I think the spirit of this writing got inside them as they read and soon their own thoughts were infused with it, so that their internal monologues took on the rhythms and diction and authorial attitudes of William Faulkner. From this they came to believe themselves worthy of the great endeavour, to write at the William Faulkner level, because, simply in thinking their private thoughts, they already were writing like William Faulkner. Bits of their experience already were being milled into Faulknerian sentences, with which they would sometimes narrate their lives to themselves more generally, in paragraphs.

I was not in their heads and so I can’t absolutely confirm that this is how Cormac McCarthy and Don Delillo came to want to write their great novels, but both of them began to write seriously very soon after they began to read seriously, which suggests I’m onto something. And anyway, I was in my own head when the thing I describe happened to me. Like them, I read very little as a boy. I was physically restless and mentally scrambled, and also the third of six loud children born in an eight-year span to my poor mother. I lacked the cognitive and bodily inclination to read for pleasure, as well as a quiet place where I might try it, until I was done with college.

Or almost done. I was in my final term, student-teaching at a rural high school in Michigan, bored on a warm Sunday in a tiny village roughly 80 miles from both my home town and my college town, when I cracked open my gigantic literature anthology and began to read a short novel wedged, somehow in its entirety, amid the hundreds of poems and stories also gathered into the fat book. Yes, I was an English teacher at that country school, and an English major at my undistinguished university, and I’d liked the fiction I read for my classes, but not enough to read the stuff in my free time — until I opened my Anthology of American Literature, randomly as I remember, at the first page of Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth.

Unlike the novels of Faulkner, McCarthy, and Delillo, Roth’s fiction is not distinguished by self-consciously daring and luxuriant prose. What Goodbye, Columbus offered instead, to a reader like me, was voice, attitude, the funny and haughty and brainy commentary of its young narrator, Neil Klugman. Before I had even finished this little novel, my thoughts were taking a Neil Klugman or Philip Roth sort of form. I was describing things as they might. Of course I desired Brenda Patimkin right away. I also started wishing I was Jewish. And, almost immediately, I started wanting this new activity I was performing in my head, this mental making of Rothian sentences, to define me in some larger sense. I thought it should. From what I could tell I was really good at it. Reading Philip Roth I thought, I can do that.

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In other words, before I’d even finished the first “literary” novel I’d ever found myself reading merely because I liked it, I started thinking I could be a novelist. I don’t relate this to compare myself with McCarthy and DeLillo, but rather to illustrate how far down the ladder of literary talent this tendency can be found. I suspect that, for certain readers, perhaps especially reluctant or belated ones, the thrill of discovering a love of serious and stylish fiction translates very quickly into a sort of literary will to power.

It might be by accident or obligation that the type of person I speak of becomes a reader, opening a book because there’s simply nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, or dutifully doing the reading for a university course, but then continuing as an avid reader because reading now fuels his uplifting hubris about writing, because that one book he stumbled on got the stylish sentences going in his head. This sent him after other books that might do the same thing.

You’ll notice that I dropped the coy neutrality and started using masculine pronouns just then. The particular reader-writer, the “type of person” I’m referring to in all this, is a male type of person. I’m dealing in gender stereotypes here. This is a risky and suspicious activity, I know, but these stereotypes are so consistently affirmed in both my reading and my personal experience that I feel I can use them as a sort of crude literary sociology. And these stereotypes are consistent with a phenomenon that comes up a lot when people talk about literature and publishing, the fact that men read very little fiction anymore, and, when it comes to the publishing category called “literary fiction”, they read almost none. Some gloomy ironies attend this fact, which I’ll go into below.

In my gender stereotypology, the woman fiction writer has been reading her whole life. She read easily and prodigiously as a girl, consuming and then producing stories that grew in sophistication as she herself grew older. Thanks to her fast and effortless reading, she developed a capacious feel for the arc of character, the full span of narrative time, the novel as a single experience, a single order. Her mature writing serves these broader elements. It is thus less showy than that of her male counterparts, more story- than style-oriented. By contrast the male reader-writer in my scheme came to reading as McCarthy and Delillo did, fairly late, perhaps after finding reading unpleasant or difficult when he tried it as a boy. His reading, when it did begin in earnest, was spurred by encounters with novels written in daring or quirky prose or bearing some other bold stylistic signature.

This style aspect is key. The male reader-writer in my stereotype understands writing, when done by the masters he admires, as a sort of exalted mischief — like the laddish riffing of Martin Amis and that early Philip Roth, or Delillo’s droll tabulating, his deadpan dropping of synecdochal nouns, an uncanny comic method whose influence is obvious and everywhere among lesser (male) writers. Perhaps consciously but at least subconsciously, our reader-writer pursues his own fiction writing as masculine self-assertion, and also — in rough consonance with Harold Bloom’s famous theory — as a quest to commit a few Oedipal murders, to transcend and thus kill his literary influences with an even more daring, more excellent, more distinctive style.

There are of course exceptions to these gender stereotypes in current fiction. For example the best, most intoxicating novel I read in the last year was Lauren Groff’s Matrix, which — with its supersaturated prose and Bunyanesque heroine, a polymathic giantess who rules a surprisingly sexy medieval convent — calls to mind male novelists like David Foster Wallace and John Barth more than any prominent female novelist I can think of. By contrast, Jonathan Franzen’s intricate, stylistically modest family sagas code as fairly female in my scheme.

Still, despite their imprecision and offensiveness, these stereotypes have real descriptive value. Indeed, much feminist criticism of toxic and laughable masculinity in the worlds of writing and publishing seems to assume some version of them. The partly justified, often philistine, and increasingly pointless mockery of male literary striving that became popular in the 2010s — exemplified by the “Guy in Your MFA Program” Twitter account and subsequent book, and their many imitators — leans on and propagates categories that resemble mine, even as its adherents would surely repudiate my gender stereotyping on grounds that it’s gender stereotyping.

