Can a writer ever get out of the way? Norman Mailer, The Executioner’s Song and what happened after In Cold Blood

Truman Capote had a problem. He was too good a writer.

In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith. 

Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.

So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?

Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.

Can you trust Truman Capote? In Cold Blood, true crime and what happens when murder becomes literature

A little while ago, I asked a question that probably isn't advisable for somebody who spends quite a lot of time writing about other people.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.

Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the dangerous business of becoming somebody’s material

In the preface to Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion leaves us with a warning.

'Writers are always selling somebody out.'

It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.

The comeback of the literary antihero

There was a time when readers expected to admire the protagonist. We wanted courage, kindness and, if not perfection, then at least someone worth cheering on. Heroes made mistakes, but they usually found redemption. Justice, more often than not, prevailed.

Modern literary fiction has taken a rather different path.

Today, some of the most memorable novels are populated by characters who are selfish, manipulative, emotionally detached or quietly destructive. They lie. They disappoint us. Sometimes they commit terrible acts. More often than not, they simply refuse to become the people we hope they will be.

Are reading goals ruining the joy of reading?

Every January, the same ritual begins.

We all do it. Me included.

As readers, we set ambitious goals. Fifty books. One hundred books. One book a week. That's obviously nothing to some people who seem to announce they've read a dozen, if not twenty, books in a month.

I have no idea how they do that, but that's probably another post.

Some readers swear by colour-coded spreadsheets. Goodreads challenges are launched. Bookstagram fills with beautifully designed trackers, while BookTok celebrates another towering pile of finished novels.

On the surface, this seems like something to celebrate. After all, encouraging people to read more can only be a good thing.

But is it really?

The best books about the Falklands War: Three essential reads and the remarkable story behind Operation Corporate

England's recent World Cup meeting with Argentina has, perhaps inevitably, prompted renewed discussion about the Falklands War. Sporting rivalries rarely exist in isolation, and while football should never be conflated with conflict, moments like these often encourage people to revisit the history that continues to shape relations between the two nations.

More than forty years after the war, the Falklands campaign remains one of the most remarkable military operations of the twentieth century. Lasting just seventy-four days between April and June 1982, it saw Britain project military power halfway around the world to retake a remote British Overseas Territory after Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands on 2 April 1982.

Why do brilliant novels so often fail at the finish?

A disappointing ending to a novel you've been enjoying has a peculiar power over us. At least it does for me. 

You can spend days immersed in a novel, recommend it to friends before you've even finished it, and carry the characters around in your head. Then you reach the final chapter and something doesn't quite land. The ending feels rushed, overly clever, relentlessly bleak, or simply at odds with everything that came before.

It raises an uncomfortable question. Can a bad ending ruin a great novel? I'm asking as I have read a slew of novels recently where this has been the experience.

At what point did making books harder to read become a sign of literary quality?

Every so often I pick up a literary novel, settle into my favourite chair, turn the first page and immediately find myself playing a game of "who's actually speaking?"

There are no quotation marks. Dialogue drifts into narration. Characters merge together. Paragraphs stretch for pages with barely a full stop to catch your breath.

It isn't long before I'm no longer immersed in the story. Instead, I'm decoding it.

Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.

Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

Why Dune is still the greatest science fiction novel ever written

There are books you admire. There are books you enjoy. Then there are the handful that stay with you for the rest of your life.

Frank Herbert's Dune belongs firmly in that last category for me. I've lost count of how many times I've read it, and every return journey to Arrakis reveals something I missed before. It isn't simply one of my favourite science fiction novels. It is one of my favourite novels, full stop. There, I said it.

Beautiful sentences, difficult people: Can we separate a writer’s style from their reputation?

There are writers we admire without reservation. Then there are the others.

The writers whose sentences remain brilliant while their reputations grow increasingly uncomfortable. The writers whose private behaviour, political beliefs or public remarks alter the atmosphere around their books.

