During my stint as a contributing editor at Book World, the phrase “minor novelist” used to get thrown around once in a while. I always hated it: It’s patronizing, and it’s almost always used by people who will never get around to writing a novel at all. (Though of course if they did it would be anything but minor.)
After reading a review in the Aug. 1 TLS, though, I’d like to suggest that the phrase “minor memoirist” needs to go into wider circulation, given what the publishing industry has been dishing out. Here’s A.N. Wilson (in no sense a minor writer) taking the lash to Jeremy Lewis’s Grub Street Irregular:
But in this account of how the author “plumped” for publishing, worked in a minor capacity for a number of firms, and then helped out in an editorial capacity at several small magazines, the reader is left wondering whether anything interesting is going to happen and I may as well spoil it for you by saying that it doesn’t. At one point, attending a seminar on the art of biography, the author is sharply upbraided by Roy Foster, who tells him, “I think, Jeremy, that we’ve had enough of this anecdotage.”
Exactly.