But I’m less concerned with the exalted strata inhabited by Lauren Groff and Jonathan Franzen, who don’t have elderly neighbours and helpful loved-ones suggesting that they “self-publish”, than with the lower levels where most male reader-writers read and write. Shouldn’t the final collapse of literary reading among other men be something of a bummer to them? Shouldn’t the idea that their potential audience has largely disappeared kill their desire to keep writing?

In these times of hegemonic psychotherapy, many educators and functionaries would answer “No! Of course not!” Writing is fundamentally a mode of self-expression, they believe. It should be an end in itself, its own reward. Teachers of writing, at every level from primary schools to MFA programs, often base their writing pedagogy on this assumption, implying or even stating that the point or goal of writing is “finding your voice”, which means that a writing effort could be considered successful if it resulted in this bit of therapeutic self-discovery and nothing else. But the male reader-writer wants something very different from this. He’s on a quest to kill his Oedipal fathers. He writes because he thinks he is, or might be, uniquely excellent at writing. His standard for success in a writing effort is having it read by people who agree that it and he are excellent. For him the truly therapeutic outcome is not him finding his voice but other people finding his voice, and then declaring in newspapers and magazines and end-of-year award ceremonies that it is the best voice.

But in order to do that he has to get published, and in order to get published he needs a publisher to believe he might have an audience. It’s true that, while male fiction readers rarely read female authors, women fiction readers often read male authors. So he has that going for him. Still, if our reader-writer is writing as a mode of masculine self-assertion, publishers are going to expect his audience to skew male. He surely wants women readers, but his paradigmatic reader is another man, if that man can be assumed to exist — and on this point the numbers are extremely discouraging. A statistic much-repeated is that women buy 80% of published fiction and men only 20%. And it is largely agreed-upon in the publishing world that the imbalance is even greater, perhaps much greater, when it comes to literary fiction — as opposed to other fiction genres such as fantasy, science fiction, and especially spy novels and military thrillers, which sunburnt men in Bermuda shorts can often be seen reading on airplanes.

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This is obviously a problem for publishers, who want all the genders shelling out for their books, but for some commentators it represents — as either symptom or cause — a moral problem. In two recent articles, male commentators agonise over the lack of literary reading by their fellow men. Writing in GQ, Jason Diamond confides that reading quality fiction made him a better person. He believes it might help other men gain “a better understanding of what drives… people to do terrible things” — the implication being that men who don’t read novels are perhaps at greater risk of doing terrible things themselves. In the Daily Beast, Jeff Hoffman offers a nearly identical lesson about men being at moral risk because they don’t read award-eligible fiction. Hoffman points to various small-n, non-randomised studies that claim to find an empathy boost from reading novels, especially for teen boys. The fake science is a minor problem, though. The more basic problem is that, for boys and men looking to enjoy and not just endure their lives, this eat-your-vegetables case for reading literature is more likely to stigmatise than encourage it. Of course, it’s easy for me to criticise such earnest wrestling with the issue, instead of offering my own suggestions. Then again, I’m not convinced it is an issue, and, anyway, I suspect my own case for reading good fiction — it gets the stylish sentences going in your head — has limited resonance in the larger world of men.

As to the supposed moral problems, I haven’t noticed any among men I know, but the statistics about women and men and literary reading are corroborated in my experience, and with almost total fidelity. Most women I know who went to university and maintain some cultural interests — women who see serious movies occasionally, who like the idea of museums and sometimes visit them, who are willing to converse about decent TV shows as a way to survive a dinner party — read at least a few literary novels a year. But, most of the men I know — men from my local parenting and social worlds, who have university degrees and respectable taste in television — read virtually no literary fiction, though some read sci-fi or detective novels. When my kids were little I met a fellow dad who told me (probably because I’d gone on at tedious length about the novel I was writing) that he had just finished reading a well-regarded recent novel. I thought, “Finally, a dad I can talk fiction with.” It wasn’t until several years later that he and I finally sat down for a cup of coffee. I started talking about contemporary fiction, assuming he was keeping up with literary things like I was, but it turned out that the novel he mentioned when we first met was the last one he’d read.

Conversely, when I do meet a man who’s an active reader of serious fiction, our conversation usually travels a familiar path. I learn that we like the same edgy, stylistically daring types of fiction, and that we’ve read many of the same recent novels. Sometimes the overlap in our reading seems quite improbable, given how little-known and low-selling these novels can be. A couple years ago a man I didn’t know mentioned to the group of people we were in that he was a huge fan of the Irish writer Kevin Barry. I’d just finished reading Barry’s brilliant, edgy, stylistically daring novel The City of Bohane. It was my new favourite novel! What a coincidence! But then, well, to make a long story short, this other Kevin Barry fan and I were eventually exchanging manuscripts, each of us reading the novel the other was currently “working on”. That’s right, we were both fiction writers, of the unpublished variety.

Further, on the rare occasion when I meet another man with a serious interest in literary fiction, I typically learn that he and I like many of the same edgy, stylistically daring writers, and, with absolutely zero surprise, I also learn he’s not just a reader. He’s a reader-writer. Like me he has at least one unfinished novel on his laptop. The identification I experience in these moments has become a little deflating, I have to admit, unflattering for both of us. Ruefully I consider this other reader-writer and think, “You too.” Even more ruefully, I think of the absurd ouroboros of literary creation and consumption that we reading-writing men make up — reader-writers writing for the small population of other readers who also write. The intimations of cultural glory I once felt while reading my literary heroes and thinking “I can do that” would have been much less seductive had I known my potential audience was, basically, me.

