This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Thirty or even 40 years ago, as an apprentice scrivener on the margins of Grub Street, the Secret Author used to beguile his leisure with “surveys” — fat and (usually) academically-fathered conspectuses of the state of Eng. Lit.

The starting point was The Modern Age (1961), a fine old Leavisite endeavour that made up Volume 7 of the Pelican Guide to English Literature. From there one moved on to such ornaments of the craft as Lorna Sage’s Women in the House of Fiction (1992) and Malcolm Bradbury’s The Modern British Novel (1993).

Long after the primal urge had passed, there was still a certain amount of satisfaction to be had out of Richard Bradford’s combative The Novel Now (2006) and various writings by the Cambridge academics David James and Rod Mengham.

The value of these compendia was that they helped you to trend-spot, to identify “tendencies” in contemporary fiction that might help you to sound a bit more knowledgeable in some of your own critical manoeuvrings. Beneath their centralising lens, vast amounts of shattered stone soon reconfigured themselves into recognisable mosaics.

The ’50s stood revealed as the decade of the “Movement”, shading into the working-class novelists from north of the Trent. Come the ’60s the smart money was on “experimental” sandpit-scufflers (B.S. Johnson, Eva Figes, Alan Burns et al), before their rapid displacement by the phenomenon known as the “lady writer” (Murdoch, Byatt) and “state of the nation” merchants (Piers Paul Read, Margaret Drabble, etc).

Naturally, many of these demarcations were horribly artificial; hindsight tends to reveal much that was marginalised and overlooked to suit conventional tastes. Still, as the ’70s gave way to the ’80s, the baton continued to be passed on, from Martin Amis and his chums on the 1983 “Best of British Young Novelists” list (Barnes, Swift, Rushdie) to the debased entity known as “Mart’s Lads” (i.e., people who wrote like Martin Amis.)

All this led to a point in the late 1990s when informed judges started talking about the “Hornbyfication” of British men’s writing (as in Nick), and novels were suddenly full of newly sensitive blokes dredging up feelings for the benefit of sympathetic female companions.

What sort of trends can be detected in the contemporary British novel here in 2024? One piece of information to be borne in mind is that books with titles like “The British Novel in the Twenty-first Century” are in woefully short supply — nobody dares write them anymore.

The second is that the old-style mainstream that sustained so many publishers’ lists and so many book prize shortlists has more or less disappeared. The Booker rosters of the 1980s used to feature Kingsley Amis, Timothy Mo, Iris Murdoch and J.G. Ballard — writers the average middlebrow pundit had heard of and quite liked to read. This year’s list contained a solitary home-grown writer and three Americans, and it was of no interest to anybody beyond the specialised redoubts of the books pages.

How has this happened? On the one hand, fiction, like everything else in life, has become more diverse and identity-focused. Most modern novels, consequently, are pieces of reportage from communities and coigns of vantage way beyond the experience of the people reading them (not, it should immediately be said, a bad thing, otherwise which of us would ever have read The Grapes of Wrath?)

Alongside this development has marched the intellectualisation of the form observable in those London Review of Books critiques, in which the thought that a novel is there to entertain comes in second to its function as a kind of high-grade acrostic.

Trumping all this, though, is the general contempt in which middle-class life and middle-class values are held by most of the cultural arbiters who bring fiction to the marketplace.

By and large, and with due regard to all the other elements that add to its savour, the novel is essentially a bourgeois artform. There must be several million reasonably educated people in this country who would like to read a novel that said something to them about their lives and was not written by somebody previously known to them from the TV screen.

Will they get it from this year’s round of literary prizes, or the “literary novels” that a few optimistic publishers continue to bring out despite falling sales and general indifference? No, because such books are hedged round with a layer of snootiness designed to inform non-specialists that they can keep their distance.

All this is a terrible shame, for it diminishes both the publishing world and the vast untapped readership that seethes behind it. Which is to say that we need more novels of the kind that Kingsley Amis and Margaret Drabble wrote half a century ago — novels about modest bourgeois aspirations and sweet suburban dreams.

As to why we no longer get them, a cynic would probably take refuge in a pithy explanation recently offered by the Secret Author’s wife: “Publishing is crap.”