How I Became A Famous Novelist

Here is a novel for anyone who has ever looked at the publishing industry and thought: yes, this all seems perfectly sensible and not at all driven by vanity, commerce, trend-chasing, insecurity, blurbs from people who may not have read the book, and the desperate hope of being described as “a major new voice.” How I Became a Famous Novelist is Steve Hely’s sharp, gleeful and thoroughly unromantic comedy about literary ambition, and more specifically, about the sort of ambition that would quite like the rewards of art without suffering too much from the inconvenience of meaning.

At the centre of it all is a man who decides that writing a serious or good novel may be unnecessarily difficult when one could instead write a successful one. This is, in many ways, the dream of the modern age: not genius, exactly, but the appearance of genius with good sales figures and perhaps a favourable author photo. What follows is a wonderfully sly dismantling of literary pretension, publishing fashion, and the machinery by which books are packaged, praised, launched, stickered, shortlisted and occasionally even read.

The joy of this book lies in the fact that it knows precisely where to stick the knife. It skewers creative writing clichés, MFA earnestness, authorial ego, and that faintly absurd cultural habit of treating novelists as a species of secular prophets when many of them are, in reality, simply tired people in cardigans staring at email. Hely clearly understands the ecosystem he is mocking, which makes the whole thing much sharper than a simple parody. This is satire written by someone who knows that publishing is ridiculous, but also knows exactly how it is ridiculous.

There is also something deliciously meta about the whole enterprise. Here is a novel about manufacturing literary success, which itself must then go out into the world as a real novel and survive among the very forces it is mocking. It is rather like writing a comedy about award ceremonies and then having to sit through award season smiling politely at canapé trays. One imagines the book enjoying this irony immensely.

For readers who like fiction about writers, this is a particularly entertaining specimen because it avoids the usual fog of tragic sensitivity and tortured brilliance. There are no candlelit scenes of noble suffering over the perfect sentence while rain falls on Brooklyn. Instead, there is calculation, opportunism and the distinctly modern suspicion that culture is, at least in part, a marketing exercise in spectacles and endorsements. In other words, it feels refreshingly close to real life.

This 2009 edition arrives from that not-at-all-suspiciously named institution, Crappy Old Books, in Good condition, which feels oddly appropriate for a novel about the gap between aspiration and reality. It has survived the years well enough to keep doing what it does best: grinning at the literary world while quietly joining it. There is a certain justice in that.

A smart, funny and acidly observant book, this is ideal for readers who love novels, hate literary hype, and secretly suspect that the two experiences may be closely related. If you have ever wondered what lies behind the polished solemnity of modern publishing, How I Became a Famous Novelist is here to pull back the curtain and reveal that, behind every great cultural moment, there may well be a strategy, a sales pitch, and someone trying very hard to look profound on a dust jacket.

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