I felt this gloomy identification while reading those two earnest articles on the crisis of non-reading men that I cite above. I was mildly depressed but entirely unsurprised when, in each article, the author lets on that he, alongside his admirable, gender-atypical reading of literary fiction, is also a writer of it. “You too,” I thought, ungenerously. Still, I should give these articles a little credit. They don’t seem to realise it, but both authors have revealed the one reliable method for solving the urgent problem they’ve identified, the one proven way to create the empathic, evolved, morally enlightened type of man who reads literary fiction — convince him to become the grasping, vainglorious, most likely deluded type of man who writes it.

Take Roberto Bolaño. When he first appeared on the American scene in 2003 with the English translation of By Night in Chile, he was hailed by Susan Sontag as a major voice of Latin American literature. But it wasn’t until the posthumous publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007 that he became a household name among the smart set. That novel, a towering work of literary virtuosity, would go on to be a national bestseller. Bolaño, who’d died in 2004 at the age of 50 from complications due to a liver condition, became that rarest of breeds — the writer who goes by a single name.

In 2008, his short stories began to appear in The New Yorker, and the same year saw the English translation of Bolaño’s masterpiece, the 900-page 2666, completing the cycle of his major works. But the publishing world was hungry for new Bolaño, whether he was around to write it or not. More than fifteen books have been published since 2666, the most recent in February 2021. Just when you think the last novella or half-finished short story collection has been unearthed from his hard drive, another one is announced. Like Charles Bukowski, Bolaño has found a fame in death he would’ve scoffed at during his life, which he spent as a struggling poet in Chile, Mexico and Spain.

Bolaño is worthy of his place in the canon, but he would’ve had a harder time earning it had he been an American. For the US literary establishment, Bolaño’s foreignness was central to his appeal. At a time when the literary Jonathans — Franzen and Safran Foer — and what remained of the old white males reigned supreme, here was a dead Chilean poet whose seedy, often macho stories of Latin American depravity offered white liberal readers a chance to wallow in grit and grime.

Wokeness wasn’t yet a factor then, but the winds were blowing in that direction. Bolaño offered an outlet for New Yorker readers who wanted some of the “toxic masculinity” — sex, violence, and machismo — that they’d previously gotten from the likes of Roth and Mailer. Bolaño, a foreign noble savage, was the perfect guy for the role.

Bolaño’s stature has only grown over the past 20 years, even as the literary world became increasingly feminised; both readers and editors are now mostly women. It’s a trend that’s been picked up on, and even lamented, by the Times, the TLS, and the Observer. It’s almost impossible to find debut novels by American men, and especially white men, about the plight of heterosexual males.

With foreign writers, it’s a different story. Like Bolaño, the French novelist Michel Houellebecq and his Norwegian contemporary Karl Ove Knausgård, have epitomised the rise of the literary noble savage. These two have built careers on “problematic” subject matter that would get an American-born writer cancelled. Why are imports allowed to thrive?

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A European like Knausgård, perhaps the whitest man in existence, can still be embraced by the publishing industry. His autobiographical My Struggle novels, which chronicle his everyday life in tedious and often brilliant detail, are almost pathologically self-indulgent. They are also, to put it lightly, controversial. The narrator, a Knausgård stand-in named Karl Ove Knausgård, rants against political correctness and feminist parenting, describes his attraction to his students while teaching at a high school, relates his anger at being falsely accused of rape, and, in general, details his sexual proclivities and hang-ups in all their quotidian repulsiveness.

But one gets the sense that the books are popular among elites not in spite, but because of the way they muck around in male sexuality. Take one look at the grizzled and handsome Knausgård and it’s obvious that there is a psychosexual element at play here. Wokeness requires a degree of repression, which in turn necessitates an outlet for release. The sexual itch must be scratched in a non-problematic manner, and since the noble savages are foreign curiosities who can’t be expected to internalise the progressive ways of America, they get a free pass. The elite reader can be titillated by Knausgård’s grubby masculinity while keeping his or her conscience clean.

The American male novelist, by contrast, is despised not for his toxic masculinity but because he ought to know better. Unlike the noble savage, the American male is expected to understand what is and isn’t problematic — he went to college, after all. For him, masculinity is something to be condemned and renounced. The embodiment of this emasculated ideal is Ben Lerner, a master of self-flagellation whose 2019 novel The Topeka School “decodes white male rage”. Pull up any picture of Lerner and he looks just about ready to weep.

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American men who deviate from the Lerner school are treated like Callan Wink, whose debut, August, a coming-of-age novel set in Montana and Michigan was panned in the New York Times in no small part due to its flirtations with masculine bravado. “Despite his abundance of literary talent,” the reviewer teases, “we’ll be sure not to mistake [Wink] for some effete literary type.” The reviewer’s problem, of course, is that Wink, who lives in Montana and writes about Western men, is far too close to the American savages of old. Wink graduated from an MFA program and has published stories in The New Yorker. That means he got the memo, which makes his defiance unforgivable.

The case of Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz is another cautionary tale: this time about what happens to writers who make the leap from noble savage to upstanding member of the American literati. Diaz, who was born in the Dominican Republic, became a celebrity in 1996 with the publication of Drown, a short story collection documenting the gritty island life of his homeland. But as his fame grew, and especially after he won the Pulitzer for The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, something funny happened: he was civilised. He landed a teaching gig at MIT, and even if he still spat out his patented Dominican slang at readings, it was clear that he’d been domesticated. Diaz was an American writer.

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But with Americanisation comes cancellation. In 2018, Diaz became the subject of a #MeToo campaign, led by former students and writers whom he had mentored. He was accused of overstepping boundaries, pushing himself on female writers and getting handsy. Blinded by the awards and the fawning press, Diaz failed to realise that the sort of behaviour that was indulged in a Dominican was off-limits for a Yank.

