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| Great nonfiction expels the fake and trivial | Great nonfiction expels the fake and trivial |
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| All week, people (by which I mean Twitter users, now uncomfortably close in their own minds to being people in general) have been railing at, or embracing, the social media platform’s act of largesse. An increase from 140 characters per tweet to 280! A doubling of self-expression! Not since Gutenberg, etcetera... or brevity is the soul of wit, depending on your perspective. | All week, people (by which I mean Twitter users, now uncomfortably close in their own minds to being people in general) have been railing at, or embracing, the social media platform’s act of largesse. An increase from 140 characters per tweet to 280! A doubling of self-expression! Not since Gutenberg, etcetera... or brevity is the soul of wit, depending on your perspective. |
| The naysayers had much on their side: an increase in capacity does not inevitably lead to an increase in clarity or quality, especially when a medium’s USP is held to be its immediacy and directness. And, as Twitter struggles to fight its way free of the extremists, trolls and vipers who increasingly suck the oxygen from it, the idea of affording more space to them seems masochistic. | The naysayers had much on their side: an increase in capacity does not inevitably lead to an increase in clarity or quality, especially when a medium’s USP is held to be its immediacy and directness. And, as Twitter struggles to fight its way free of the extremists, trolls and vipers who increasingly suck the oxygen from it, the idea of affording more space to them seems masochistic. |
| As for me, I’m a freelancer and I just find the idea of writing more words for no more cash downright weird. | As for me, I’m a freelancer and I just find the idea of writing more words for no more cash downright weird. |
| However, this is an argument that applies to ephemera, the unmediated, unedited wordfest that shines a light on our prejudices, appetites, aggressions and rivalries. Twitter is, above all, a battleground for space, attention, amplification, dominance. And, where it is not that, where it connects people and allows for expressions of kindness, support and camaraderie, it is invaluable. | However, this is an argument that applies to ephemera, the unmediated, unedited wordfest that shines a light on our prejudices, appetites, aggressions and rivalries. Twitter is, above all, a battleground for space, attention, amplification, dominance. And, where it is not that, where it connects people and allows for expressions of kindness, support and camaraderie, it is invaluable. |
| Larger thoughts, though, often require larger arenas. This Thursday brings the announcement of the 2017 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson prize), which is approaching its 20th year. Former winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Helen MacDonald and Philippe Sands, who last year took to the stage and immediately announced that he would share the £30,000 prize with friend and fellow shortlistee Hisham Matar and that they would donate the money to a refugee charity (keeping only enough back to buy a bottle of cognac for Hisham and a jar of pickles for himself). | Larger thoughts, though, often require larger arenas. This Thursday brings the announcement of the 2017 Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction (formerly the Samuel Johnson prize), which is approaching its 20th year. Former winners include Antony Beevor, Jonathan Coe, Helen MacDonald and Philippe Sands, who last year took to the stage and immediately announced that he would share the £30,000 prize with friend and fellow shortlistee Hisham Matar and that they would donate the money to a refugee charity (keeping only enough back to buy a bottle of cognac for Hisham and a jar of pickles for himself). |
| Sands may be a highly successful barrister rather than starving in a garret, but that is still seriously classy. | Sands may be a highly successful barrister rather than starving in a garret, but that is still seriously classy. |
| A vast number of writers, though, struggle to make any sort of meaningful living and find themselves yielding book time to activities such as teaching, journalism and other forms of writing. This is all the more acute in the writing of non-fiction, where research is often dependent on proximity to libraries and the freedom and wherewithal to travel. I recall a highly acclaimed writer telling me that she had to rethink her project entirely because commuting to the materials that she needed was impossible to combine with taking her children to school. Biographers may work on their subjects’ lives for many years to produce a book that they will never believe is definitive but hope is the best it can possibly be: Hilary Spurling’s recently published life of Anthony Powell is a case in point. | A vast number of writers, though, struggle to make any sort of meaningful living and find themselves yielding book time to activities such as teaching, journalism and other forms of writing. This is all the more acute in the writing of non-fiction, where research is often dependent on proximity to libraries and the freedom and wherewithal to travel. I recall a highly acclaimed writer telling me that she had to rethink her project entirely because commuting to the materials that she needed was impossible to combine with taking her children to school. Biographers may work on their subjects’ lives for many years to produce a book that they will never believe is definitive but hope is the best it can possibly be: Hilary Spurling’s recently published life of Anthony Powell is a case in point. |
| However, look at the Baillie Gifford shortlist this year and savour its scope: works on Islam, cyborgs, Jewish history, European borderlands, the fight against Aids, Homer and his centuries-later effect upon a father and son. The longlist included similarly wide-ranging books such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ground-breaking book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Plot 29, a family memoir by Observer journalist Allan Jenkins. | However, look at the Baillie Gifford shortlist this year and savour its scope: works on Islam, cyborgs, Jewish history, European borderlands, the fight against Aids, Homer and his centuries-later effect upon a father and son. The longlist included similarly wide-ranging books such as Reni Eddo-Lodge’s ground-breaking book Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and Plot 29, a family memoir by Observer journalist Allan Jenkins. |
