It being a Friday, and a distinctly slow news day to boot, I spent the post-lunch slump flicking around the web to catch up on the week's book news (also known as a serious afternoon's work round our way), and came across this piece from last week's Sunday Times. No doubt you'll all have seen it already (always the last to know up here), but in case you haven't, the deal is this: in a bid to discover whether the literary industry really does know its stuff, the ST sent typed manuscripts of the first chapters of two Booker-winning novels (VS Naipaul's In a Free State and Holiday by Stanley Middleton) to 20 different agents and publishing houses - and received rejections from all but one of them.
While everyone loves to snigger at the sight of an entire industry with egg on its face, I have to admit I do have a certain amount of sympathy for the blushing victims of this classic sting - who, after all, have to wade through hundreds of submissions every week and can't be expected to make the right decision every time. And furthermore, after I'd finished chuckling into my tea, another question occurred to me: why are we so sure that the joke in this case is on the agents? The ST has surely done us a favour by drawing attention to what critics speaking to the paper describe as an "obsess[ion] with celebrity authors and 'bright marketable young things' at the expense of serious writers". But without in any way wishing to cast aspersions on the work of Messrs Middleton and Naipaul, isn't it worth considering the other possibility - that the regard in which we hold certain authors blinds us to faults that would be exposed in their less-famous counterparts?