Bolaño is still pumping out books nearly two decades after his death, but many a noble savage has joined him in recent years, including his countryman Alejandro Zambra and the Argentinian César Aira. And they just keep coming. The latest in the genre, The Women I Love, by the Italian Francesco Pacifico, came out in December, and is described by the publisher as “a provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity”. That’s publicity speak for: a noble savage Italian dude fucks around for 300 pages, magnificently unafraid of committing a microaggression.

For American novelists, the news is bleak but not hopeless. You may need to neuter your writing. You may need to show exquisite sensitivity to the ever-shifting rules around race and gender. You may need to conduct your personal life with the utmost progressive decorum. But if you change your name and flee the country, you can write whatever you want.

Written as the author was turning 50, Experience felt like a book that it would be important for Amis to have written. He described his relationship with his father, Kingsley Amis, in hilarious and often moving detail. He also described his “missing”, including his cousin Lucy Partington who disappeared in the 1970s and whose body turned up two decades later beneath the house of Fred and Rosemary West.

It had been expected that Experience would unblock something in Amis. His style in fiction and criticism had always been notoriously tinder-dry, as though the novelist could not trust himself to break a smile or laugh in public. In his memoir he trusted himself — and trusted the reader enough — to do this among other things he had not previously done. He was willing to recount details with slapstick humour, such as escorting his father from the pub, so that the reader could burst into generous, unadulterated laughter.

And he opened his heart in a way that was not just surprising but perhaps needed. In Experience he described the emotion that he felt surge through the attendees at the funeral of his cousin. It felt as though for the first time on the page Amis had trusted his readers, and so had given them a glimpse into places that he had spent decades guarding.

But a protective-layer still remained. At this time I shared an American publisher with Amis, and we did the same publicity rounds after each other. I remember a photographer who had done a session with Amis just before me recounting a detail I always found telling. However hard the photographer tried and however much he insisted, he said he could not get Amis to stare straight into the camera. Repeatedly the novelist would make sure that even when he was staring head-on, his pupils would catch just to the side of the lens. It was telling because it spoke to an element that existed in his fiction: Amis had spent years making sure that his readers could never stare — never see — straight into him. Even when they imagined they were doing so he would in fact be slightly evading them.

Twenty years later he has done it again. Inside Story self-describes as a novel, though it is no such thing and after the briefest early protestations never again really tries to be. The result of an earlier false start, it is in fact a follow-up volume to Experience, with all the earlier book’s virtues and occasional flaws.

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Perhaps the flaws can be got out of the way first of all. They are of one piece, which is that Inside Story is too long, digressive and takes on too much. Several books lie within. At first it seems to be a memoir of the novelist’s intellectual and emotional engagements over the last two decades. Then a set of accounts of his friendships with Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens take over. Slightly strangely, as Amis writes the late lives and final years of both these men his father’s great friend Philip Larkin gets caught up in the narrative and ends up coming along with the accounts of these other two writers’ final years.

This is slightly strange because Amis has written about Larkin in the past (not least his 1992 essay “Don Juan in Hull”) in a way that could not be improved upon. But there appear two reasons why Larkin intrudes here. The first is an ex-girlfriend of Amis’s who interrupts his fifties — piling turmoil on turmoil — by claiming that Amis is actually the product of a fling between Larkin and Amis’s mother. That claim turns out to be bunk. But the real reason why Larkin intrudes appears to be that he is the poet of decline and death who Amis most carries with him. So as the years creep up on him and various ailments, including the loss of loved ones, come along, so Larkin is the lens through which Amis sees life as well, inevitably, as death.

There is one other component of Inside Story, which is that Amis intermittently takes time out to provide short lessons, of a few pages each, on how to write. As with the best of Amis’s criticism, this is witty, truthful, even practical stuff. And although it may be presumptuous for a critic to return the favour to Amis, there is one tick he has which should not be copied. This is his decision (first rolled-out in Experience) to append footnotes to his text so that each page has one, sometimes more, notes on things that Amis has written in his main text.

These footnotes are salient, often enlightening, digressions on themes (including the Holocaust and Stalinism) that preoccupy Amis. But they interrupt the flow of the narrative even more than the main narrative already interrupts itself. To relay a lesson in turn, I was always taught that you should never even use parentheses unless you absolutely have to, for if there is a detail not worthy of being carried in the main body of the sentence then you should think again over whether it is needed at all. In the far more serious case of Amis’s footnotes the reader might wish that Amis had decided that those things not worth including in the main flow of the page should not be smuggled in on the page’s bottom.

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But this is a quibble. The main purpose, and worth, of Inside Story is not just that it appears to be a signing off by one of the most significant figures in modern English fiction. It is that it constitutes his last reflections on three (or arguably four) of the men who formed his literary and other character. The description of Bellow’s decline into forgetfulness is memorable and moving. But as the picture on the dust jacket suggests, it is the description of Hitchens and his more untimely death that will attract many readers.

Detractors of Amis and his circle often remarked on the insular nature of the coterie, and there is something in that. Whenever a new novel by Salman, Martin or any of the others came out it would always be generously noticed by Hitchens, who in turn would have his non-fiction referred to by the others. Outsiders tend to hate this sort of chumocracy, but as Amis shows here the fact could not be helped. Along with James Fenton and others, the Hitchens-Amis circle educated and informed each other. And as the dominant non-fiction writer in the group, it was the force of Hitchens’ political polemic that forced the others into positions and stances they might not otherwise have taken. So much so that when they disagreed (as Hitchens and Amis did very publicly over the latter’s Koba the Dread [2002]) it was noteworthy, even newsworthy.

In death as in life, Hitchens figures large in Amis’s imagination, the formation of his views and the ideas towards which he gravitates. His descriptions of moments in their decades of friendship are almost alarmingly intimate, and those of Hitchens’ last days are hard to read. It seems churlish to claim of a book so personal and self-intrusive that the author holds anything back. And yet he does, in a manner similar to the way in Hitchens himself drew back at moments of his own memoir Hitch-22 [2010]. In this Hitchens interrupts an account of perhaps the most devastating moment in his life to write “A coda on self-slaughter”. Elsewhere, as in his accounts of the Iraq War he evades the obvious question and slips off onto a different matter.

