What Fleet Street can learn from Hot Ones

Behold! I have had a thought.

Hello!

Hi! As I think I’ve mentioned on here before I have a terrible shame, and it is that I am one of those snobs who just doesn’t love most contemporary literature. I’ll sometimes look at all the novels I’ve read over the past few years and realise that very few of them were actually published after about 2000.

One reason for this is that I do not want the internet to feature in my fiction. I’ve nothing against authors who write about what they know, but I have no interest whatsoever in social media intruding on what it meant to be escapism. Another is that I just find a lot of contemporary fiction quite…nothingy.

I wish I had a better word to describe it but I don’t. I recently read quite a zeitgeisty book published a couple of years ago, written by one of those new literary darlings, and it was…fine. The prose was pretty decent, which let’s be honest isn’t always a given, but overall it just felt like a book that happened at me. Reading it felt like a very passive thing. I finished it, put it down then immediately went on with my life.

That’s often my problem with the new stuff. It’s mostly inoffensive; neither great nor awful, usually very stylised. Again: all quite nothingy. This is why I hesitated to pick up Diamond Hill by Kit Fan. It came out in 2021 and all the cover quotes were from quite zeitgeisty authors, which usually turns me off.

Still, I thought I’d give it a shot because it’s set in Hong Kong in the 1980’s, and that felt like a fun premise. In the end I really enjoyed it, specifically because I didn’t love all of it. There’s one character in there who isn’t quite as well-written as they could be, and I can think of a few scenes which weren’t perfect. As a result, reading it felt like a very active process; I’d thoroughly enjoyed some bits, like some other bits less, and had to stop to think about why that was. It was knotty, and that felt good.

I also didn’t love the ending but that means that I am still thinking about it now, both wondering why it bothered me and what I would have wanted to see instead. It’s a novel that made me think! You don’t get that with books about thin people who send sad texts to each other. Well, at least I don’t. Each to their own. I’m going to read some Turgenev next, get back on home turf.