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That difficult first novel | Review | The Observer
There has never been a tougher time to be a debut novelist - only a tiny fraction receive six-figure advances, and most manuscripts end up in the shredder. So, what makes or breaks the first-timers? Kate Kellaway reports and talks to five who made it into print.

I must admit that this article from March is a very strange one. Lots of doom and gloom. And if you happen to be writing your ‘literary’ debut novel at the moment. I wouldn’t click on the link above.

It’s a shockingly elitist article focusing only on ‘literary’ debuts- which I often find are more style over substance and tend to bore me. Take for instance, Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (not a debut but definitely literary. I am going to finish it. I am. But it’s going to take some will power when there are more exciting novels out there to be read. And don’t get me started on The Dante Club.

So after this depressing state of publishing we are offered five people to feel sorry for. So we should run out and buy there books.

One is about a fashionable journalist in her thirties’s fall from grace - another is James, a first-year student at Cambridge, is overwhelmed by the thrill of opportunity and startled by his own hunger for friendship - then we have a sensuous generational novel about a Sikh mother whose secret past corrodes her life with tragic consequences for all - and a German patrol arrives in the valley, the purpose of their mission a mystery - finally, the break-up of a marriage and the effect this has on four children is told largely from the darkly humorous perspective of fifteen-year-old Ruth.

I had to get the plots of the novels from Amazon.co.uk as the article focuses on the personality of the writers - as if who the writers are is more important than the novels they are written.

None, from those brief glances, make me want to rush out and buy them (though a couple have raised an interest), and - as you can probably tell -I am not there main audience as I’m interested in the what is written rather than who it’s written by. Instead, they have to battle it out against established ‘names’ like Salmond Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Zadie Smith, who already have there ‘literary’ credits fully stamped up.

The thing about literary novels is that they often are treated as if they are somehow special and a cut above popularist fiction as they fall outside the genre classification and expectation/convention system. And in some ways they have to create a genre or a brand of their own. Beryl Bainbridge, Jerry Archer, Julian Barnes, Haruki Murakami, are established brands whose next novel already has an air of expectation.

Trying to put these debut writers on a pedestal, as Kate Kellaway does in this article, is unfair to them as it puts them not their work in the spotlight. I’d have much preferred to know more what they’d written and how it fits into what’s already out there. A few comparisons to established authors wouldn’t have gone a miss as it gives a more of  a reference point.

As it is this article, means I have to judge them from what I know about them, and if I like them for that or not.

Edit - I should have said that Owen Sheers is very much on the Radar as I’m reading Resistance, his debut novel. He is already an gaining his ‘literary stamps’ being an award winning poet of two collections (that I’ve read), and Welsh Book of the Year winner for his non-fiction book, The Dust Diaries (not read).