Events at the Shop
The LRB Debate at the Edinburgh International Book Festival: Fiction on a Pedestal
Friday 15 August 2008
At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the London Review of Books festival event saw a panel composed of Anne Enright, Andrew O’Hagan and Nicholas Spice, chaired by Marina Warner, conduct an animated discussion of what fiction can do and what it can’t. Why is the novel treated so reverently as a genre? Should novelists command more attention than writers who don’t write fiction? Or don’t they get enough? Why is it that the state of the novel is sometimes taken as a sign of the state of the culture?
Marina Warner’s Introduction
Listen now (5:49)
Marina Warner introduces the theme of the debate, posing the question of whether the market has distorted the value of fiction, before introducing the panellists.
Comments from the Panel
Listen now (15:06)
The panellists speak in turn on the debate topic: Anne Enright on the novel’s limits in providing definition of a cultural moment; Andrew O’Hagan on our cultural failure to support excellence; and Nicholas Spice on the dearth of new writing that is able to address successfully the need for intensity, energy and compression, in particular at the level of the sentence.
Panel Discussion
Listen now (18:19)
The panel debate opens with some heated discussion over whether Spice’s allegation is fair: he argues there are currently “lazy instances of writing” that are celebrated and rewarded, while O’Hagan attacks the “degradation in what we’re willing to accept as a wonderful novel”. Enright makes a case for the novelist’s ability to “break open and re-form new linguistic shapes”, escaping the linearity of the form, and the possibility for transcendence inherent in the best work. The debate closes with the voicing of regret about the “professionalisation of novel-writing”, and its impact on literary culture.
Audience Questions
Listen now (16:29)
Audience questions on:
- Richard and Judy
- Realism
- Aristotelian unity
- Cultural waxing and waning
- The possible impact of e-publishing
- Whether the problem is not with the novel but the publishing industry.
Anne Enright studied creative writing under Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter at the University of East Anglia. She has published one previous collection of stories, The Portable Virgin, and four novels: The Wig My Father Wore, What Are You Like?, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch and The Gathering.
Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, many of which were first published in the LRB, was published in June. Be Near Me won the 2008 Los Angeles Times Book Prize award for fiction.
Nicholas Spice is the publisher of the London Review of Books.
Marina Warner’s books include From the Beast to the Blonde, Indigo and most recently, Phantasmagoria. She teaches at the University of Essex.
Further Reading
If you enjoyed this event, you may also be interested in:
Rory Stewart on International Intervention