To write simply is always to seem to write well. Bad writing is usually identified with over-writing: too many adjectives and adverbs, flowery figures of speech, verbosity. No one is ever accused of under-writing. Yet the unadorned prose which often passes for good writing these days could aptly be described as under-written. The sentences which open several of the pieces in Granta's much trumpeted Best of Young British Novelists are plain to a fault. 'Andy runs across the ice,' 'I had no time for vices,' 'Lisa was meeting her father for supper,' 'He didn't like attending County Hall,' 'The first person I was in love with was called Mark Lyle' - all these sentences could have been written by the same person, the person who wrote 'Frank drops me off outside the sisters' flat,' 'You could hear the kids yelling in the pool,' 'I could hear kids on the waste ground behind me,' 'The travel-agent smoked in the empty church' - first sentences, by different writers, from an anthology of new fiction published last year by Faber.

LRB 24 June 1993 | PDF Download