Author William Nicholson complains that comfortable, middle-class people are no longer legitimate subject matter for serious fiction. Can he be right?
Breeding runs deep ... Keira Knightley in the film of Ian McEwan's Atonement. Photograph: c.Focus/Everett / Rex Features
William Nicholson was in his 50s by the time he got around to writing his first novel in 2004. Before then he worked in TV drama, and on Hollywood screenplays including Gladiator. He also wrote books for children. But adult fiction turned out to be harder than expected.
"I wanted to write about my own world and I felt that I couldn't," he says. "And I puzzled about this. Why did I feel that my world, which is comfortable, middle-class, well-educated people living in the countryside, was illegitimate subject-matter for serious fiction?"
Nicholson spoke about his experiences, including his rejection by a publisher who said he wasn't interested in women who drive 4x4s, at a festival in Devon earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Scottish writer Alan Warner was making the opposite argument. Writing for the Guardian in praise of Ross Raisin's second novel, Waterline, which describes the descent into homelessness of a widowed former Glasgow shipyard worker, Warner wrote of a "sly, unspoken literary prejudice" against working-class lives and characters.
While the upper-classes remain perennially interesting to publishers and readers alike, is it affluent middle-class or working-class characters who are being squeezed out of literary fiction? Or can both Nicholson and Warner be right?
When I phone him, Nicholson is quick to qualify his remarks. "I'm not daft, I know the middle classes dominate our culture," he says from his home in Sussex. But when he began reading Jonathan Franzen's hugely acclaimed novels about American family life, he decided Franzen's compassion for his characters was missing from British fiction. It is true that there is no obvious equivalent to Franzen's success with The Corrections and Freedom in Britain. The tragic grandeur with which he invests the lives of his middle-class Americans does not have an obvious counterpart in a modern-day Middlemarch set in Harrogate or Morningside. But British fiction has become so diverse it is difficult to usefully generalise about it.
Full story at The Guardian.
"I wanted to write about my own world and I felt that I couldn't," he says. "And I puzzled about this. Why did I feel that my world, which is comfortable, middle-class, well-educated people living in the countryside, was illegitimate subject-matter for serious fiction?"
Nicholson spoke about his experiences, including his rejection by a publisher who said he wasn't interested in women who drive 4x4s, at a festival in Devon earlier this week.
Meanwhile, Scottish writer Alan Warner was making the opposite argument. Writing for the Guardian in praise of Ross Raisin's second novel, Waterline, which describes the descent into homelessness of a widowed former Glasgow shipyard worker, Warner wrote of a "sly, unspoken literary prejudice" against working-class lives and characters.
While the upper-classes remain perennially interesting to publishers and readers alike, is it affluent middle-class or working-class characters who are being squeezed out of literary fiction? Or can both Nicholson and Warner be right?
When I phone him, Nicholson is quick to qualify his remarks. "I'm not daft, I know the middle classes dominate our culture," he says from his home in Sussex. But when he began reading Jonathan Franzen's hugely acclaimed novels about American family life, he decided Franzen's compassion for his characters was missing from British fiction. It is true that there is no obvious equivalent to Franzen's success with The Corrections and Freedom in Britain. The tragic grandeur with which he invests the lives of his middle-class Americans does not have an obvious counterpart in a modern-day Middlemarch set in Harrogate or Morningside. But British fiction has become so diverse it is difficult to usefully generalise about it.
Full story at The Guardian.
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