Review: Lost for Words - Edward St Aubyn

Review by Jayne White

Lost for Words is a novel about the literary world and thus has inevitably attracted the attention of literary journalists with not just reviews, but some fairly in-depth articles. There have been suggestions that this book has been written as a result of ‘sour grapes’ since the author was unsuccessfully shortlisted for the Booker prize back in 2006 and didn’t make the cut in 2011. Of course that must be all there is to it! It couldn’t possibly be that the internet boom, the rise of lit-blogging and the proliferation of new well funded and much publicised literary prizes has made the idea of a satirical treatment of the process appealing. Let’s take it for granted that the author is nursing a grudge in that morose and bitter way they are so well known for and lay it aside to look at the book itself.

The prize in this novel is the ‘Elysian prize’ and it’s funded by a Chinese company which made its fortune from genetic modification. The judges have been appointed and include a member of parliament, a media personality, a literature professor, a handsome young actor and a civil servant turned thriller writer. We also meet some of the hopefuls and their associates. Katherine, a writer and saloniere with a string of lovers and not quite ex-lovers including her editor who polishes her every word almost as soon as she has written it, and her publisher who bestows huge advances which bear no relation to her sales figures. We have Sam, a young serious-minded novelist who wants the prize so he can have his earlier work published. We also have Sonny, princeling and direct descendant of Krishna who is convinced that his lineage can’t help but make his work magnificent. The novel abounds with rich, neurotic, comic characters and in a sense that becomes its downfall.

At the beginning of the book when you start to meet the characters the book gives the impression that it’s going to do for literary awards, what Porterhouse Blue did for Oxbridge traditions. You’ve got the situation established; the principal players and their viewpoints / interests are summarised for you and the plot seems about to gather pace as we learn that Katherine’s novel has not been submitted in time for the prize owing to an error by her publishers. However, at this point we start to slump into more and more character study and the plot becomes little more than a loose timeline so there’s an eventual endpoint in sight. I’ve nothing against well-drawn characters, but I don’t think we gain anything from philosophising about the academic’s daughter’s anorexia or her son’s drug experimentation during his A-levels. Similarly, I don’t think we need to see Katherine move from promiscuity to monogamy - for the purpose of this novel it’s acceptable for her to fall in and out with lovers rather than to grow as a person and forsake all others. I’d be quite happy to see her as a lead character in a novel of her own. 

In a sense I think the author has tried to accomplish too much. It’s as though he wants his novel to be a window on the entire literary world and can’t bear to throw out any idea that he’s had. I found myself wishing that he’d stuck to writing about either the judges or the contenders. I also think he might have held back on his chapter describing the thriller writer’s use of cliche generating software to support her writing. It’s a witty idea - but all it did in this context was heighten my observance of the author’s own use of adjectives and adverbs in subsequent chapters and make me more critical of them; ordinarily I’d not pay attention to ‘funny feeling’ or ‘bashfully’ and who says ‘tip-top’ these days?

I’m particularly frustrated with the structure and scope of this novel because parts of it are really entertaining. We get to read some ‘extracts’ from novels in contention for the prize. My favourite was the one from a novel set in Tudor times about the life of Shakespeare entitled ‘All the World’s a Stage’ which includes:

‘Speaking of strumpets,’ said Thomas, ‘is that not Mistress Lucretia that comes hard upon us?’

and a sequence of cod-shakespearean knob jokes which come as a late payoff for all the time I spent puzzling over Shakespeare’s innuendo when I was a teenager. For me the pastiches of literary novels were the most enjoyable aspect of the book.

It strikes me that I’ve complained a lot in this review. I feel a little ungenerous about it because there is much that a fan of contemporary literary fiction will enjoy. For me the lack of momentum and lack of focus were a big hindrance, but I can see that other people would get a lot of fun out of identifying the real life inspirations behind the characters and recalling scurrilous gossip and will overlook weaknesses for the sake of the laugh out loud moments. At the end of the day, this is a book written for people who love books and those who write them, but perhaps it’s one to borrow from the library rather than to buy for your collection.