In Inside Story Amis does something similar, interrupting accounts of the demise and loss of the people most close to him, he will suddenly step away and either survey a different scene, reflect on a literary text he feels is related to it or go into a colloquy related to the writer’s art. Perhaps Amis is acting on one of the first lessons for any writer — “show, don’t tell”. Perhaps the problem is that he remains a novelist and is never willing to fully take on the exposure that comes from being a wholly trusted, first-person narrator.

Although there are fairly lengthy recreations of the conversations the two friends had, somehow Amis misses ever saying what it was that made Hitchens the extraordinary person, even force, that he was. What, in the end, was Amis’s understanding of what made his friend, how he changed (if he changed) and what his meteoric impact was all about? Just during the time I knew Hitchens — which was only for a decade — he rocketed from being a famous figure in the literary world to someone you couldn’t walk down a street with, or dine with, without pedestrians and waiters coming over to express some serious admiration. What made him become this, what was he searching for and did he find what he wanted? As before with Amis, you hold out the hope that he is going to look right at the thing.

After Hitchens’ death Amis wrote a piece about him that consisted of a set of anecdotes. Then, as here, Amis (who is better placed than anyone) strangely fails to explain or demonstrate what it was about Hitchens that made an increasing number of people seek him out. Indeed he doesn’t even quite capture what it was about Hitchens that was capable of setting not just the table, but whole arenas, in a roar.

Once again he evades the gaze just slightly, looking off fractionally to the side, hoping not to be caught. But if you are not going to capture yourself and others, and be able to be caught by others, fully and finally in a memoir like this — even while packaged as a novel — then what later opportunity can Amis possibly be waiting for?

Why does he, and it, need defending? Well, with entire academic disciplines dedicated to damnation of dead white males, Tolkien, who is one, is accused of all the ‘isms’. But leaving aside this tedious bigoteering, is there anything in Tolkien’s work – as he meant it – that is genuinely objectionable?

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The key charge is that Tolkien is a reactionary – because the Lord of the Rings revolves around a war to preserve a pre-industrial, pseudo-medieval, aristocratic ‘golden age’:

“Some… have accused Tolkien himself of implicit fascism because the story ends with everyone going back home and order being restored.”

Williams rightly points out just how wrong this interpretation is:

“…the story repeatedly reminds us that all this is taking place in a post-heroic age: the great days of elves and humans are over, and the elves are on their way across the sea, never to return. For all the triumph of the king’s return, some things can never be restored. Straightforward fortissimo heroics are rare and often ineffectual.”

As Galadriel (one of the supposedly absent strong female characters of Middle Earth) says at a pivotal moment in the story “I shall diminish and go into the west.” Superficially, this refers to the ‘Undying Lands’ that lie across the sea from Middle Earth – a last refuge for the Elves and, in time, other heroes of the story. But they weren’t off to found a brash New World. The west is where the sun sets, and Tolkien, who would have understood the symbolism through-and-through, was writing about the passing of an old order.

Far from holding on to the past, the conclusion to the Rings trilogy is about sorrowfully, respectfully, graciously letting it go. This is a conservative, not reactionary, sentiment – and quite unrecognisable to the arid mind of the liberal rationalist.

Not that Tolkien was uncritical of the old order. Time and again his plots turn upon its weakness and corruption – the enemy within, as much the enemy without.

It’s this understanding of mortal imperfection that lays the foundation for what the Lord of the Rings is really about:

“The work is ultimately a fiction about how desire for power – the kind of power that will make us safe, reverse injustices and avenge defeats – is a dream that can devour even the most decent.”

The theme is, of course, embodied in the object of the One Ring. At key points throughout the narrative, the heroes and villains of the story find themselves tempted by the Ring’s promise of absolute power – and much depends on how they respond.

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It’s interesting that some of Tolkien’s earliest fans were the hippies of late 60s and early 70s. Their enthusiasm came as quite a surprise to the crusty old professor, but there is in fact a place where the borders of traditional conservatism meet those of the pacificist, anarchical Left – because both share a distrust of over-centralised, overbearing power.

But perhaps that’s also why other elements of the Left dislike Tolkien. At key points in its history, when it could have embraced its anti-authoritarian, decentralising tendencies, the Left has gone the other way – replacing the hierarchies of the old order with an equally hierarchical new order. Whether it was the ‘democratic centralism’ of the communists, the well-meaning bureaucracy of the social democrats, or the foreign interventionism of the Blairites, the Left in power has always taken up the Ring… and tried it on for size.

But, then, the literary world doesn’t linger long. Rarely does it even allow itself a look in the rear-view mirror, to work out what an author has been trying to do. Not just asking questions such as whether this book is better than the last, or which are the duds, but more probing ones about the author’s vision and purpose.

What is the truth that he or she is trying to get to? Is it a local truth: one that might be recognised only by those people who share the particular experiences, sympathies or vantage point of the author? Or is the author getting at some universal truth, where the specific circumstances of the characters or plot are standing in for something far greater than they themselves represent?

I think six novels in is a good vantage point from which to survey any novelist’s output. And last year, one of Britain’s most acclaimed novelists, Alan Hollinghurst, published his sixth, The Sparsholt Affair. Now in his mid-sixties, Hollinghurst has produced a slow but regular stream of work, averaging a book every six years since he published his debut, The Swimming Pool Library, in the 1980s. Now, three decades later it is possible for us to take that step back, have a look at his career, and see what he has thus far achieved. It is certainly not what might have been have expected at the outset.

