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Notes -
The Booker's had a string of weak winners since George Saunders' deserved win for Lincoln in the Bardo. The best of the stack is Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida but read it vs the last South Asian winner, Aravind Adiga's The White Tiger.
Karunatilaka:
Adiga:
(that thing is "Fuck!/Motherfucker!")
Adiga's a natural, Karunatilaka's a purply tryhard.
2019 was the most transparently political of all the recent transparently political awards. It was a double winner despite the rule against it, Margaret Atwood won (her writing is excellent, but it was for a Handmaiden's Tale sequel) and Bernadine Evaristo became the first black woman to win for Girl, Woman, Other. I'd rate GWO above most of the other recent winners but that's not really praise. The others all do this varying combination of purple prose, idiosyncratic writing, and "unconventional structure." They might not be consciously or even unconsciously trying to be Cormac McCarthy but there's a shitty sameness of what reads as McCarthy wannabe-ism from writers who don't understand the great works succeed in spite of such style because of masters who know when and how to break the rules.
Milkman
Jesus Christ, editor totally MIA.
The Promise
Shit editing again.
Prophet Song
Now Prophet Song, which maybe I should have started with because that's what you wrote about. There are weak Booker winners but the writers still show some skill. Burns and Galgut have chops they just had shitty editors. Prophet Song is the first Booker winner I've read I would call a bad book. I felt less disgust after finishing Hank Green's "I can do it too" YA trash than that shit. Lynch is a shitty writer, this is a particularly shitty piece of his overall shitty submission. I've read significantly better from anons on /lit/ and if someone posted this to a /wg/ thread they would have been mocked relentlessly for being so far up their own ass without even having something good to show for it. The book is poorly conceived, poorly written, and that's besides the terrible structure that should have magnified the shittiness to everyone judging but for some reason put it on track for the preeminent English literary award.
Coetzee's Booker-winning Life & Times of Michael K is unconventional structure, no chapters but three sections, set in South Africa during a civil war the novel implies the whites are losing. The book is rich with commentary, but being Coetzee who can actually write, it's usually subtle and beautifully so. There's an idea in this space; still set in Ireland, a revisiting of the Troubles where the racial line is Irish and not. A story of a person who keeps experiencing events and actions against them beyond their control. Proper punctuation and structure but like Coetzee with very long sections instead of chapters. But all of this would require an intelligence and thoughtfulness and above all skill in prose Lynch does not possess.
A woman won the second Booker, a Trinidad-born Indian Brit the third. This stuff is such a bummer, and it's also insulting because writing might be the purest meritocracy. If someone could write like Rushdie they could look like anything, be anything, believe anything, and they'd succeed, because his lower peers have for decades. Wherever there is a "lack of representation" it's because there's a lack of skill. You can take the angle of social and economic factors keeping that writing skill from being developed, but that's the only angle there is. If it's good enough, people will read it. Political awardings do nothing, they aren't incentivizing anyone to pick up the pen who wouldn't so they're not bringing anything new and good into the field, they're just making the brand worse and the field worse as they further encourage publishers to keep facilitating this bullshit.
Your excerpt from Lynch's novel is exactly what I imagined 🤦♀️ "Ochone, Eileen achusla, but isn't it the hard, dreary life you have and you trying to rear your seventeen ragged-arse children while your drunken husband is never home except to beat you and get you pregnant again in between spending the rent money in the pub, och ochone agus ullagón o!" Such a staple of the Irish novel as to become a parody of itself, and he's still using an updated version of it.
Trade union husband finding out that it's the left-wing element* he's served all his life turning Ireland into the authoritarian police state, but one where anyone can get gay married and sure don't we have abortion now (albeit it's in a limited way) and do you want to bring back the bad old days when the Church was in power, do you, Larry? while his middle class striving to be upper-middle class STEM professional wife working for one of the American pharma multinationals with a base here dreams of making it to the head office in California because that's where the action is, everyone knows that the real career advancement and power lies in America if you can get there and doesn't want to know anything about it, don't rock the boat Larry, we're never going to get a visa if you have a criminal record; everyone is happy with the new prosperous Ireland - if you are in the right place to avail of that prosperity - and of course we need to crack down on the ignorant lower class that is rioting in the streets - now that's a novel that would threaten his career.
But that's not a novel he's ever going to write.
*Or the version of it we have now; the Frank Cluskey type in the Labour Party is long gone and replaced by the champagne socialist element much more comfortable with social progressivism rather than the class struggle, and appealing to win the middle-class vote by promising more social liberal policies while the real working-class element is scooped up by Sinn Féin and the tiny splinter Marxist parties, such as our very own college-graduate Trotskyists.
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