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Telegraph
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The male novelist isn't extinct – just look at this year's Booker longlist
It appears rumours of the death of the male novelist have been greatly exaggerated. This year's Booker longlist, announced today, bucks recent convention by celebrating this most unfashionable literary creature over hot new faces – six of the 13 authors on the list are men, not to mention middle-aged ones (by contrast, last year's shortlist of six featured five women). With Sarah Jessica Parker on a panel headed by Roddy Doyle, the list plays a curiously straight bat. The men, in particular, are mid-career – Andrew Miller, Benjamin Markovits, David Szalay, Benjamin Wood, Tash Aw and Jonathan Buckley – meaning the list has largely eschewed this year's buzzy debuts. British-Hungarian writer Szalay, one of Granta's Best Young Novelists in 2013, leads the pack with Flesh, his brilliant novel about masculinity, sex and modernity, told through the rags-to-riches life of a Hungarian immigrant. Miller is another venerated, if overlooked, author of exquisitely observed, character-led novels – it's great to see the elegantly atmospheric Our Land in Winter get the nod. Joining them is the 44-year-old Wood, five novels-deep into his career, with his arresting novel, Seascraper, about a 20-year-old loner in a 1960s English coastal town. And, too, Jonathan Buckley: author of 13 radical novels, his career has been maintained through the faith of independent publishers, including his current stable Fitzcarraldo. (These are, let's face it, hardly household names. Instead, they represent the quiet men of – largely – British fiction, toiling away in the slipstreams.) So they are not the usual suspects. There's noticeably no Ian McEwan, whose new and highly anticipated sci-fi novel, What We Can Know, is out in September (although, to be fair, the last time McEwan got the Booker nod was in 2007 for On Chesil Beach). No Alan Hollinghurst, who won in 2004 with The Line of Beauty and whose recent elegiac novel, Our Evenings, was a hotly tipped contender. No Tim Winton, the Australian heavyweight whose admittedly hard-going climate change novel, Juice, has been critically acclaimed. This year's crop of swaggering new talent from across the Irish sea has also been omitted. There's no Wendy Erskine, whose time-bending, polyphonic debut, The Benefactors, has received rave reviews. No Roisín O'Donnell, or John Patrick McHugh, or Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin, whose respective first novels have each been causing a splash. Nor is there much room for the Americans, whose usual dominating presence on the shortlist each year generates palpitations of anxiety about undue American cultural might. There is the London-based American Benjamin Markovits (a regular fiction critic for this paper, and picked along with Szalay as one of the Telegraph's Best Novelists Under 40 in 2010); the Korean-American Susan Choi, and the experimental minimalist Katie Kitamura. They're all fine writers – yet they hardly have the razzle-dazzle force of say, a Percival Everett, whose bravura novel James narrowly lost out on the top prize to Samantha Harvey last year. So what are we left with? There are a few stylistic stand-outs – Kitamura's Audition, which tells one story in two radically different circumstances; Jonathan Buckley's modernist-leaning, elusive beauty, One Boat; Maria Reva's tricksy Ukrainian heist caper Endling – one of the most eye-catching novels on the list. But in general, these are novels that are structurally conservative, opting for traditional narrative over technical innovation and without the daring of, for example, Patricia Lockwood's forthcoming Will There Ever Be Another You (another disappointing omission from this list). Several books – Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Choi's Flashlight – deal in the sort of narrative the Booker judges tend to love: they're bustling, intergenerational family dramas about migration and post-colonialism, set against heaving geo-political backdrops. The judging panel may exult in their list's roving global energy, but in truth, many of the novels this year are intimate psychological dramas. Some are also strikingly modest, such as Love Forms, Claire Adam's novel about a woman haunted by the baby she gave up for adoption – a result perhaps of the influence of SJP, whose book club picks tend to be both populist and easy on the eye. So, ostensibly a far from exciting list. But at its best it also celebrates the sort of quietly observational, superficially traditional storytelling that has been passed over by critics and judges in recent years – yet which often deliver just as much satisfaction as the most extravagantly hyped new sensation. No doubt this is down to the much more consequential presence of Doyle, who excels at precisely this sort of book. Will one of these underrated writers triumph? My bet is that Szalay, Reva, Wood and Desai are placed to do well, with Szalay's authoritative, deceptively spare examination of male desire at this point, arguably, the leading contender. But with so many dark horses on the field, it's a wide-open race. The 2025 