"Lost for words" by Edward St Aubyn (Picador, 2014)

We meet the judges and some of the contending authors of the Elysian Prize for literature. There are samples, sometimes a few pages long, from some of the entries. The judges' choices depend on many factors not strictly literature-related - social relevance, representation of minorities, friendships with authors, etc. They don't read all the books. They think that putting a book on the long-list as a favour won't do any harm in the long term, surely. "wot u starin at" is set in Glasgow. The chairman, Malcolm, wants it to win. No all agree.

'It's relevant, Vanessa. Re-le-vant,' said Jo. 'I prefer revelatory,' said Vanessa. 'Why? Because it's got more syllables?' (p.143)

A recipe book sent in by accident gets long-listed because the author/publisher ticks so many boxes. One of the rejected authors, Sonny (nephew of the cookbook author, some-time lover of Katherine), plans to have some judges murdered.

Didier loves theory - "Nietzsche announced the death of God; Foucault announced the death of Man; the death of Nature announces itself, with no need for an intermediary. As these three elements of our classical discourse dissolve in the acid rain of late Capitalism ... in the absence of the hidden object, we cannot see what we see, because we have abandoned the need to search. As for searching, let our engines do if for us! ... In the rhetoric of bourgeois liberalism, conformity deploys the language of rebellion, precisely because there is no possibility of revolution" (p.133)

Beautiful Katherine didn't get her book long-listed. Her father died when she was 14, so she fears close emotional ties - she wants "to be the author of her own fate and take charge of a narrative whose opening chapters had been written by others with terrifying carelessness" (p.195). Instead she sleeps around. She's trying to get rid of Didier the theorist - "When they had last separated he sent her emails that were little essays on the changing meaning of romantic and erotic love since the eighteenth century, indistinguishable from his published work, and indeed, after taking out the 'dear Katherines', he had published them" (p.113)

Vanessa, a Cambridge literature lecturer, is on the panel. She thinks "Frozen Torrent" (written by Sam, an ex of Katherine) is the only work of literary value on the short-list. Her daughter Poppy has eating issues - "A principled hunger strike, like Gandhi's, which was aimed at achieving something in the outside world, looked very impure and compromised compared to a hunger strike whose sole object was to stop eating: this was the white on white of the hunger strike, the moment when it became abstract and transcended the clumsy literalness of merely representing one thing or another" (p.105)

Penny, a civil servant and ex-lover of the chairman, an MP. She skims some of the long-listed books she hasn't yet read - "the author had written a guidebook to the fauna and flora of the Canadian outback, without the slightest concession to a novel's need for fast action and cliff-hanging suspense ... All very impressive no doubt, but frankly life was quite depressing enough without listening to a story like that, which didn't even have the merit of being factually true". She's a novelist. She uses "Gold Ghost Plus" software which given a word (e.g. "air") comes up with helpful phrases ('The bracing seaside air ... the air, heavy with the scent of roses ... the air was crackling with tension ...'). She doesn't got on with her daughter, but thinks that telling her to bet a lot of money on "wot u starin at" is a good idea.

Vanessa thinks "wot u starin at" is sub-Irvine Walsh. It emerges that it's written by a lecturer friend of the chairman. And another short-listed book, "The Greasy Pole", is written by the chairman's ex boss. In the end the cookbook wins.

For my tastes, the book improves the closer it come to realism, in 2 ways -

• The competition stays close to real-life ones
• The people act like real people

The book become more farce than satire in places. But there are neat phrases scattered throughout - e.g.

• pain was pain, not a pearl in waiting (p.126)
• John Elton let out a gust of confident laughter, as if he were starring in an advertisement for a new mouthwash (p.128)

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (the irony is St Aubyn has the discernment of a born critic. His intricate satire, written with restless wit, overrides fiction, holding what passes for literature up to the light.)
• Adam Mars-Jones (In the world of Lost for Words the Elysian, ‘the world’s most famous fiction prize’, stands in for the Man Booker. The composition of the panel is the same, with a chairman and four judges. Raising the prize money from £50,000 to £80,000 can’t count as much of a disguise. ... Lost for Words drifts away from the harsh but habitable territory of satire and into the badlands of travesty or burlesque. Lost for Words depicts a world in which the judges of literary prizes are lazy, self-obsessed and prejudiced, unable to recognise quality when they see it, but seeks to attract a readership with the information that its author was once shortlisted by such people. It offers its readers the pleasures of a fast-moving farce plot, as long as they don’t mind this one being broken.)
• Anne Enright (Everything St. Aubyn writes is worth reading for the cleansing rancor of his intelligence and the fierce elegance of his prose — but rollicking, he is not. A knockabout comic novel needs a plot that believes in its own twists and turns, and that is not on offer here. )