Britain came slightly late to the gay fiction party. America got there first, of course. Yet until Edmund White and Andrew Holleran got going, even in America the diet had been predictable and consistent, mainly consisting of slimly disguised autobiography churning around the theme of the doomed homosexual. What set that mould in place is up for debate. Thomas Mann is an obvious suspect. A simpler answer might be ‘the law’.

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By the time the great American author James Baldwin published Giovanni’s Room (1956), the life of the fateful, soon-to-die homosexual had become a fictional sub-genre. Even a writer with the courage of Christopher Isherwood had trouble breaking it. Though A Single Man (1964) may have been fairly open for its time about the nature of the protagonist’s sexuality, the title character’s same-sex lover is dead from the start. It was still as though the only alibi any author could possibly offer for writing about gay love was to say that at least their characters would never be happy, and would most likely die soon anyway.

It took Holleran’s heady novel of gay New York, Dancer from the Dance (1978), and White’s first coming-out novel, A Boy’s Own Story (1982), for gay fiction to smash the literary stereotype. Holleran depicted an intoxicating and ecstatic world of unapologetic sex in the bath-houses and cruising areas of New York just before AIDS ransacked that landscape. White, meanwhile, broke through with his story of an ordinary young man’s coming out, something that created a branch of literature which every gay man and woman could relate to, and most for a time seemed intent on adding to.

When the The Swimming Pool Library was published in 1988, Alan Hollinghurst received praise from these forebears across the Atlantic. Here was a work not of fated, historic loves, but of sexually unapologetic Londoners living, loving and shagging in the decade in which the book was published. The central character, William Beckwith, is attractive, rich, talented and aristocratic enough to have inhabited an EM Forster novel. But couldn’t be further removed from his predecessors.

What gives the novel its original aroma is the societal cross-section of experience which Hollinghurst uses to bring his characters alive. Beckwith’s life is privileged and uninhibited, spanning from the exquisite to the dirty, the opera to the dive. The novel’s publication was a watershed moment in British fiction.

But there were corners of the novel that did mark it out as a debut. The most obvious, re-reading it 30 years after its publication, is the amount of technical construction the author seems to want to lean on. Hollinghurst cannot resist the urge to throw in a clear plot – including a resolution of a kind even though the work does not need it. But the first-time novelist obviously did.

If first novels are nearly always autobiographical, then it’s easy to discern the author’s interests in this one. For many readers, then and now, it’s these juxtapositions are precisely the thrill of the book. Any ‘out’ homosexual of Hollinghurst’s generation would recognise the gilded gutteriness of the world he describes.

Occasionally he lays it on a little thick. One of the climaxes of The Swimming Pool Library comes when Will Beckwith tries to visit his black boyfriend on a council estate and is set upon by a gang of racist thugs. The character, like his creator, is a fan of the acquired-taste exquisite writer Ronald Firbank, and when Will is attacked there is a first-edition (with dust-jacket) of The Flower Beneath the Foot in his pocket. Beaten to the ground, he sees the pages of the volume fanning out on the ground. A symbol of Beckwith’s (and Hollinghurst’s) world, certainly, but a slightly over-polished one.

Hollinghurst followed-up his acclaimed first novel by reaching backwards for inspiration. The Folding Star (1994) depicts a disaffected 33-year old who applies to become a private tutor in a Flemish town. The plot is thick with art and sex, and a matchlessly atmospheric description of an Antwerp-like town. The plot is Death in Venice, albeit a Death in Venice in which Tadzio is 17 and Aschenbach manages to have sex with him. After which slightly iffy climax, Hollinghurst pulls the novel to a close with one of the bleakest, most inexplicably cruel endings of any book I have read (a judgement that doesn’t forget the collected works of Ian McEwan).

The Folding Star deserved – and received – huge praise. It was awarded the James Tait Black memorial prize and shortlisted for the Booker. Which suggested that Hollinghurst had survived the famous second novel problem. Though, as it turned out, he had simply saved that for his third.

When it was published (in 1998), The Spell bemused readers. Some feared they must have missed a layer in what is – charitably – a comedy of manners. One friend read it three times, certain that there must have been some depth to the work that he had missed. His fear was unfounded.

The cast of The Spell is almost entirely gay. There is a gay father who also has a gay son, and the gay father lives in a house in the country with his gay lover whose own ex-lover (Alex) ends up going out with his partner’s gay son (Danny). At a house at the end of the garden in this typical English village is a young handyman who is gay and rents himself out to anybody with the means to pay. The one big development comes when the slightly geeky ex-boyfriend is introduced to the joys of drugs at a nightclub by the gay son and is rejuvenated by the discovery. Hollinghurst sprinkles descriptive magic far above his subject matter. Looking back over the first night in which he took ecstasy, Alex reflects on:

The blearily milling boys smelling of sweat and smoke, pupils huge and bewildered by daylight, fag-ends imbedded in chewing-gum stuck around the welts of their shoes – the rapturous novelty of it all. Absurd though it was, with the same beautiful young man snoring naked bedside him, he longed to be back there again, looking out for the improbable taxi that would take them home together for the first time, in the magically protracted hour when he knew that his life had been given back to him.

Much of that passage could have been written by any novelist. Few others, though, could have placed that ‘improbable’ and then come up with ‘the magically protracted hour’.

Still, it is safe to say that The Spell was off-putting for a lot of readers. Many – especially heterosexual ones – must reach the baffled by this world and wondering what the point of it all is. Presumably it is one that Hollinghurst at least partially inhabited in the decade before The Spell: historically and financially privileged, vaguely sybaritic and startlingly shallow.

What was frustrating were the obvious depths which Hollinghurst chose not to explore, though he could have done so better than anyone.

