This time of year, in France and Italy, hunters renew their licences and start cleaning rifles, not always carefully enough, preparing to go forth to destroy the peace of the countryside – and sometimes each other.
In the book world, a withering crossfire always seems to commence around now – because it is awards season and, in an increasingly challenging fiction market, awards can make a difference.
There have been several of these teapot-tempest affairs in the past week or three. Most hardly rate a raised eyebrow in the wider world, but book blogs are buzzing.
In one such brawl, Victoria Glendinning, a British writer serving as a judge for Canada's Scotiabank Giller Prize, dissed CanLit in print, giggled at the word “eavestrough” and complained about the quality of the 100 books she had had to read. She did all this, rather tackily, before the award has been voted on, and even before the short list was picked. (It has been, since.)
Noah Richler, in these pages, dissed Glendinning and BritLit right back. Others weighed in, with one point or another, or sometimes no point at all, just to be heard. Book people are feisty and the times are troubled.
On the other hand, this sort of thing isn't remotely new. A few years back, I received an e-mail from two baby-boomer authors. They were drafting a Boomer Manifesto to protest against what they saw as a trend toward the major awards ignoring older writers in favour of younger, trendier, next new things. They wanted other boomers to join in the drafting, and to sign on.
I wrote an urgent reply trying to talk them off that ledge. Others might have done the same, or the inner calm and judicious equipoise we boomers are widely known for may have kicked in, because the Manifesto never appeared.
It gets better: A few short awards seasons after that, Stephen Marche, one of those younger literary tigers, wrote a fierce piece of his own, and this one did appear in print. He complained that – wait for it – all the awards and nominations in this country went to tired, over-praised baby-boomer writers and that Canada would never rise in literary terms until it started, properly, to give awards (and sales) to next new thing, thirtysomethings.
I thought about these two expressions of indignation, and I shook my head. How can you not?
We'll find ourselves working away from category and genre debates and toward the question worth asking about any novel: Is it any good?
And right now, perhaps even more heatedly, there's yet another spat in spate. This one is a battle over Britain's own top literary award, the Man Booker Prize. The fine science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson just wrote a piece blasting how that prize utterly ignores SF, always has, and seems lately to be only about historical fiction ... and, well, what's with that?
A historical fiction novel did, indeed, receive the award last week, Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. But I have an academic, deeply knowledgeable about the, well, the history of historical fiction, who points out that until very recently it had no stature or esteem at all, that as a genre it was as ignored as SF and fantasy, dismissed as even more lowbrow.
In purely commercial terms, of course, Tudor-era novels these days about fetching heroines shown half-decapitated on the covers in elegant gowns have made the genre hot. (And how perfect is it to show beheaded women in a Tudor setting?)
