisher, has a right to try and bewitch us, and in the book game these days promotion is all. Only the reviewer might stand between the potential readership and the waves of hype. But reviewers are copping out. Book assessors either haven't got an unkind nerve in their bodies (unlikely) or they're under career pressures, or they're compromised by the policies of their outlets, and the result is that their bias is towards commendation, gushing in the case of okay books, bland in the case of lousy ones. Oz forthrightness deserts people when it comes to a printed negative opinion about a book. Film, music, drama, food critics readily, and regularly, tell us if their allotted specimen is a dud. Book reviewers, certainly in the major outlets, very rarely manage it.
To instance just one pressure. The Sydney Morning Herald makes much each year of a Best Young Australian Novelists feature. This may be interpreted as commendable cultural involvement. It should also be read as part of a Fairfax bid for the youth market -- after all the paper also runs features on best young chefs, best young whizkids, best young carpetbaggers ...And when the best young novelists land on the Herald reviewer's desk?
The literary pages are advancing steadily into the promotion business, and their critical function is being compromised and corrupted. Australian fiction, an undifferentiated mass, starts to appear a con.

McKenzie Wark: columnist

Some people only read novels; some people only fuck goats. The latter is an instance of a sexual fetish, where only one specific form of the act can furnish one's jollies. The former is an instance of a textual fetish, which is pretty much the same thing. Not that I think there is anything wrong with fetishism. I'm broadminded. But where sexual fetishists don't go round pretending to speak for the whole of sexuality, the boosters of Australian fiction get away with the pretence that they speak for the whole of literature. Australian literature is in the hands of compulsive goat fuckers. It's not just that remarkable non-fiction and poetry stands always in the shadow of the goat. The very act of reading, the values and virtues it can encompass, end up being narrowly defined. It's not just that fiction receives too much subsidy, to much publicity and too many prizes relative to goat-free reading experiences. It is that even when other genres of writing are celebrated and promoted, it is usually on the basis of a resemblance to fiction. That literature may aspire to quite other qualities, values and experiences is repressed in favour of a textual fetish. Novel fetishists, like most perverts of repetition, find it harder and harder to get off, and blame the novel itself for their jaded tastes. That's their problem. It need not deter fiction writers from writing books that, to the nonfetishist, seem as good these days as they have ever been. But the literary world as a whole is in sad need of reform. Its other minorities need space and time and attention, in which to glisten in the light.

Katharine England: critic

I think too much (mediocre) fiction is being published. For me, one of the oddest things is the chapter in all the writing manuals on generating ideas, thinking of something to write about. It confirms my impression that there are hordes of writers and would-be writers with nothing pressing to say. Another odd thing is the publishing practice of commissioning writers and celebrities to fill perceived gaps in the market. In the children's area, a huge amount of mediocre fiction is produced on the questionable grounds that 'at least it will get/keep them reading'. My fear is that the dross will drown books that may have proved to be significant. Publishers who commission 'bestsellers' are often also those who have given up reading unsolicited manuscripts. There is only so much time and so much shelf space: 'the canon' changes and has anyway been in question for some years, but a society -- a literature -- needs to know its past, including its recent past, and as we publish more and more our significant past is squeezed out of print. I like the concept of the necessary novel -- the one that nags its author to be written, that changes in even the slightest degree the way in which its reader sees the world. But it has to be admitted that different things are necessary to different people. There are also novels which, read with attention, read twice, grow on the reader, start to impress with their structure, balance, sense of place -- or with the sheer investment of faith, time and energy on the part of author, editor (one hopes -- another current commonplace is the promising first or second novel ripped from its author without the aid of editorial midwifery) and publisher that is a full-length work of fiction. If there is much that seems to me imaginatively impoverished or undercooked there is also much that seems exciting and good -- and occasionally it is the same book over two readings.

James Bradley: novelist

I'm never quite sure how to respond to the too many books argument. My response as an author is to feel a bit edgy and wonder whether my books might be part of this supposed torrent of mediocre novels. How would I know after all?
     But my response as one of the wider community of writers is one of irritation. Contemporary Australian fiction is internationally successful in a way it has never been before, critically and commercially. And while this success is being achieved across the board, it's particularly noticeable amongst younger writers. Yet back home there is little or no recognition of this. Instead the background burble is too many books, badly written, formulaic, overexposed, nothing but hype, blah, blah, blah. And ironically it's a burble that grows loudest among the younger writers, and even louder around the younger women.
     Now I don't accept that international recognition is the litmus test of success, but it's certainly a respectable yardstick. Yet it's a yardstick which many of our cultural commentators -- call them senior critics or gatekeepers or what you will -- only seems to apply when we're talking about Murray Bail or Peter Robb or one of the other anointed repositories of our literary culture. When was the last time you heard about the (very real) success of Julia Leigh overseas? Or Nikki Gemmell? Or Eliot Perlman or Matthew Reilly or Michelle de Kretser? I could go on and on, but I won't.
     The thing is that it's just silly to talk of too many novels. After all, how many is enough? Is there any consensus about which ones shouldn't be published? And who forms that consensus? If fewer were published would the quality from the unpublished ones somehow move osmotically into the ones that were left?
     No, what bothers people is the fact that in a vibrant culture lots of people talk at once, in lots of different voices, instead of a select few. And yes, a lot of what gets said is forgettable, and a lot of it is noise, but that's always been the case. You need the noise to get the good stuff, because you never know whose signal will resolve out of it into something unforgettable until it happens. But one thing's for certain: without the noise there's nothing for anything to resolve out of.

