THIS MONTH’S SELECTIONS give the lie to the common complaint that fiction today from mainstream publishers is generic, unadventurous and formulaic. There is a lot of that stuff about, true, and it pays the bills — but they aren’t the only stories. Indeed, what’s most interesting is that in our increasingly fragmented media age, the stuff at the fringes stands as much of a chance of making it big as the fiction-by-numbers does. Is it always good? Well, one step at a time.
Take Max Porter. The former bookseller and editor in 2015 made a huge success of the most unexpected material: inspired by Emily Dickinson, Ted Hughes and his own idiosyncratic imagination, his debut Grief is the Thing with Feathers won all the awards going and continues to sell handsomely. His second novel Lanny (2019) blended English rural mythology with a missing-child page-turner.
His new novel (singer PJ Harvey says she was “changed” by it, but we’s vulnerable hero with ’s polyphonic style and brevity. But where was soft, is hard — a 16-year-old boy, troubled or troublesome depending on viewpoint, and he’s one of the kids at Last Chance, a special school currently facing closure.