A novel or essay once encountered innocently can become harder to read after we learn more about the person who wrote it. The words have not changed, but the reader has.

Down a literary rabbit hole with Christopher Caudwell, Spain and the forgotten writers of the 1930s

Sometimes you pick up a book in a second-hand bookshop. You have never heard of the writer, but you like the cover, and that is all it takes to send you down a literary rabbit hole.

This is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago when I picked up three detective novels from the 1930s by Christopher St John Sprigg.

At first, Sprigg appears to belong comfortably to the world of Golden Age crime fiction. He wrote ingenious mysteries with titles such as Fatality in Fleet Street, The Perfect Alibi and Death of an Airman.

A hundred years of murder: reading Agatha Christie while writing crime

One hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published a novel that would change crime fiction.

First released in June 1926, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was only Christie’s third Hercule Poirot novel. In 2013, members of the Crime Writers’ Association voted it the CWA Best Ever Novel, placing it above books by Raymond Chandler, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers and other giants of the genre.

That is quite a legacy for one murder in a small English village.

The return of the difficult woman in fiction

“I am no bird; and no net ensnares me,” says Jane Eyre, and there is still something thrilling in the force of it. It is not merely a romantic declaration. It is a refusal to be made smaller, prettier or more convenient than the self demands. 

The difficult woman in fiction has many ancestors, and Jane is one of them. For a long time, women in fiction were allowed to be many things, provided they were legible.

Why we keep returning to campus novels

“A little learning is a dangerous thing,” wrote Alexander Pope, and campus novels have been proving him right ever since. Not because education itself is dangerous, although anyone who has sat through a three-hour seminar on structuralism may disagree, but because knowledge can become tangled with vanity, desire and the desperate wish to be exceptional.

Campus novels are rarely about education.

This is odd, given the setting. There are lectures, libraries, tutorials, essays, departmental politics and people quoting dead Europeans with the confidence of those who have not yet had to assemble flat-pack furniture. But the real subject of the campus novel is almost never the syllabus. It is a desire. Reinvention. Exclusion. Ambition. The intoxicating belief that a life can be remade by proximity to books, clever people and old buildings.

Is the literary internet making us better readers?

“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, which is a useful thing to remember in an age when reading can so easily become a performance metric. To read well is not simply to consume a book. It is to meet it, resist it, misunderstand it for a while, and perhaps find that it has been quietly rearranging the furniture in your mind.

There was once a pleasing simplicity to being a reader. You read a book. You liked it, hated it, abandoned it on page 47, pressed it upon a friend, or left it to gather dust with the quiet moral authority of something you still intended to finish.

Why the shrinking sentence might tell us more than we think

Every so often, someone announces that the novel is in decline. Usually, this is followed by a familiar roll call of suspects: phones, streaming, BookTok, schools, short attention spans, modern life, the algorithm, and the general moral decay of people who do not own enough bookmarks.

This time, though, the anxiety has a number attached.

A recent Economist piece argued that it is not only that people are reading less, but that “the texture of what is being read is changing,” noting that its analysis of hundreds of New York Times bestsellers found that sentences in popular books have become almost a third shorter since the 1930s.

When a book becomes too heavy to hold: Reading A Little Life

Some books draw us in gently. Others demand something from us. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is a novel that does both. 

It's a book, which, for me, was packed with such overbearing emotional weight, emotion so densely packed like bodies pressed together on the tube, that it is a challenging read.

The comfort of unlikeable characters and why we do not need to like who we read about

There is a particular kind of discomfort that comes from spending time with characters you do not especially like. They make poor decisions. They frustrate. They resist redemption. They say the wrong thing, choose the wrong person, protect themselves when they should reach out, or pursue what they want with a moral flexibility that makes you shift slightly in your seat.

And yet, more often than we might admit, they are the ones who linger. I can think of so many books that are true of this, and we always reach for them.