Dialogue: It is hard now to find a good book

By JOHN ROUGHAN

Not long ago I went into a serious bookshop, deserted as they often are, scanned the shelves for a while and asked, with a note of desperation: "Have you got any masculine novels?"

The woman behind the counter fled. A bearded man came out of the back and approached me warily.

I told him I was looking for something gritty and visceral. "Isn't there anyone who writes like Hemingway and Mailer these days?" Actually Hemingway had never done much for me but it gave him the general direction.

The bookseller knew immediately what I meant. He remembered. He also knew I wouldn't find it. He picked out a few male Americans he had recently enjoyed but did not pretend they were the real thing.

In the end he sold me Tom Wolfe's latest collection of essays and fiction, Hooking Up, which was tasty but not a complete meal.

When supply fails to satisfy a demand it is probably that the market has been protected too long. So it was good news this week that the Government might not stop parallel importing of books, films and music recordings after all.

It is not convinced that the profits of franchised publishing are subsiding our creative community as generously as the authorised publishers have claimed. That, too, is good news. I find it no consolation to be ransomed for the sake of some of the turkeys we read, see and hear in the name of New Zealand culture.

Still, the Wolfe collection was almost worth the $50 for one story alone: a fictional but all-too-probable account of how political correctness can edit the truth out of television. There is another piece, one the bookseller possibly had in mind for me, which really explains why I cannot find the literature I need.

Tom Wolfe wrote the definitive novel of the 1980s (The Bonfire of the Vanities) and followed it with something similar for the 1990s, A Man in Full.

In the collection he takes revenge on three literary notables: John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving (The Cider House Rules), who could no longer contain themselves when Wolfe's second book scored good reviews and high sales.

Updike in the New Yorker, Mailer in the New York Review of Books, Irving almost apoplectic on a Toronto television programme, each said Wolfe's books should not be treated as literature. They were "entertainment." The man was not a novelist, he was a journalist.

Literature, said Updike, must be "exquisite" and Wolfe's work was not exquisite. I dare say he is right. But it is a long time since Updike's books gave me anything I would call exquisite. And Mailer, after The Naked and Dead, wrote several lifeless novels before he found his feet again in journalism.

Now he has relapsed, writing overblown fancies on antiquity. Meanwhile, Updike's last effort was the imagined early life of Shakespeare's Hamlet. No doubt it was exquisite in the dictionary sense: delicate, highly sensitive. I don't know; I didn't read it. Not many did.

Wolfe takes an excursion into art history to explain how serious literature has lost touch with just about everybody outside its practitioners.

The great American writers of the first half of the 20th century, the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck, were, as he says, absorbed in the world about them and managed "to combine the sublime with the intensely real."

Europe was in awe of them. But America, says Wolfe, remained fatally in awe of European, particularly French, aestheticism - the notion that pure art was not about life but about art itself.

Europe was not always that way. Britain produced its greatest novelists, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, when it was, in a sense, a new country, undergoing the Industrial Revolution and the arrival of liberal democratic ideas. Their novels were sublime and intensely real.

Realism gave way to aestheticism in Europe before the turn of the 20th century. Literature then aspired to be appreciated for its refined techniques rather than its meaning. It became full of allusions to itself and merely clever.

It was the mid-20th century before higher education ruined American writing in the same way. "Dreiser, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Faulkner probably didn't have four years of college between them," says Wolfe. "But from 1950 on, the great majority of novelists came out of university writing programmes. Novelists who got going before 1960 still tended to realism, but for the postwar realist the only valid experience was his own."

Nobody can help but write from their life. The trouble with modern literature is that too much is written by people whose lives are spent teaching it, studying it or writing about it.

My house is scattered with forsaken novels about writers doing not much at all. It seems a long time since I fondly installed one on the top shelf of the high cabinet.

Up there with Tender is the Night, Anna Karenina, The Naked and the Dead, Children of the Arbat and most of Jane Austen, there are several by Maurice Shadbolt, there is Plumb and Once Were Warriors, of course, and The Bone People - now that was a masculine novel.

But New Zealand literature seems to be going the way of the rest. I paid out for the latest Montana Book Award winner, Owen Marshall's Harlequin Rex, and tossed it aside half way through, finding I cared not a fig for the characters or their fate.

Novelists here and everywhere should cease writing formalistic froth for each other, get outside themselves and do some journalism. When they find a story to tell, their art will kick in. The result could be novels that once again carry us as no other medium can, to the raw, gruelling and splendid recognition of human nature.