'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

Pulped Fiction

Celeb book sales were down and fiction sales were up last Christmas. At first glance this seems encouraging, but the meaning of fiction has changed as the publishing industry has grappled with the problem of popularising printed fiction, which although a mainstay of the movie industry has been diminishing in terms of book sales ever since the sixties. Sometimes of course, when a movie comes from a book far larger book sales follow.  

The first thing that publishers realized was that big selling books, like big selling movies are mainly the province of the youth market. The Oscars have been used to provide a mature gloss to the movies, but they are rapidly dropping all pretence in that direction and the publishing industry is sure to follow, either with a new ‘youth oriented’ awards show or by transforming an awards show that they already run. In another ten years, a writer’s awards show will be like watching The Grammies.

Many bookstores now have a specific section entitled ‘Teenage Fiction’. No, this is not devoted to teenage writers; that would be brilliant. It is a section devoted to Chick Lit, Middle Earth Adventures and the latest, hottest commodity; ‘Vampire Legends’.

Part of the problem is the ramping up of educational requirements on the most intelligent of teenagers. They now have so much to read for their grades that they have no time left to read anything of any weight outside of their curriculum.

I was no scholar at school and did not go to University, but I read C P Snow, Aldous Huxley, Somerset Maugham, Evelyn Waugh, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Raymond Chandler, Norman Mailer, Albert Camus and a host of others. None of these writers were on my ‘required reading’ list, but all gave me clues as to what the world was about.

There are a number of contemporary fiction writers worth their salt, but unless like Annie Proulx their stories are made into movies, they don’t sell well. I hope that the audioBook revolution will make their works more accessible, given that you will be able to download a four or five hour story in approximately the same time as a music album - soon to be, but not right now.

We will have reverted to storytelling as it was in the time of Homer, when speakers travelled the land telling their stories to the people; tales narrated in the town square or in the evening around a fire. Perhaps this will usher in a new breed of writer who has not only to think about plot and meaning, but about the sound of the words themselves as playwrights do. Not that a fictional story is all about action and dialogue as in a play. The great wonder of what we call a novel is the writer’s ability to describe thoughts and surroundings in a way that stage plays or movies cannot do, and the way the writer does this can make the story greater than it ever was before.

The quality of the writing and the uniqueness of the story are essential factors but book publishers are more interested in tried and tested commercial formulas which have nothing unique about them and in which quality is a purely incidental factor. Yes, all my talk of audioBooks heralding the Renaissance of high grade fiction is just me clutching at straws - ‘helplessly hoping’ as the song says. The world is changing, but I am not changing with it. Well, I am sorry. It is down to having inhabited a world of infinite subtlety and variety which is now being well and truly pulped.        

Post Your