Linda Jaivin: novelist

You can encourage and nurture literary talent with university writing programs, mentorships and government grants. You can ensure it fulfils its potential with energetic and creative publishing. You can help it find its audience with dedication on the part of booksellers. You can reward its contribution to the cultural and intellectual life of the nation, as the Irish do, by exempting writers (and other artists) from tax.
      Conversely you can deny local literary talent oxygen by devoting most of the new newspaper book sections to reviews of literature from overseas and profiles of foreign writers. You can whack it on the head with culturally suicidal policies of a GST on books and the proposed parallel imports.
     Still, at the end of the day, either you have it, or you don't. The appearance of great literary talent is serendipitous, random and unpredictable. And publishing is an industry that's not going to stop and twiddle its thumbs while waiting for it to come into view.
     Even when it makes itself known, there's no guarantee the publishers are going to recognise or commit to it in a difficult market, at a difficult time, the difficult fact is that publishers take fewer risks. I know of at least one extraordinary manuscript by (in my opinion) a brilliant young writer which no publisher to date had the guts to take up. If too much mediocre fiction is being published, it's not necessarily that there's nothing better on offer.

Laurie Clancy: critic and novelist

In his fine book on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James remarked that 'It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.' He went on too say, in effect, that as a rule great writers don't spring from isolation but out of a climate in which many other human beings aspire to the same cultural achievements as the rare genius, even if they are perfectly aware that they will never be capable of them. Fine writers grow out of a climate in which writing as an activity is valued, practised, talked about.
Such a climate still does not exist in Australia and perhaps never will -- certainly not in the way it does in, for example, France. Forty to fifty years ago, however, the climate was much worse than it is now. Australian writers were rare and almost always published from London (White, Stow, Koch). University courses in Australian literature were similarly sparse. To aim at being a writer seemed as bizarre as aiming at being a spaceman.
That situation has changed, even if writers are still marginalised and poorly paid. Our heroes will always remain sports heroes. I have no quarrel with that; nor do I object to the mega-sums currently quoted as the price of winning an Olympic gold medal. But just as the great athlete will emerge only from a society that values sporting accomplishments, so the great writer will emerge only from a society that values literary achievement. People who complain about the proliferation of mediocre fiction are almost always mediocre critics, people who have never written creatively themselves -- or in some cases pure philistines.

Delia Falconer: novelist

I feel that there is a tendency, sometimes, in Australian literary culture toward negativity and censoriousness, criticism serving to determine not so much the quality of a piece of writing as the fitness of the author to be recognised as a 'Writer' or the conformity of the book to some preconceived model of an acceptable 'Australian novel'. I have a concern that the phrasing of the question for discussion leans in that direction. Perhaps it would be more positive to consider whether we have an ability to recognise quality writing and how it can be fostered.
It seems to me that our present definitions of quality are rather narrow, for a number of reasons. Materially, a small number of print and radio forums for reviewing and the appearance of a limited pool of reviewers and commentators across these different publications tends to produce rather staid and orthodox canons of quality; recently, our prize culture has tended also to reward somewhat conservative novels, without outlining criteria for selection or any vision of fine writing. And, while I am intellectually in favour of English courses which challenge highbrow hierarchies of taste and study novels as evidence of a wide variety of textual and historical theories, the fact is that, along with the concurrent decimation of humanist textual appreciation courses, this can have the sad material side-effect of favouring easily teachable novels which embrace the canonised issues of the day. It does not necessarily get royalty money in the pockets of writers who may put more time or craft into their books.
A marked tendency to treat first novels with a lack of seriousness contributes greatly to limited notions of quality. First novels, especially by younger authors, are often lumped together in the one review, on the assumption that they will be of poorer standard, forcing reviewers to search out tenuous thematic or stylistic similarities across the books, rather than assessing their individual worth. First novels are often given to the least experienced reviewers. Some well-established authors and critics even consider it an insult to be asked to turn their attention to first fiction. This means that first novelists often do not get to learn from considered, expert reviews, surely an important phase of 'research and development' for our national literature. Given that younger novelists are perhaps likeliest to pursue more experimental forms, and newer novel technologies, this also means, if they are excluded from critical consideration, that our canons of quality are more likely to favour the established or middlebrow.

