Contemporary Fiction and the Critical Act

Richard Bradford’s The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction closes with a familiar complaint about scholarly writing on contemporary fiction. “[T]he absorption of theory into academic criticism,” writes the professor of English at the University of Ulster, “has all but immunized the latter from that most contentious, subjective feature of talking and writing about literature: an inclination to offer an opinion on whether or not the novel or the author are any good” (246). Impatient with scholarship in which evaluative responses are “compromised by other commitments,” Bradford therefore declares in his preface: “One objective of this book will be to show that enjoyment and critical scrutiny are not mutually exclusive activities” (vi).

Let me take Bradford at his word, then, and begin with the sort of judgment he prefers. The Novel Now is not a good book. I didn’t enjoy it, and my lack of enjoyment is directly related to my disagreement with Bradford over the function and value of the academic critical act. This doesn’t mean The Novel Now has no redeeming features. As a survey of recent trends in British and Northern Irish fiction, it is impressively comprehensive and unusually up-to-date. Published in 2007, the book nevertheless refers to several novels released only the previous year, with no visible strain on its argumentative structure. Sensibly divided into four parts, The Novel Now moves from a discussion of the vexed post–1945 relations between modernism, realism, and the “new postmodernists” into an excursion on genre fiction; a consideration of novels that take up themes of gender and sexuality; and a multipart survey of fictions marked by “nation, race, and place.” Bradford writes, moreover, with commendable clarity and occasional brio, while his evaluative judgments hit the mark as often as they miss. For instance, I think his analysis of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) is a work of mere dutiful explication, deaf to the aesthetic and ideological ambivalences of that strange and wonderful counter-Bildungsroman. Yet I can only applaud his excoriation of Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani (2006), as a “blatantly exploitative” novel that stretches “clichés of violent nefarious teen angst beyond their known limits” (213). There’s more to say about Malkani’s fiction than this, but it’s an important point, made with admirable passion.

So what’s the problem with The Novel Now? My first objection relates to Bradford’s linkage between the “fundamentalist” pursuit of modernist formal experiment past its interwar heyday (9) and an alleged academic prejudice for the new in all its forms (27). Bradford describes, without benefit of cited evidence, a supposedly well-known scholarly consensus that the novel “cannot rely upon precedent, irrespective of the intrinsic abilities of a new novelist who elects to write in a comparatively conventional manner” (27). What’s more, he describes this prejudice as one of the “legacies of modernism”—a dubious inheritance in which the “dictum that everything has to be new” has somehow replaced “the notion of evaluation, the appreciation of the specific qualities of a novel” (27). The unsubstantiated nature of these remarks is, I think, symptomatic of their superficiality. For if academic critics were really infected by a maniacal lust for novelty, how could one explain the esteem in which a formally conventional novelist like Pat Barker is currently held?¹ Far from being an exception to the modernist rule, Barker’s growing reputation (she has been the subject of two interviews and an essay in this journal alone) is better understood as just one sign of an established critical appetite for historical realism—a taste that, in the parts of his book not organized around generalized critiques of his own discipline, Bradford clearly understands very well (99).²

But I’m in danger of grinding my own ax. I do not dwell on Bradford’s argument with modernism for its own...