The slightly gauche juxtapositions of The Swimming Pool Library and the resonant deeps of The Folding Star had promised that, if he could capture it in the right form, from the right angle at just the right moment, Hollinghurst might somehow capture it all. What, for the best part of 200 years, people have thought the novel might be in a unique position to capture. What even Lord Byron struggled to define, and finally italicised in a letter to a friend in 1819. Writing about his epic poem Don Juan, in an era when poetry still seemed the best medium in which to struggle to communicate the essence of life, Byron boasted of his own work:

It may be bawdy — but is it not good English?  It may be profligate — but is it not life, is it not the thing?  — Could any man have written it — who has not lived in the world? — and tooled in a post-chaise? in a hackney coach? in a gondola? against a wall? in a court carriage? in a vis a vis? — on a table? — and under it?

The contents of Hollinghurst’s first novels suggested that their author was keen to collect and describe the variety of life experiences that also appealed to Lord Byron, but that he had not so far been able to build them into anything more than these elements. He could pinpoint the life of a particular type of gay man, but he could not speak to all that much beyond it. He could record everyday life, but not encompass it.

He has never been a fast writer. A common acquaintance described holidaying with Edmund White and Hollinghurst, recalling how White would scribble constantly, filling notepad after notepad, while Hollinghurst would work at a sentence or two at most in a day. The carefully polished final product was to become a trademark. But the results justified the wait.

Six years after The Spell came The Line of Beauty (2004). The novel was unanimously praised by critics and readers alike. It won the Booker Prize (a first for a book whose central characters were all gay and whose living breathing sex lives were central to the plot) and was even made into a BBC mini-series.

All this helped create a meeting-point between author and a wider public. The reading public moved towards Hollinghurst in greater numbers than ever before; and he moved towards them, by coming out of the narrow thoroughfares he had explored to date to write about a wider variety of  life. The Line of Beauty is not only a description of gay life in the 1980s, but a pin-point depiction of Thatcher’s Britain. One that does not neglect the heterosexual community as Hollinghurst’s previous novels appeared to.

It revolves around the vaguely unlikeable figure of Nick Guest – a scholar of Henry James – who ends up living slightly parasitically in the household of a friend whose father is a rising politician. The sustained description of the household of Gerald Fedden MP is one of the most accurate depictions of a politician’s life since Anthony Trollope.

The work is packed with crystalline social observations. There is, for instance, the scene at the local fete at which Fedden enters the welly-wanging competition and at first performs poorly. He ends up paying for round after round until he has wanged the welly far enough to see off any and all competition. Some years after reading that scene, I went bowling with a politician in Washington DC and the déjà vu washed across me as I watched my opponent. When Hollinghurst finds a type he nets, pins and frames them as calmly as a lepidopterist would.

At another point, Nick is leaving the Fedden household with his new black boyfriend, Leo. At that precise moment, Gerald’s mother, Lady Partridge, draws up in a cab. There is no way they cannot meet. Nick introduces Leo to the grande dame. Hollinghurst writes:

She smiled and said, “How do you do?” in an extraordinarily cordial tone, in which none the less something final was conveyed – the certainty that they would never speak again.

In The Line of Beauty, Hollinghurst’s cool forensic eye falls not only over the politics of sex and race but also on a certain type of Englishness. His class observations in particular are as subtle in their diagnostic gradations as anything in Balzac or Proust. When Fedden ends up in the constituency of Guest’s own parents, he visits their house. Guest’s father takes the drinks orders and then brings them in on a tray as though they were a great treat. This is a social world far removed from the grand rooms of the Fedden house where the drinks tray is always at hand. It is the 1980s, but these things still deeply matter and Hollinghurst makes sure they leave a taste in the reader’s mouth like metal.

The local and specific becomes something near the universal. Even the bravura description of Nick Guest inviting the Prime Minister to dance (after he is a couple of different lines of beauty in) could be a fable of any young man with the whole world ahead of him taking gambles and high-wire risks, with no understanding of the consequences.

There, in a way, Hollinghurst might have rested: Booker Prize and BBC serial under his belt. But what he did next was probably his most significant book to date, and one of the most startling creative works of recent years.

The plot is separated into five episodes which cross the 20^th century, finishing in our own, and starts with a young poet undisguisedly modelled on the young Rupert Brooke, named Cecil Valance. He writes a Brooke-ian poem called ‘Two Acres’ which comes to represent the idyll before the First World War. The war consumes him, and he is memorialised in marble.

Across a century, we then follow the passions, traces and impacts of that life: from the grieving mother defrauded and consoled by mystics, the early hagiography of friends, the biographical investigations of a subsequent generation and finally the unsettling attempts at ownership by ‘queer theorists’, among others.

If this sounds like a niche career or world, it both is and is not. The Strangers’s Child manages to depict, in the fullest manner imaginable, how the life of one young man burns, radiates, cools and fades, through the people he loved and who loved him, the people who did not know him but still fight over him and finally to those who do not care about him or remember him at all.

The background is the century of the war to end all wars, and Hollinghurst has an almost terrifying mastery of this canvas. There are unforgettable descriptions within it. And while the surface plot is completely absorbing, equally riveting are the stylistic glitterings above that surface plot and the vast depths sensed beneath.

In the days it took me to read The Stranger’s Child, when it came out in 2011, almost everything else went on hold. Very few novels have had a similar effect. I ended up asking to be left alone to finish the book over a weekend. The neglect of everything else was total. What is more – and this may be the nearest I can get to a definition of the effect of a masterwork – the impact on finishing it was something like devastation, or mourning.

There may be several reasons for this. One is the fact that The Stranger’s Child is a biographer’s novel: a novel written almost precisely for anyone who – as I have – has ever worked in, or been absorbed by, that peculiar genre. For The Stranger’s Child addresses one of the fundamental thing that disturbs biographers: the envy and the fear of the things that fall between – the moments that are unrecorded and unrecoverable. Who mattered more than the records show? Who matters less than their own testimony suggests? What happened then? And what, in the end, matters at all?