Peter Craven: critic

There is a sense in which too much mediocre fiction is always being published and a correlative sense in which this state of affairs is preferable to its opposite. This situation might be clarified by the very different case of poetry where hardly any poet apart from Les Murray can have any expectation of being published by a mainstream publisher, whether multinational or independent. I don't believe that a young and prodigiously talented fiction writer would have much trouble getting published in this country and if that's true then there's no cause for alarm.
     On the other hand there is a widespread perception at the moment that in the case of literary fiction there does seem to be a bit of a tendency for the hype to lead the question of value by the nose and that's a legitimate reason for concern. It's good and necessary that we have effective publicity machines but I think in some cases what's being sold into the significant niche market that constitutes literary fiction (and sold very effectively) is in fact pretty ordinary and middlebrow stuff.
     Clearly this is tied up with the diversification and -- paradoxically -- with the sophistication of the market though I'm not sure that it shows too much judgment on the part of our publishers. It does worry me that very accomplished writers like Catherine Ford or Liam Davison may not be getting the automatic recognition, and the accompanying visibility, that their work should command. There's also the fact that when a market becomes viable its dominant impulses will become commercial and it will require a conscious effort on the part of the best people operating in the field to resist the temptation to equate saleability and quality.
     One of the paradoxes of Australian publishing at the moment is that the qualitative leadership seems to be coming from the couple of independent publishers who are themselves constrained commercially because they cannot afford to lose too much money on a given book. What Australian fiction publishing requires is a restoration of the kind of self-confidence (and the attendant sense of value) which would ensure that if a new Murnane or Mathers came among us he would automatically have the attention of the most powerful publishing intelligences in the land.
     But there are plenty of hopeful signs. One is that at every level our popular fiction (from John Marsden to the detective stories of Shane Maloney and Peter Temple and Catherine Jinks) is looking good.
     Another is the strength of our established writers (which is the area of Australian fiction I have most to do with). David Malouf's Dream Stuff, for instance, seems to me the best thing he's done in years. I should add that when I edited the annual Best Australian Short Stories last year I saw no diminution of quality looking at the arc traced between Malouf, who is in his 60s, and the contributor with whom the volume ends, Colin Oehring, who is in his early 20s.

David Gaunt: gleebooks bookseller

When we started selling books at gleebooks twenty-five years ago, our beginnings happily coincided with the so-called 'renaissance' in Australian publishing. This was a flowering of energetic, lively and imaginative small and independent presses who, in conjunction with Penguin Books and a couple of other large publishers, were responsible for Garner, Malouf, Grenville, Drewe, Bail, Carey, Ireland, Moorhouse, Jolley et al. first finding voice in print. It was a 'golden' age and, like all thing bright and beautiful in publishing, it had a perfectly obvious side effect: overpublishing, or the publication of some mediocre, marginal literature (poetry and prose) which would otherwise have not seen the light of day.
Nothing unremarkable about that, in any culture, I would have thought. Indeed, the principal difference I have seen between then and now in our industry, is the quality of production and marketing devoted to such books, so we have more mutton dressed up as lamb, perhaps. Nevertheless, the fact that the inevitable mediocrities are more visible doesn't persuade me that there are too many of them, when we keep history in mind. Call a spade a shovel by all means, if such a work(s) merits review for whatever reason, but if curtailing publishing programs to fit some more rigorous critical agenda means losing one first novel (how about Catherine Ford or Michelle de Kretser, from the last year?) then count me out.

Michael Heyward: publisher

Anxiety about the state of Australian fiction can easily turn into so much wishful thinking. Was Australian fiction in great shape in 1930 when The Fortunes of Richard Mahony appeared in its entirety? Who even believed in the Australian novel when James Stern trumpeted The Tree of Man in the New York Times? Could you reasonably expect a novel like Oscar and Lucinda or Eucalyptus to come along more than once in a decade? Great novels can't be anticipated any more than we can ever grow tired of them, but this is only part of the story. What is more pertinent, and what I often think about as I read the manuscripts which cross my desk, is the quality of attention and imagination we bring to fiction in the first place. I am a publisher in a country where the literary infrastructure is, quite simply, inadequate to the abundant talent around us. It seems to me mindless to prognosticate about the quality of Australian fiction when the quality of our editing and our reviewing, the two most important processes to which fiction must be subjected if it is to find a readership, is so fitful. The Man Who Loved Children was a great novel long before Randall Jarrell wrote his marvellous essay about it; but that essay made the reputation of Stead's novel for a generation of readers. For an Australian writer, Stead was in this sense very lucky indeed. So let's be anxious then, but anxious about this: can we read well enough to discover the fiction to which we aspire?

Complete:

THE STATE OF AUSTRALIAN FICTION: IS THERE TOO MUCH MEDIOCRE FICTION BEING PUBLISHED?