Having made my list, the other day, of favourite novels of the decade – one per year – I promised I’d do the same for the Nineties, didn’t I? And, when I said it, I imagined my list would be chilly and bleak – which, for some reason, is how I remember fiction from that decade. But I was wrong! Here they are:
1990 The Passion – Jeanette Winterson.
(I read everything of hers on first publication until, I think, ‘Lighthousekeeping.’ I’ve been through so many phases with Jeanette W. Adoration of those first three or so novels, when she couldn’t do wrong in my eyes. Even neglecting to have a story or losing track of who her narrator was and blaming it all on spirals, on fairy tales, blaming it on the boogie, whatever. I loved it all. I even passionately defended her when others jeered at ‘Art Objects’ or ‘Art and Lies’ or her Fitness Book. But gradually she’s faded away for me. The brilliant critic Paulina Palmer tried to talk me round ‘The Powerbook’ over dinner at the Gothic conference last July, but I still couldn’t learn to love that book. When she’s good Jeanette is incandescent. When she’s bad… it’s like she’s printed off twenty half finished short stories from her hard drive and tossed them together. She’s found a / the canny conceit to link them.
Oh, look. That sounds carping. I love Jeanette! This will be a top ten of novelists I loved in the Nineties. And still love. But it’s having affairs, isn’t it, reading novels? You’re in and out of love like you are luxury hotels. I’ve carried her books around with me, I’ve flung them from me, as far as they can go. That’s what being someone’s reader is like. I’ll go back to her. I will! I’ll catch up again!)
1991 Wise Children – Angela Carter. I applied for funding for my Phd on Carter about two months before she died. It was a weird time, because she was coming to life for me, so wonderfully, so completely on the page. When I read ‘Wise Children’ it was during my Creative Writing MA and it was amazing to read someone doing a low comic turn – a cockney voice – the raucous low demotic – and using it to talk about life, art, theory, society, culture. All the things a voice like that ain’t supposed to know about. The book’s a glorious kick up the arse for supposed high culture. It’s a punch up the hooter. Angela Carter was such a big part of my reading, studying, thinking, writing life for a number of years afterwards.
1992 Saint Maybe – Anne Tyler. Which I’ve written about somewhere else on this blog. Carter and Winterson were my twin goddesses of intellectual glamour in the Nineties. For flashiness and blinding wit and fan-dances with wolves. Anne Tyler was my antidote to showy excess and in-your-face cleverness. She’s subtle and unassuming. She later became a worldwide phenomenon and people started reading her in earnest, giving the kudos she deserved. ‘Saint Maybe’ was the one I loved the best. She’s got the lightest of touches. She hides all of her working-out miraculously. She writes about embarrassment, obligation and the way families invent their own mythologies. Not flashy, fashionable subjects. And it’s been an era that praises fiction that gets overwrought and revels in its own conspicuous effort… I’m glad Anne Tyler’s still doing what she does.
1993 Maybe the Moon – Armistead Maupin. I’m writing too much about each book. I need to quicken this up. One of my favourite novels ever. Another one that I’ve reread a lot. My friend Alicia and I went to see him read it in a smart hotel’s literary lunch on Deansgate in Manchester in 1993. We had to share round tables with strangers, like at a wedding, and eat prawns and melon balls sprinkled with nutmeg. I remember he read brilliantly, though he must have done it a thousand times on that tour. We had our book signed and I marvelled at the idea of sitting there, signing new hardbacks for people who couldn’t wait to take them home to gobble up. The novel is a wonder. A showbiz midget’s raucous fairy tale. And again, much, much cleverer and subtle than anyone would give it credit for. Because it’s popular and funny and the midget has a dirty mouth.
1994 The Lights of Manchester by Tony Warren. The first novel by Coronation Street’s creator. A hefty saga, brimming with melodrama and fondness for its teeming cast of characters. I sat agog all one Christmas with this. He did three more, partially linked to this, by theme and / or characters. It was like he was building a Manc Tales of the City. With hints of Howard Spring and Masie Mosco.
1995 Anne Tyler again – ‘Ladder of Years.’ I was sent it for free, which made it even nicer. In 1995 I sold my first novel and it was to Chatto and Windus, and in paperback to Vintage. So that meant I was sharing a publisher and catalogue space with Winterson, Carter and Anne Tyler. ‘Ladder of Years’ came out just after I’d signed the contract for ‘Marked for Life.’ My editor sent me it as a gift, as I worked on my copy-edits. (It was all so quick! Bought in April – out in November!) It was a strange time, really. I’d been reading this stuff. Now I was amongst it. Weird being in that Chatto catalogue – with the Angela Carter-painted cover – to be in there with AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch, and all these grand dames. It felt reachable, somehow. Tangible.
1996 Got to choose two, sorry. Georgina Hammick’s ‘The Arizona Game’ and Patricia Duncker’s ‘Hallucinating Foucault.’
1997 ‘My Silver Shoes’ by Nell Dunn
1998 ‘The Object of my Affection’ by Stephen McCauley
1999 ‘The Hours’ by Michael Cunningham
So it was in the Nineties that I really discovered what it was I liked to read and explore. This, through a process of reading everything I could get hold of. I read quite a few stinkers to get there. But I found I loved formally quite complicated books – but ones that somehow hid that fact: they made their complexity seem inevitable, as if rising out of the circumstances and demands of their characters’ lives. The immediacy of the characters’ voices was what hid the book’s scaffolding, so carefully, so apparently easily. I loved books about women of a certain age and gay men. I loved magical realism, outrageous fantasy – but wonderfully observed realism, too. I loved these things all jammed together. I loved ensemble casts. Rollicking tales that intertwine. I love jokes and ludicrous anecdotes. I still can’t see why so many novels are po-faced.
Tha’s my list, anyway, for the last decade but one. That’s two lists covering twenty years I’ve given you! What do you think?
