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January 22, 2008
Sean Lindsay on The Great Australian Novel
Sean Lindsay, proprietor of the "101 Reasons to Stop Writing Weblog", is interviewed by the good people on the Jossip website. Sean has some interesting things to say about The Great Australian Novel (caps compulsory). It doesn't start out that way, but bear with it:
What's the deal with the great American novel? Why does everyone want to write it?When people talk of the "Great American Novel", what they mean in more concrete terms is "The Book Everyone Reads". Every writer dreams of writing the book that is foisted on every teenager in high school English class, and the guaranteed sales, frequent movie adaptations and honorary doctorates that come with it.
There's no consensus on what constitutes the Great American Novel, which leads some writers with Ozymandian egos to think they're going to write it. You never hear debate over the Great Russian Novel, because it's War and Peace. The only discussion about the Great English Novel is which Dickens novel it is. There is zero discussion over the Great Australian Novel, because there are no great Australian novels.
It's also because of Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, which would certainly be on the shortlist for the Great American Novel if such a list existed. Lee is a perfect example of a writer who did the honourable thing after producing her masterpiece -- she stopped writing. She didn't whittle away her reputation on increasingly erratic minor novels and getting into fistfights with other ageing writers. But she's also a terrible counterexample: her best work was her debut, providing a convenient exception to the rule that you have to 'hone' your writing talent over years and hundreds of thousands of words. Now all aspiring Great American Novelists cling to the Harper Lee Fantasy that they will magically produce a masterwork, when they eventually get around to writing. It's the literary equivalent of aspiring to win the lottery.
Posted by larrikin at January 22, 2008 10:12 AM
Comments
This is actually pretty perceptive: "The problem isn’t scarcity of readers, it’s that no-one knows how to motivate those people to buy more than one book per decade." (After quoting the success of The Da Vinci Code.)
It's a strange ecology, publishing: each year you seem to get a couple of big books that gobble up the general population's reading budget, leaving 99% of books in desperate need of attention. Whereas for movies and music there seems to be a healthier equivalent of the 'midlist' (not that such a thing really exists in publishing anymore.)
Maybe he hits the nail on the head when he says: "The biggest problem facing the publishing industry today is that the people who should be buying books are instead trying to write them."
Tough love? Hell yes.
Posted by: Christopher Miles at January 22, 2008 12:18 PM