Booker longlist Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian) Forty years ago, Dawn, a white Trinidadian teenager, was forced by her family to give up her illegitimate daughter following a brief encounter during Carnival. Now a divorced GP living in London, she has never been able to escape the thought of what she has lost – when, out of the blue, a mysterious Italian woman gets in touch. This is a novel of quiet sadness, steeped in the grief of a life half-lived. Flesh by David Szalay (Hungarian-British) Jonathan Cape David Szalay leads the heavyweights on the list with this critically acclaimed exploration of the socioeconomic forces that shape a single life. A superb novel about sex, money and masculinity, it's the story of István, a teenage offender who moves from a Hungarian council estate to a position of extreme status and wealth – and back again. Universality is playful but modest: it's a literary striptease which comprises alternating chapters from various characters, all linked to an assault on a Yorkshire farm. A novel about the commodification of language and truth, in the age of the sound bite. The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian) 4th Estate It's third time lucky for Tash Aw, one of Malaysia's most venerated authors. He's longlisted once again, this time for a tender epic about a love affair between two boys in an unnamed Asian country. A novel of Proustian luminosity, it's the first in a quartet tracing the lives of a family against the fall-out of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Buckley is a virtuoso stylist, barely known in his native Britain. An elliptical work about memory and selfhood, and comprising mostly a series of fleeting encounters, One Boat centres on a woman retreating in the wake of her father's death – to the same Greek shoreline where she mourned her mother nine years previously. Flashlight by Susan Choi (American) Jonathan Cape In this sprawling, sometimes heavily political novel, a Korean academic disappears the night his daughter nearly drowns. Spanning four decades in one Korean family's history, the novel explores the idea of exile in both emotional and geopolitical forms. Our critic called it an 'engrossing' tale 'which delights in playing with the reader's expectations'. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian) Hamish Hamilton Desai has been working on her third novel ever since her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006. A busy, decades-spanning novel about love, family and solitude in a post-colonialist, globalised world, think of it as an Indian-style Romeo and Juliet (that runs up to 700 pages). A quintessential Booker novel. Audition by Katie Kitamura (American) Fern Press In a list short on technical daring, Kitamura's Audition stands out – it's a gnomic meditation on character and artifice which pivots on the familial tensions between a New York art critic, actor and their adopted son. Not everyone is a fan: among reviewers, Kitamura's tonally vacant prose and equivocal narrative approach have proven literary marmite. Wood is another welcome British surprise: a 44-year-old author from Stockport whose five lyrically tense novels have slipped under the radar – until now. Set in 1960s Lancashire, the pungently atmospheric Seascraper explores ideas of class, dreams and creativity through the unlikely friendship between a 20-year-old shrimp farmer and an American director, in town to shoot a film starring Henry Fonda. The Rest Of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits (American) An American road trip and a midlife crisis novel in one: The Rest of Our Lives follows Tom who, after dropping off his daughter at university, heads west instead of back home. Twelve years previously his wife had an affair, and while on the road, he reckons with this ongoing emotional fallout, problems at work and his place within our new modernity. It's an understated book which simultaneously seems to nod to all the great 20th-century American novels about the disillusionment of the white middle-class male. The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British) Sceptre Set during the freezing winter of 1962, this psychologically interior novel from a master of the form centres on two married couples – one living in a well-to-do doctor's residence, the other in a run-down nearby farm – who are forced to re-examine their lives when a blizzard cuts off their homes from the outside world. Endling by Maria Reva (Canadian-Ukranian) Virago This arresting debut, which features endangered snails and the mail-order bride trade among other eccentricities, is one of the liveliest and most original novels on the list. Three women make a journey across the Ukrainian countryside with a van of kidnapped bachelors in tow – then they're abruptly torpedoed by the Russian invasion. It's a bleakly comic novel about war – and a meta-fictional delight. Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American) Daunt Books Originals An Albanian interpreter based in Brooklyn throws her marriage into crisis when, faced with clients who include refugees, she finds herself unable to draw the line between professional conduct and emotional impulse. A rather earnest debut, about PTSD.
