What do you look for in a novel?

[suiledonn]

After reading most of the recent thread about authors whose success is a mystery to you I am wondering what do you look for in a novel? I am stunned by some of the names mentioned in the other thread and wonder what does it take to impress the modern reader. I love any story that is well written with characters that come alive. I like everything from modern American literature to classics with some murder mystery thrown in for good measure.

but Pruners all my book group hated one book so much they all took it down the charity shop

I loved it

they were wrong

i have just bought the private papers of eastern jewels. loved wild swans.

look for things a bit different really. hope it's a good book

or is it brought

I don't know if I look for something. There are things I avoid. I avoid chick lit - I hope not cos of snobbishness, tho prob, yes. Just not my type of thing.

For me and for most probably its about something that touches your own life, or makes you think about life in a wider/different way. I think though if it touches you, if you feel it has the potential to 'speak' sorry to you, then I'd give it a go. Just instinct really, and if you make a mistake, then nothing lost really.

I give a book 35 pages to get me gripped, if I'm still struggling to read it after p.35 then I leave it. This only goes for fiction though obviously.

I like to take something away from a book I've read, so like them to have some depth, and not too much descriptive writing, as it bores me and I prefer to make my owm mentail image of everything going on.

secondhand, elasticwoman - secondhand?!

We have a Kent Haruf on the shelf.
I don't boycott Americans, I limit them!

What's wrong with 2nd hand, UQD? Very environmentally friendly.

Did any one like 84 Charing Cross Road?

Yes i know it's by an american UQD but did you read it?

Nothing wrong with second-hand for the reader, but the writer gets nowt!

Now UQD I have a quandry. Would love to read some of your work purely on the basis 'I know you' (as in MN world have seen you around) BUT that is quite an issue...
a) you would have to give away your real life persona in some way
b) If I hated it I would have to avoid you forever
c) If I didn't understand it I would have to avoid MN forever!!!
I have based a few novel choices on the author being from my very small hometown (and boy was I disappointed!!)

chrissnow - I've been happy to send anyone who has messaged me details of my website, but I don't post it on here because it's quite fun to keep my anonymity to some extent!

I can understand that.

Re 2nd hand books: writer gets nowt but if the book in q is either out of print or not readily available in the shops, it could get a reader interested enough to buy more recent output. But maybe all your stuff is still in print.

True enough! Oh, if only all mine were all still in print...

I disagree with UQD, I don't think limits and prejudice are the way to go.

It is much better to be a non-prescriptive reader and open yourself out to suggestions and surprises and accidents.
Its absurd to never read Americans - you miss some of the best novels of recent years - everyone should read Richard Ford and Philip Roth and John Updike and probably Saul Bellow and Anne Tyler and oh just all of them.

Open-handed, open minded. Be a good reader. Being a good reader is important I think. Don't expect the book to live up to what YOU want it to be, let it be itself and then decide if you like it/want to pursue it/are interested in the story/are interested to see what the novelist aimed to do and whether they pulled it off.

Writers of course don't always make good readers, but they should try to be.

I'm not entirely serious about my prejudices. I love to go into a bookshop and pick something up by a new writer I've not heard of. It's just that there is so much out there now that i feel I'll never keep up with it unless I exercise some kind of quality control!

I agree with 100x, being prejudiced and presecriptive results in something quite narrow which is surely the opposite of what you are hoping? Isn't it a bit like being stuck with 1980s make-up when perhaps you could be a bit more open-minded?

I really enjoy Anne Tyler's writing. Has anyone read any Raymond Carver? He is so economical and precise in his writing - he perfectly captures the rhythms of speech. I loathe wordy books - this often spoils a really good story. Authors - what is wrong with a short book? Why are there no slim volumes of anything? Is it a marketing/sales thing?

I am also a lover of non-fiction from time to time. At the moment I am reading Irrationality by Sutherland. Evan Davies recommended it and it is the sort of book that informs and really makes you think, hard.

swedes - interesting post by Susan Hill on her blog about the R&L selection on long books vs. short books:

"You will find that most of them deal with countries other than this one and times other than now and several deal with war in one way or other. These are the books which have meat - the writers have something to write about, a story to tell, a time to immerse themselves in, another country to describe. This is the sort of book which a lot of people are reading now. They want meat. Thin, beautifully written, inward-looking contemporary literary novels are not fashionable and the 'me' novel does not find a place in this selection."

UQD - Susan Hill - "Thin, beautifully written, inward-looking contemporary literary novels are not fashionable and the 'me' novel does not find a place in this selection."
What does she mean?
Can't something be thin, beautifully written and outward-looking?
What is a 'me' novel?

Her blog is too wordy -I found myself peering at my nails and intercepting emails the moment they pinged in.

I look for:

Excellent writing
Theme - a really big question underlying the text: I want to know the writer has been compelled to write the book by Serious Metaphysical Consideration
Provocation - implicit encouragement to examine an issue/question/dilemma you haven't before
Identifiable/likeable (this may be a weakness of mine, and also may be part of the potential conflict between enjoyment/appreciation vis., for me, Money by Martin Amis) characters

Most importantly, I want the form of the book to add something - I want the way it is written to be additive to the story, to tell me something about how the author thinks of their story as an organism. Aware this sounds massively wanky but is the product of much contemplation on the difference between literature and fiction. Vis. Infinite Jest for an excellent example, but there are myriad others.

ps UQD you would exclude David Foster Wallace multiple times over on your criteria (I think the precocious bastard wrote IJ before he was 30, and certainly did The Broom of the System), and that would be a crying shame.

I like books that really give me an insight into another place or another time. DH and I are currently fighting over a book called 'Dick's Mistake' which his great-great aunt won as a Sunday school prize in 1896. It was published by the SPCK. We're three chapters into it and we still don't know what Dick's mistake was.

I avoid slim literary volumes about serial killers.

Ooh I know about SPCK books.
Dick's mistake will be ... hmmm. Is Dick a pious orphan? Or a complacently well-fed, well-parented, in possession of all advantages, child? Or, possibly, a dog?

Assuming he is No.2 of those options, Dick's error is going to have been truanting from Sunday School (at the instigation of a boy whose sense of right and wrong Dick should have known is doubtful - there'll have been a Fib told in one of the earlier chapters). Because of the truanting, Dick will find himself caught up in, let's see, petty theft - not that he'll do any, but he'll be an accessory. But he will cross paths with, natch, a pious orphan, whose selfless concern for her elderly neighbour will make himself see himself anew. And somehow the pious orphan nexus will absolve him from the petty theft cliffhanger.

The pious orphan will become a regular at Dick's Sunday School, but class distinctions will be maintained (ie they will not end up planning to marry).

If Dick is a dog, however ...

Or might Dick's mistake be:
a) Going to Sainsbury's car-park at 1am?
b) Looking into the steamed-up vehicle?
c) Never having heard of dogging?

I look for:

1. a pink cover.
2. its title on the email about the next book club.
3. anything i've read a million times before to give me an incentive to peel myself out of bed rather than just lie there groaning.