| The prize’s executive director, Toby Mundy, argues that works of non-fiction are “the only medium of thick description of the world that human beings possess”; even carefully crafted documentaries and journalism, he thinks, remain only “puddle-deep” by comparison. | The prize’s executive director, Toby Mundy, argues that works of non-fiction are “the only medium of thick description of the world that human beings possess”; even carefully crafted documentaries and journalism, he thinks, remain only “puddle-deep” by comparison. |
| Perhaps the most contentious aspect of that statement is that it requires a definition of “thick” – what use, in other words, are layers of detail and accretions of information if there is not discernment and intelligence in the way it’s selected, shaped and presented? And one could argue for a significant merging of mediums, with different forms, not merely complementing one another but feeding one another by allowing different aspects of the same story to emerge. | Perhaps the most contentious aspect of that statement is that it requires a definition of “thick” – what use, in other words, are layers of detail and accretions of information if there is not discernment and intelligence in the way it’s selected, shaped and presented? And one could argue for a significant merging of mediums, with different forms, not merely complementing one another but feeding one another by allowing different aspects of the same story to emerge. |
| We seem to be caught up in an anxiety about right-sizing. In journalism, we proclaim the importance of a “long read” and hope that it won’t attract the internet acronym TLDR (too long, didn’t read). In the world of fiction, the doorstoppers are deemed somehow too long, no matter how good. (Many words have been written about the length of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Paul Auster’s 4321, both recognised by the Man Booker Prize).But write something short and it might be a novella or is it really a long short story? | We seem to be caught up in an anxiety about right-sizing. In journalism, we proclaim the importance of a “long read” and hope that it won’t attract the internet acronym TLDR (too long, didn’t read). In the world of fiction, the doorstoppers are deemed somehow too long, no matter how good. (Many words have been written about the length of Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Paul Auster’s 4321, both recognised by the Man Booker Prize).But write something short and it might be a novella or is it really a long short story? |
| Last week, I interviewed the novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley at the event to award the VS Pritchett Memorial prize to the year’s best unpublished story (yes, there are a lot of literary prizes; they’re how writers get paid and the rest of the publishing world gets a drink). Hadley described how her career began with the short form and how it gave her the confidence to know when the shape of a piece of work was right. She also wondered whether that idea of “the arc of a life”, so key to many 19th-century novels, felt somehow outmoded, as if we no longer expect lives to have clear trajectories, constantly propelling themselves forward to some form of destiny. Perhaps, she argued, we accept that life is far more episodic than that. | Last week, I interviewed the novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley at the event to award the VS Pritchett Memorial prize to the year’s best unpublished story (yes, there are a lot of literary prizes; they’re how writers get paid and the rest of the publishing world gets a drink). Hadley described how her career began with the short form and how it gave her the confidence to know when the shape of a piece of work was right. She also wondered whether that idea of “the arc of a life”, so key to many 19th-century novels, felt somehow outmoded, as if we no longer expect lives to have clear trajectories, constantly propelling themselves forward to some form of destiny. Perhaps, she argued, we accept that life is far more episodic than that. |
| That understanding has seeped beyond the world of fiction – the literary form so completely devoted to understanding subjectivity and the interior world – and has had its influence on nonfiction. Despite the vast ambition of a work such as Simon Schama’s three-part history of the Jews, the second volume of which, Belonging, is one of the contenders on Thursday, its internal focus is on the less familiar, the marginal, the unexpected stories. For some historians, David Olusoga, for example, author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, the challenge of excavating and telling the unknown is central. | That understanding has seeped beyond the world of fiction – the literary form so completely devoted to understanding subjectivity and the interior world – and has had its influence on nonfiction. Despite the vast ambition of a work such as Simon Schama’s three-part history of the Jews, the second volume of which, Belonging, is one of the contenders on Thursday, its internal focus is on the less familiar, the marginal, the unexpected stories. For some historians, David Olusoga, for example, author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, the challenge of excavating and telling the unknown is central. |
| Meanwhile, on the margins of the personal history and its imaginative recasting lie works that confound classification – the auto-fiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the risk-taking memoirs of Maggie Nelson and Salman Rushdie and the mysteries of Elena Ferrante. | Meanwhile, on the margins of the personal history and its imaginative recasting lie works that confound classification – the auto-fiction of Chris Kraus, Sheila Heti and Karl Ove Knausgaard, the risk-taking memoirs of Maggie Nelson and Salman Rushdie and the mysteries of Elena Ferrante. |
| Nonfiction’s greatest asset might be its capaciousness and the amount of time invested in its creation. You might read Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear, followed by Hilary Mantel’s hospital diaries, Ink in the Blood, and then move on to Yanis Varoufakis’s treatise on global economics. | |
| And throughout, you might relish, in Louis MacNeice’s words, “the drunkenness of things being various”. | And throughout, you might relish, in Louis MacNeice’s words, “the drunkenness of things being various”. |
| The Baillie Gifford prize is announced on Thursday | The Baillie Gifford prize is announced on Thursday |