Was 80s literature as crap as 80s clothes?

[Nightynight]

Remember all those worthy, Booker Prize winning authors in the 1980s? Was it just me, or were they all really (whisper) ?

And isnt there a whole load of more interesting fiction being published today?

VS Naipaul, Martin Amis, Anita Brookner, AS Byatt, Salman Rushdie, Roddy Doyle, Ben Okri....I really tried to read their stuff in the 80s but I couldnt usually get past the first few pages.

I have revisited some of it recently, and find it just as turgid, just as pseudo-intellectual, just as boooooooring.....

is it just me, were the rest of you in raptures over Hotel du Lac, The Famished Road and Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha?

loved Crow Road (and in fact all Ian McEwan, I even went to see him read at Waterstones which is slightly embarassing).

Cannot stand Martin Amis, the sheer arrogance of the man is enough to make me want to rip his books up.

I wore noisy trousers and a lot of earrings, mostly in one ear. Even an ear cuff.

See, the States were still fairly conservative, so you could be really really cool there when actually you would be a bit of an also-ran in the UK. My students used to be impressed with my trousers, which was sweet of them.

I still have, and wear, the wonderful butchy DM-soled brogues-with-bits-chopped-out that I bought from a directional boutique in Boston in, hm, probably 1987. Someone complimented me on them just a month ago.

Tell me to go away, or alternatively you lot stop being interesting. Thanks.

punk/goth = me !
I honestly did get photographed by tourists quite often when hanging about in public places with my friends. They seemed to think we looked sufficiently weird to warrant a picture. Wish I'd charged for it!

extremely pointy flat shoes from Kensington market. Hyper hyper came later!!!!

Adore possession, in fact all AS Byatt. has penelope Lively been mentioned? Likes Moon Tiger which I think won the Booker in the 80s. Amis's Money and London Fields were fantastic novels that summed up the period for me - he's never been that good since.

Marina - have never met another Hilary Mantel fan - I've read everything she's written (and met her too she is delightful).

I want to read the new Jay Mcinerny ,just to catch up with those characters again (I did like Brightness falls, against my better judgement)

Deeply sensible dh has suggested \link{http://www.granta.com/back-issues/7?usca_p=t\this} as our touchstone for the best & worst of 80s literature. And there it is on our shelves, dessicated and gently yellowing.

The other thing that occurred to me, re 80s literature, was that the 80s were I think the first decade in which book publicity became a really glossy marketing exercise, as part of the whole shift in publishing to becoming much more of a business selling products (very in tune with the times, of course). So books were pushed and hyped in a much more commercial way than they'd ever been before, on a basis not entirely to do with their literary merits; while at the same time publishing houses merged and became huge corporate enterprises.

I also wore badge objecting to things. And some of mine were even in Welsh.

I also used to crimp my hair....gawd help me, I must have looked like Crystal Tips!

I was thinking some more about this, as you do.

Primo Levi. He's more essentially 70s I guess really than 80s (Periodic Table, I have just checked, was published in 1975) - but as he died (so tragically) in 1987, he belongs to the 80s and counts as the very total opposite of that meretricious unit-shifting MI is talking about.

His essay/memoir about the chemistry of paint recipes is I think my most sustaining fable - it comes up in my mind over and over again - like yesterday, sitting in a grim meeting working through the papers for a wildly over-complicated financing deal, based at bottom on trades done before, but with all kinds of weird hangovers and red herrings and interpolations from the specifics of the last deal. Anyone else have something like that, that they've read once and then ever after they find it informing their life again and again?

I love Martin Amis, but not as much as I love Will Self (always have had strange taste in men)

For me the ultimate poseur (quintessential 80's phrase that) was Brett Easton Ellis