Newsroom
29-04-2025
- Business
- Newsroom
This major focus of the Canadian election is missing what could truly help workers
Analysis: Today is election day in Canada. The polls show Liberal Party leader Mark Carney with a narrow lead over Conservative Pierre Poilievre, as voters head to the booths. The major political parties have been pledging support for the manufacturing sector, but the country's working class is much broader than just manufacturing. Canadians are on edge because as many as 600,000 jobs are at stake due to tariffs levied by US President Donald Trump. But the focus on manufacturing obscures what truly ails the working class in an advanced economy like Canada's. Manufacturing's share of employment hovers at around 8.9 percent, while nearly 80 percent of Canadians work in the service sector. A recent report from the non-partisan Cardus think tank notes that Canada's working class today is 'likely to be a female, recently immigrated worker in the services-producing sector. The new working class, in other words, is now more personified by a Walmart cashier or an Amazon delivery driver than a General Motors factory worker or a Domtar mill hand.' Manufacturing gives way to services So why is there such emphasis on manufacturing? It's easy to understand. Manufacturing has been essential to industrialisation, from the British Empire to China's unprecedented growth in recent years. The late British-Hungarian economist Nicholas Kaldor argued that manufacturing is the engine of growth due to increasing returns to scale, strong links to other sectors and its role in technological development. But as countries become wealthier, an increased demand for services follows, creating jobs in that sector. Manufacturing sectors in wealthier countries tend to invest in labour-saving technologies. The US, for example, has seen manufacturing employment fall while output has increased. Labour-intensive sectors like clothing cannot compete with Bangladeshi wages, but discussions about manufacturing jobs in Canada and other advanced economies too often focus on wage competition instead of job losses through automation and increasing productivity. There were losers when the globalisation era began, but countries like Canada and the U.S. are wealthier today than they were in 1994, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed. As American economist Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, governments have failed to redistribute the wealth created by gains from trade to those at the bottom of the income scale. Four policies of a real working-class agenda There are several key policies that politicians should be proposing that would really help the working class. First is one that all politicians are talking about: building more housing. Second is related to key elements of social reproduction — that is, care work. There must be strong funding commitments to ensure a national childcare system functions properly. With Canada on track to experience a surge of its elderly population, long-term care also needs to be a focus. Personal support workers must earn a living wage and must have better working conditions. Canada's aging population is also why decreased immigration is a bad idea. The third policy requires the federal and provincial governments to get serious about active labour market policies. This means building a labour market training system that actually works, something Canada has lacked. These policies are generally not implemented in liberal market economies like Canada and the US. But in countries like Sweden with active labour market policies in place, 80 percent of the population has a favourable opinion of robots and AI compared to two-thirds of Americans who are concerned about technological job loss. The state's ability — or lack of it — to provide social protections and job re-training has real impacts on how people perceive technological change. Canada also needs to recognise foreign credentials. Its reluctance to do so has had a negative impact on the economic prospects of immigrants. Canada should also consider making higher education free. The fourth policy involves better worker protections that include a strengthened Employment Insurance that is easier to qualify for, improved protections for gig workers and increasing union membership. Apart from the public sector, Canadian unions have not fared well organizing in service industries. Unions need to make a serious effort to organize in retail, food service, the gig economy and logistics, despite the challenges. Canadian unions may find that they have little choice but to do so, as their presence in the private sector continues to decline. Inequality, wealth redistribution The most significant barrier of these four