Promise of youth
Helen Oyeyemi, a first-year at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, has sold her first novel for £400,000. At the age of 18.
Newspapers screamed about the book deal being one of the biggest for a young writer. It's enough to make you choke with envy over your cornflakes. Apparently she even shares the same accountant as JK Rowling. An accountant?
Well, someone's got to look after all that money. A prodigy rolling in dough also must have a team of suited and booted fund managers on call - just to make sure she invests wisely and doesn't go on crazy shopping sprees à la Posh Spice or make herself sick from too much champagne.
The novel is about an African girl from England who visits relatives in Nigeria and meets a friend only she is able to see. The friend emerges as an evil spirit who wants to possess the girl's body.
Ooh. Shades of Zadie Smith. The Icarus Girl boasts buckets of multiculturalism, strange - sorry, quaint - characters, and an advance to make ol' Zadie jealous. And all this for a book Oyeyemi started at school. Here's a publisher's recipe for blockbuster success (warning: don't try this at home).
Take one Cambridge author - female, the younger the better. Mix heaps of marketing cynicism and hard-nosed business sense. Add a megadose of hype - to do this, advertise the book on the sides of buses and on rail station platforms, then get as many interviews with said author as possible. Season as desired. When the dish acquires a delicate taste of caviar and foie gras, it's ready.
So the Tabs seem to have it sorted. I can just imagine the scene in a boxing match: "In the Light Blue corner, Helen Oyeyemi and Zadie Smith!"
"...And representing the Dark Blues, we have... uh... Adam Thirlwell." At 25, Thirlwell, author of Politics, is no spring chicken by publishing standards.
At one point I wondered if all this hype about Oyeyemi was true. I rang a friend at Bloomsbury, her publishers. Surprisingly, he didn't know anything about the book.
Four days after the story broke in the Evening Standard, the paper printed a correction. "The figure... is a good deal less than everyone has been led to believe." That figure turns out to be £40,000 for a two-book deal. The reporters got it wrong - by a factor of ten.
I can't shake off the nagging feeling that the error was deliberate. It reminds me too much of the Sunday Times's claim that bus driver Magnus Mills received an advance of £1m for his first novel, The Restraint of Beasts. The correct sum was £100,000. Nonetheless, the requisite media coverage had been accomplished, and Mills' hype machine managed to churn out nominations for both the Booker and the Whitbread prizes, as well as extract a glowing quote from the reclusive writer Thomas Pynchon. The combined muscle of these factors guaranteed that the book flew out of the shelves when it was published in 1998.
There used to be a time when writers actually wrote. Whether in cold garrets or book-lined studies, they sweated and sweared over their notepads or typewriters, thinking of the pleasure words brought them and how they might share that passion with their audience. If they achieved fame, they were grateful for modest book tours, critical acclaim from Oxbridge dons reviewing them in The Times, and kind letters from little old ladies.
Today, literature has become a singing, dancing, flashing-with-neon-lights beauty contest. My best vacation read was Posy Simmond's Literary Life, a wry comic-book commentary on the trials and tribulations of writing. In one scene Jane Austen is accosted by the media, who tell her: "You're a celebrity...get yourself over here."
"Get me out of here" is what Austen thinks instead, as she is interviewed, bullied, and asked questions that would make a 19th century novelist blush. But it's a competitive world these days, and with more and more titles fighting to stay in the bookshops before being consigned to the dark recesses of the (shudder) recycling bin, publishers are desperate to sign up that elusive mix of youthful freshness and mass-market appeal.
Donna Tartt's flirtatious stance - in Victorian gentleman's clothes reminiscent of costumes in the controversial erotic drama Tipping the Velvet - on the cover of the Sunday Telegraph magazine surely didn't hurt her sales figures.
Even the London Book Fair has got in on the act. The fair's organisers recently launched a competition called 'Lit Idol', where unpublished novelists submit sample chapters in hopes of being selected as the next commercial bestseller. Among the judges are Chick-Lit authors Jenny Colgan and Emlyn Rees - best known for their portrayals of overpaid middle-class twentysomethings griping about their lot in life.
But hey, if the Pop Idol format is good enough for Simon Cowell, it should be good enough for aspiring literary hacks. The shortlisted writers will be required to read from their works at the fair. I wouldn't be surprised if they were joined onstage by Will, Gareth, and Michelle belting their hearts out.
And the prize? No cash, I'm afraid. What you get is representation by a literary agent. It's a valuable commodity, given that they don't even look at unsolicited manuscripts these days. One leading agent recently scoffed at the mere mention of the so-called 'slush pile', which she dismissed as 'nonsense'.
This relentless search for model-type looks has made it difficult for talented writers on the wrong side of 40 break into print. Astonishing Splashes of Colour author Clare Morrall had problems finding a literary agent before she made it to the Booker Prize shortlist.
She attributes this obstacle partly to her relative ordinariness, as a 51-year-old music teacher from Devon - a far cry from what is considered 'hip.'
More dangerously, this strategy can backfire on the authors themselves, who, in the process of being touted as the voices of 'black/mixed race/insert marginalizing category here' Britain, end up writing only about their heritage, never looking beyond that box to tackle broader ideas. While many authors of Anglo-Saxon origin have no hesitation in writing about different parts of the world, fiction or non-fiction - for instance, William Darlymple in White Mughals and Patrick French in Tibet, Tibet - you won't see 'minority' writers taking as their subject, say, castles in Medieval France or women in Edwardian England. And that is a pity.
29th Jan 2004