It was perhaps predictable that the Mail would go to town on the publication of Grey, EL James’s follow-up to her multimillion-selling bonkbuster Fifty Shades of Grey. Clearly concluding that one review would barely scratch the sides, Femail magazine went for two, with the critic Craig Brown bringing the literary clout, and Liz Jones wheeled in to contribute the, er, female perspective. Brown was concerned about all James’s talk of making Christian Grey, her S&M-loving protagonist, into a “complex character”, and more so by the “page of acknowledgments where she thanks academic highbrows such as “professor Dawn Carusi for help in navigating the US higher education system. Professor Chris Collins for an education in soil science. Dr Raina Sluder for her insights into behavioural health.” He asked the question on every reader’s lips – “Eh? So where’s the porn?” – before concluding that the book was “money for old rope”. Jones, on the other hand, “love, love, loved it!”, and bafflingly took the book’s critics to task for being “women who make their husband pee sitting down”. (Among others, she may have been referring to the Telegraph’s Bryony Gordon, who had slated Grey as “a cut-price Mr Darcy in nipple clamps”, and the Sunday Times’ Christina Patterson, who noted that the sequel made Fifty Shades “look like War and Peace”. Still, even the most incisive critic would have to admit that Jones had a point: “Yes, of course it’s excruciatingly badly written, but who cares? It’s not literature, it’s cliterature!”
Some newspapers even found space for other books, including ZeroZeroZero, an expose of the global cocaine trade by Roberto Saviano. Having made his name with Gomorrah, about the Naples mafia, Saviano has lived for the intervening years under armed guard. In the Financial Times, Misha Glenny found that it “includes some remarkable material”, even though the author’s “notoriety among the criminal fraternity means that he cannot get his hands dirty in researching the underworld as he did in the past”. Although his approach lacks academic rigour, Saviano makes up for it “with an unrivalled passion in describing the damage that organised crime inflicts on society”. Tony Allen-Mills, writing in the Sunday Times, also had some reservations. The book is “a scathing survey of the cocaine industry in its many forms”, he wrote, but also “strangely unsatisfactory”. “So desperate is Saviano to be heard, so intent is he on warning the world that we have failed to see the ruin that cocaine is visiting upon us, that he ends up veering into questionable hyperbole.”
Finally, critics on both sides of the Atlantic largely concluded that the work of Nell Zink, a novelist who was lounging in obscurity until talent-spotted by Jonathan Franzen, lived up to the considerable hype. Reviewing her first two novels (published together in the UK) in the Sunday Times, Robert Collins hailed “a talent that is as rare and strange as a kestrel on Oxford Street”. He was particularly keen on her debut, The Wallcreeper, “a slim, strange masterpiece, and one of those alluring, elliptical, exceptional novels that I will want to keep rereading for the rest of my life”. In the US, too, critics preferred it to her second book, Mislaid, in which, found Walter Kirn in the New York Times, “piquancy and intimacy are lost, sacrificed to momentum and high mayhem”.