policy proposals is that most require an increased redistribution of wealth. Canada over the past several decades has retreated from wealth redistribution and as a result, economic inequality has surged. White blue-collar workers in the US in areas hit by factory job losses swung to Trump. A Canadian version of this is happening with some blue-collar unions endorsing the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre. Fixating on manufacturing is not a solution. After 2012, China began shedding manufacturing employment. Job demand in Chinese manufacturing today is in sectors that require skilled workers for software and AI systems. Services like retail, technology and transportation are also drawing in workers from manufacturing. Building infrastructure, green energy Not all blue-collar work will disappear. Canada needs labour to build not just homes, but high-speed rail. Active labour market policies will be key to ensuring manufacturing workers transition into building infrastructure and green energy. Canada can also remain competitive in areas like aluminum production . Policymakers need to understand our post-industrial moment, and focus on a just transition for manufacturing workers. Labour and progressive movements have long championed a just transition for fossil fuel workers. Like factory workers, fossil fuel workers have been courted by right-wing politicians who tell them environmental policies will destroy their jobs. At the same time, oil companies automate their jobs anyway. These policies are not easy to achieve, but there are few other options for Canada if it wants to be carbon-free, open to the world and more equal. Canada's economic nostalgia for manufacturing is ultimately strange given it's also a common talking point of Trump, a politician who's wildly unpopular in Canada. Gerard Di Trolio, PhD candidate, Labour Studies, McMaster University This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Telegraph
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Novelist David Szalay: ‘You can't write like Martin Amis any more'
It's not long before a conversation with David Szalay, the British-Hungarian novelist, veers onto the subject of sex. Specifically sex from a male perspective and, invariably, sex that by turns is adolescent, unthinking, prodigious, loving and rather dreary. Such are the encounters in which his male characters frequently indulge, in novels such as the 2016 Booker-shortlisted All That Man Is, and there are a fair amount of them in his new novel, Flesh. 'I always want to depict sex as honestly as I can, which is something you can't, for instance, do so well on Netflix, because on screen there is only so far you can go,' he says. 'Of course, men engaging in casual sex is no longer allowed to pass without comment. There's no longer that sense that boys will be boys. So I expect the main character in Flesh to draw quite a bit of disapproval.' I'm talking to Szalay in his Vienna apartment, where he lives with his second wife, a German-Hungarian academic, and their two-month-old son. Szalay, a genial 51-year-old, occupies an intriguing position as both a major British writer and one who stands apart from the British literary scene, having lived in Europe for nearly 15 years. He was born in Canada to a Canadian mother and a Hungarian father, but grew up in London and graduated from Oxford, moving to the Continent in 2010. A box containing several copies of Flesh arrives during our conversation and he hoicks it up the many flights of stairs in his apartment block with evident delight. A few minutes earlier, we had been talking about an exchange between two characters in a proof copy, which contained the words 'elemental masculinity' and which Szalay has cut from the final draft. He could scribble it back in, I suggest. 'Perhaps. But I think I cut it out because the line felt a bit too obvious.' It's tempting to regard Szalay's novels as some sort of disquisition on the state of modern man. The characters in the interlinked stories of All That Man Is – hormonal students, real-estate developers, suicidal Russian billionaires – are united by anxiety over their position in the world and by an overarching struggle for purpose. A similar desultory restlessness feeds into Flesh, which follows, in colourless prose, the life of a largely monosyllabic working-class Hungarian man, István, as he stumbles from a calamitous teenage affair and a stint in the army into a relationship with the wife of his wealthy employer, great money and power, and an ultimately mutually destructive relationship with his stepson. István, both fool and tragic hero, drifts through life rather than actively pursuing it, although such is Szalay's structural deftness that the novel's sly drip-feed of information forces us to reappraise repeatedly what we think of him. Often, it is left to the reader to decode the flattened surfaces and toneless dialogue. 