Stuart Kelly on the year ahead in books
Last week I was grumbling about my retrospective of 2023, and this week it is the turn of my worst favourite piece to write: the preview of 2024. It is an article that goes against everything being aliterary reviewer ought to mean as the majority but not all of it is opinions about books that are as yet unread. Some will still be unread come the preview of 2025.I will try to begin on a more upbeat note. 2024, I hope and even dare to expect, might be the year of Percival Everett. Everett was one of the very first novelists I reviewed for this paper – Erasure, in the early 2000s. I couldn’t believe he got away with it then, and now that it is a film, directed by Cord Jefferson and retitled American Fiction, I fully expect it to be at the eye of a furore. It involved an academic, whose novels update Greek mythology and don’t sell. He – being African American – is infuriated by “ghetto” literature, so writes a parody that everyone takes seriously called “My Pafology” under a pseudonym. Everett, who was shortlisted for the Booker for The Trees, has a new novel out as well, James, which I have read. It is a different angle on a character in Huckleberry Finn, usually referred to as Jim with a nickname that rhymes with “snigger”. It is another systematic and forensic and laugh out loud funny deconstruction of America and race. I wholeheartedly recommend any of his backlist – I’ve also reviewed and loved American Desert, Wounded and Dr No. So I am thrilled that six other backlist titles are being published as well.Will James be on the Booker lists? I would hope so. It is shaping up to be the Year of the Bridesmaids, with new novels by Ali Smith, Colm Tóibin and Andrew O’Hagan. Between them they have 11 nominations for the prize. I have, at the time of writing, started the O’Hagan, Caledonian Road, and am enjoying it a great deal. It is a panoramic, state of the nation novel, about political correctness and corruption, privilege and the persistence of the past. Curiously, the last time there were novels in a similar vein, they were analysing the fag-end of Major and the ascent of Blair. Hmmm. Ali Smith’s Gliff is being kept tightly guarded, but we do know it has a companion piece, Glyph (a Doric shock, a classical inscription). Whether this customary doubleness is problematic for the prizes remains to be seen, but I remember discussions about whether the novels from Autumn to the post-script Companion Piece were standalone works or a magnum opus. Likewise, Tóibin’s Long Island is a sequel to Brooklyn. Personally and possibly heretically, I never thought Mantel’s Bring Up The Bodies worked without Wolf Hall, and its eligibility for the Booker was at least questionable.There are, of course, Books By Names, such as a memoir by Salman Rushdie, a valedictory novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a manifesto by Arundhati Roy. There might be a book or two by Alexander McCall Smith, and I would reckon that Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment will shift copies. In terms of Scottish writers, there is a new collection of essays by Kathleen Jamie (track record means it will be worth considering); poems, May Day, by Jackie Kay and Rain, Blossom by John Burnside; and another addition to the Darklands line from Edinburgh publishers Polygon, with Val McDermid taking on Lady Macbeth.In non-fiction it is easier to discern trends. There are a lot of non-fiction books forthcoming which I will most likely read but probably not review: Robert Sholl’s biography of Messiaen, Orlando Whitfield on art forgery with All That Glitters, Kerri Ní Dochartaigh’s essays, Cacophony Of Bone, Catherine Nixey’s Heresy: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, and Andrew Drummond’s biography of Thomas Muntzer. The trend, though, is that we are all suffering from technophobia, it seems. The briefest of glances through the catalogues offers Susie Alegre’s Human Rights, Robot Wrongs, Shadbolt and Hampson’s As If Human, Salman Khan’s Brave New Worlds. Anil Ananthaswamy’s Why Machines Learn, Kelly Clancy’s Playing With Reality, Neil Lawrence’s The Atomic Human, Marianna Spring’s Among The Trolls, Danny Wallace’s Somebody Told Me and Moral AI And How We Got Here by Conitzer, Sinnott-Armstrong and Borg. (Call me superstitious, but a book about techno-futures by “Borg” sends Star Trek shivers).As for the rest: hunches, curiosities and liking the cut of the jib. I like the sound of Mohamad Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory Of Men, Julius Taranto’s How I Won A Nobel Prize and Carol Adlam’s The Russian Detective about Panov, who outsold Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And if you want to cause an almighty stooshie, do send copies of the eminent Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid Of Gender? to your MP / MSP / pundit of choice. Have a fulfilling, happy and book-filled New Year.