Elegant Tricksiness

1. Elegant Tricksiness Mike Hender Critical Reading 29 November 2012

2. Approach • Context • Genre/Audience – middle-class, middle aged women • Purpose/Message – men are not fulfilling our needs • Structure – classic ‘making the sale’ • Use of Language – clear, rich, varied, emotional • Conclusion – buy this book (if you’re a woman!)

3. My Context • Book Group – 7 men, 60 – 75 • Public Sector/Business, Technology/Humanities • My last course – English Lit ‘O’ Level 1959 • Then 50 years of Science/Tech/Management • Non-Fiction OK, Fiction a Challenge • Example: The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

4. Author’s Context JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012 • Influential journalist and broadcaster • Writing at the turn of the year • In the leading middleclass broadsheet • In the fiction section of the book reviews • ~70% of fiction is read by women

5. The Hook JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012 Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and emotions of strangers' lives. . . “They flourish their elegant sentences, their self-conscious tricksiness and their implausible plot twists as if this were the point of writing.” Emotive Language

6. The Hook JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012 Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and emotions of strangers' lives. . . “They flourish their elegant sentences, their self-conscious tricksiness and their implausible plot twists as if this were the point of writing.” Tricolon

7. The Hook JENNI RUSSELL Sunday Times 1 Jan 2012 Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out until I had finished my book. I was reading that rare thing: a novel about contemporary life that felt revelatory, wise and true. I didn't want to leave the company of my characters until I had no choice. I was caught up in the thoughts and emotions of strangers' lives . . . “They flourish their elegant sentences, their self-conscious tricksiness and their implausible plot twists as if this were the point of writing.” Anaphora

8. Message/Audience What is missing are today's home-grown equivalents of Updike, Roth, Tyler, Shields and Franzen – the confident chroniclers of swathes of middle-class life. The big literary prizes are going to foreign, historical or small-scale books. I am baffled by the praise and prominence given to McEwan's Booker-shortlisted On Chesil Beach, or to Barnes's Booker prizewinner, The Sense of an Ending. Both are principally devoted to the close examination of the psyche of dull, mean-minded men. They are dismal, crabbed little narratives, without warmth or depth or exuberance, written in a limited emotional register. They flourish their elegant sentences, their self-conscious tricksiness and their implausible plot twists as if this were the point of writing. It isn't. Great writers offer more than this stunted view of humanity. They ally elegance to a sense of human potential as well as its limitations. That is what is absent here. “Ladies, men aren’t fulfilling our needs!”

9. The Vision Metaphors? Novels have taught me how to live. They have taken me beyond the barriers of diffidenceand convention into other people's private passions, longings and doubts. Through books I have known what it is to be a bewildered Russian count caught up in battle; a disillusioned Victorian wife married to a stolid bore; a clever, wary, socially insecure courtier to Henry VIII. I have been inside the minds of French revolutionaries, Philip Pullman's witches, Iris Murdoch's bed swapping couples, Marilynne Robinson's gentle, dying pastor. Metaphors? Tricolon

10. FUD Emotive Language My friends in middle age, like everyone else, are dealing with private anxieties that occasionally surface in a moment of anguish. Women married for 20 years despair about their loss of desire for their husbands. Men in second marriages find they have nothing in common with their younger wives. Parents watch with fear as their children drop out of university, or return home without confidence, ambition or jobs. Fiftysomethingsfear their careers have peaked and their status and income will start to fall. They don't know how to face years of declining power and health. Twentysomethings are haunted by the anxiety that their careers may never take off and they may never meet the right partner. The wealth of choices haunts everybody. Did I make the right one? How will others think of me? What did other people do?

11. And the recommended book is . . . William Nicholson's trilogy of life in contemporary Sussex, which begins with The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, is what's been keeping me up at nights. Nicholson follows a group of families, including unfaithful couples, sexually precocious teenagers and difficult grandmothers over the course of a week in each book. He writes about doubt, love, equivocation, treachery, loyalty and joy, but he does so with such empathy and shifts one's perspectives with such unobtrusive skill that he widens one's sense of what it means to be human. One finishes his books exhilarated by liking and understanding others more than one did before.

12. Classic Structure for Making the Sale • Get the Attention of the Audience • “Two nights ago I stayed up until 3am, unwilling to put the light out . . .” • Identify and pump up the Need, Want or Pain • “They are dismal, crabbed little narratives, without warmth or depth or exuberance . . .” • Create a Vision of the Ideal State • “Novels have taught me how to live . . . !” • Show how it Relates to the Audience • “Women married for 20 years despair about their loss of desire for their husbands . . .” • Offer a Solution

13. Use of Language • High on emotion • Knows her Audience • Tricolons • Variation in Sentence length

14. Conclusion • Nicely structured article • Clarity and strength of message • Well structured emotional trajectory • Highly targeted to her audience • Builds openness, relevance, empathy • Ends with a clear recommendation • I bought the book – but alas, it’s not for me!

15. End Links: Our book group – http://www.hender.net/book-group Oxford Critical Reading course – http://www.hender.net/books-oxford

16. Jenni Russell Jenni Russell is a British columnist and broadcaster. She writes the Monday political column for The Evening Standard and also writes regularly for The Sunday Times and The Guardian. She worked for many years at the BBC and ITN, most recently as editor of The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4. She was tipped as one of the candidates to be the next controller of BBC Radio 4, following the resignation of Mark Damazer. She is married to media executive Stephen Lambert and lives in London, with their two children.

17. Jenni Russell Russell studied History at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and went on to become a BBC News Trainee. She worked for the BBC, as well as ITN and Channel 4 News. In 1998 she became joint editor of BBC Radio 4's The World Tonight, becoming one of the first people to pioneer job-sharing within the BBC. On leaving the BBC, Russell began writing comment pieces for The New Statesman and The Guardian and now also regularly writes for The Sunday Times. In 2011 she began writing the Monday political column for The Evening Standard. She is a vocal critic of the failings of the education system and of the increasing abuse of civil liberties under the Labour government. According to The Spectator she is a key figure in the New Establishment, due to her friendship with both Steve Hilton, David Cameron's director of strategy, and Ed Miliband, the newly elected Labour leader. In September 2010 she was shortlisted for the Commentariat of the Year award by Editorial Intelligence. In May 2011 she won the Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2011.