For while biography holds out the promise of mastery and the illusion of omniscience, it relies at best on the most chaotic accident, and happenstance built upon happenstance. Almost all biographers hold out hope, of course. Hope that the missing pieces of the life they are trying to discover will reveal themselves. That the missing trove of memoirs or letters will turn up.

But however well documented a life, the true picture is unrestorable once the subject is gone, assuming it were recoverable before. Behind this realisation lingers this fear – a fear which biographers only have in slightly higher doses than everyone else – of how, if at all, we can ever understand the life of another person. We might read all their works, tear through their letters and even sneak our way through their diaries and bills. But we will never know whether their life turned on a conversation on some roof-top, a chance remark overheard, or an encounter never spoken of again.

And though the worlds The Stranger’s Child depicts are often rarefied, they are without any doubt ‘life’. And in its descriptions of the intricacies, joys, fall-outs, and deceits of love – in its amorous, familial, platonic and literary varieties – it undoubtedly captures ‘the thing’ that Byron saw as the truest defence for writing. Not just the capturing of the experience of life, but the capture of some other, greater truth.

Hollinghurst ends by digging at the haunting question of whether the truth – even the truth of one life – counts for anything or not. What does it matter? The human body disappears, and the papers all follow at some point. Eventually all reduces down to just one question: the question of, as Rilke once put it, whether the outer space into which we dissolve tastes of us at all?

The Stranger’s Child is a novelist’s attempt to try to answer that question. And Hollinghurst succeeds, in part, through the technical device of showing us the gaps between his snapshots across the century. Between each of his episodes characters hold onto misunderstandings they have developed. A crucial meeting falls short because one of the parties has no intention of giving up the materials that the pushy young visitor hopes to pry from him. The plot does not resolve, because like our lives it cannot be ‘solved’.

The reader gets to see where various of the lives and reputations might have gone, had people not behaved in the difficult, thwarting, multiply-propelled ways they do. The result is like looking at a silhouette of a life, but a silhouette that captures its subject more truly than the most high-resolution likeness. It is, in other words, a vindication of fiction, because it is something that no other medium could do.

Last year, after the usual wait, Hollinghurst published his sixth novel: The Sparsholt Affair. He had previously speculated he might try to write a novel in which none of the characters was gay. He failed. But between his first and his sixth novel this aspect of the lives of his characters has receded into background importance. While some of his American forebears were still writing novels that would have got stuck in the ‘gay fiction’ section of a bookstore, Hollinghurst’s had (through subject matter as well as success) by this stage gone out and into the world.

The Sparsholt Affair does open with a gay affair at Oxford in the early days of the Second World War, and proceeds episodically until the present day. And to a number of readers – this one included – it felt as though Hollinghurst was re-writing a novel he had just published. But it is so deftly done that, at worst, it has the effect of a masterful re-orchestration.

The plot evolves from the brief affair between the athletic undergraduate David Sparsholt and his pining contemporary, Evert Dax, whose father is a celebrated middle-brow novelist. The reader is allowed few details of the affair, but does see how it reverberates across the ensuing decades.

As the consequences of the affair play out, the least likely of the pair (Sparsholt) ends up involved in a sex scandal which ruins his career and envelopes everyone in a Profumo/Thorpe-like cloud. Again, the nature of the scandal is never made completely clear. Unlike his earlier novels, in which he spells out the most crucial parts of the plot, in The Strangers Child and The Sparsholt Affair Hollinghurst resists.

Early on in Sparsholt, between the blackouts and fire-watching at their Oxford college, a drawing is made of the naked torso of David Sparsholt. Years later, his son, Johnny, glimpses the work in another character’s house. “Ancient pornography – is there anything more sad” another character says to Johnny:

‘Oh…’ said Johnny, as if nervously agreeing.

‘Or perhaps you like it,’ said Denis.

‘Well’, said Johnny, ‘no, not really my sort of thing,’ but seeing it almost as a symbol of the London life – it could certainly never have hung in his father’s house, or even his mother’s.’

Johnny doesn’t realise that the drawing he is looking at is of his father. But the reader sees how just as David would never have displayed the painting – even though he was its subject – nor would his son, a generation later. The echoes are still being heard.

This is a core aspect of Hollinghurst’s style: that novelistic technique which sadistically keeps the main events and denouements concealed from the characters, as well as the reader. We are shown the bits in between, but not the crucial junctures. We have to reverse-engineer an understanding of the scandal from the scraps we are thrown over the decades that follow. Certainly we get some picture. Perhaps even the picture. But we miss what might be expected to matter most, as do the characters who have to live in the scandal’s wake.

People miss what turn out to be decisive events for their own lives, but equally others fail to open up for the edification and gratification of others. The man in whose house Johnny sees the drawing of his father could spill the facts. He is the only person alive who could. But he doesn’t. Eventually nobody will know. And then nobody will care. The picture will find its way to a junk room or a scrap heap. Very little retains any value after the departure of those who gave value to it.

This technique reinforces a key part of Hollinghurst’s world. People keep things to themselves. They often have no desire to elucidate. They own things they do not want to share and often share things they do not want. Other people – other characters – have to make sense of what they can with what information they have, based on a picture whose scope and meaning are never revealed to them.

If there is a clear triumph in Hollinghurst’s art so far, it is here. It is in finding a way to justify the novel at a time when its remaining possibilities have been doubted. Because if the purpose of the novel is, like all writing, to try to get to the essence of life, of ‘the thing’ (to explain it, capture it, or frame it) then that is something Hollinghurst has accomplished as much as any other writer now working. And there is a pleasing trajectory of its own in all of this. That a novelist who started off being noticed for his depiction of the world of one minority did not get stuck in one sub-section of the bookshops, but ended up finding a recognisable way to depict all of our lives as they are actually lived.

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