'What happened?' asks István's mother, when he returns from a visit to the hospital. ''I told you,' he says. 'You punched a door?' 'Yes.' 'But why?' 'I don't know,' he says.' Szalay resists the idea that his novels present a thesis. 'I'm just reporting what I see in the world, which tends to include men who lack a clear sense of what they should be doing and why.' If it's an identity crisis, it's not, he argues, a new phenomenon. 'When I was writing Flesh, I'd been reading Lord Jim, by Conrad, which was published in 1900 and which is about the gulf that exists between images of masculinity that exist in the culture and the experience of men trying to live up to those images, and failing.' Yet, surely, thanks to successive waves of feminism, those experiences and our ideas of what constitutes masculinity are more in flux than ever? 'Yes, but some things remain the same. I think the idea of violence in men, for example, is innate. We have a post-MeToo world, but I find it hard to imagine a post-violence world. In fact, in that respect, the world is going in the opposite direction. The strong warrior male is becoming much more a feature of modern politics.' All the same, he thinks masculinity is risky territory for contemporary male novelists. The rules have changed, too, for novels that embody a certain machismo and swagger. 'You couldn't write like Martin Amis or Norman Mailer or Philip Roth now. But it's inevitable that our views of writers, thinkers and artists will shift and morph over time. Although there's a kind of absolutist fervour now about [our attitude to certain dead, male novelists]. I'm wary of making sweeping statements, but moral certainty is never a very healthy state of mind.' As a young man, Szalay dreamt of becoming a writer, but instead he drifted into a job in telesales, an environment he describes as 'a shabby, shitty British version of Glengarry Glen Ross'. 'There was a very macho thing about being the hunter, this idea that you eat what you kill, and a kind of contempt for people on salaries who got given food whatever they did at work,' he says. 'I was in my mid-20s and, for a while, I was seduced by the whole ethos. But after a while, I got very depressed by it. Writing a novel was my unlikely escape.' That novel, London and the South-East, which won the 2008 Betty Trask Prize, drew with a satirical sting on his telesales experience, and it was followed by the Cold War novel The Innocent, and 2011's Spring, which both dealt with the bleaker undercurrents within a romantic relationship. In 2013, he was named as a Granta best British novelist under 40. But it was the Booker nomination that changed everything. 'It made it possible to live and work as a writer,' he says, although he admits he can only afford to do this in Hungary (and now Austria), rather than Britain. 'The Booker is a precious thing.' Characters in his novels share the rootless quality of his own life (few writers capture the anonymous globalised textures of contemporary Europe better than Szalay). He thinks his peripatetic experience, which has included periods living in France and, as a child, in Lebanon, has affected his writing for the better. 'You can see the downsides of staying fixed in the same place on modern American writers, for instance – the Brooklyn novelist has become such a cliché. There is an almost indistinguishable pack of them.' Pressed to name names, he demurs. 'It's a general sense that there are lots of writers in Brooklyn turning out tonally similar material.' It's tempting to assume he means writers such as Ben Lerner and Elif Batuman, whose hyper-literate novels share an ironic, at times overwhelmingly self-aware playfulness. What about the British novel, is it similarly stuck? 'It's harder to define, isn't it? The first English novelist to win the Booker for some years [referring to Samantha Harvey, who won last year for Orbital ], and she set her novel in space!' Perhaps British novelists have become wary of saying anything definitive about Britain, as though nationhood has become a toxic subject? 'But you'd think this would be exactly the scenario that would be fertile ground. Although I can't write a British state-of-the-nation novel sitting in Vienna. That would be absurd.' He's bullish about the future of the novel, although he hopes that Flesh is optioned for the screen. The cultural dominance of Netflix is, he argues, good for writers. 'It forces you to constantly think about why you are writing a novel and not for a TV streamer. You have to make a much more conscious effort not to just describe a TV show in your head.'
