Stephanie Merritt - Desperate for nuance, no wonder we are turning to the nonfiction shelves
When public discourse
denigrates expertise, when politicians and Twitter trolls alike have learned to
dismiss every criticism or uncomfortable truth as “fake” and media outlets
compete for clickbait headlines, it’s not surprising to find a corresponding
hunger for a deeper, more thoughtful form of engagement with ideas and for that
– thankfully – there’s still no better medium than a book.
On Wednesday, the
Baillie Gifford prize will be presented, Britain’s most prestigious award for
nonfiction writing. Whichever of the six
shortlisted authors takes home the £30,000 prize and the resulting
boost to sales, it’s an opportunity for booksellers and publishers to remind
the public of the current robust health of nonfiction writing. Not so long ago,
nonfiction bestseller lists were dominated by cookbooks and celebrity memoirs,
but over the past couple of years a noticeable shift has taken place. Books about evolution
(Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens), medicine (Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt), geopolitics (Tim Marshall’s Prisoners of Geography), physics (Stephen Hawking’s Brief Answers to the Big Questions) and philosophy (Jordan
Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life) have all held on in the top 10.
Harari’s
book in particular, with sales of more than three quarters of a million copies,
heralded a renaissance of what the Bookseller magazine
this year called the “brainy
backlist”. Serious nonfiction is
back in fashion, with essayists such as Rebecca Solnit and Teju Cole building devoted followings for work that addresses
political turbulence in the US, and a new generation of British writers – among
them Laurie Penny, Reni Eddo-Lodge and Nikesh Shukla – speaking to new, younger, diverse readerships
on issues of race, feminism and activism.
Acclaimed novelists
such as Zadie Smith and Jonathan Franzen turn their hand to personal essays, a form
that not so long ago seemed a quaint relic from another age, preserved only in
a few determinedly old-fashioned publications such as the London Review
of Books and the New Yorker, but which has seen an
unexpected revival and a new urgency, perhaps precisely because online debate
has become so superficial and lacking in nuance or wider reference. Of course,
“nonfiction” is such a vast and non-specific field as to be almost meaningless
as a descriptor. Even a nonfiction prize with a more clearly defined remit,
such as the Wellcome prize (for books dealing with themes of health, medicine and
illness) can include genres as diverse as neuroscience, biography, history and
memoir – and there has been much controversy over how strictly the last
category is obliged to adhere to the boundaries of nonfiction.
In 2007, when I was a
judge for the Costa Biography award, it was clear that we were attempting to
compare two entirely different types of book under one, unhelpful heading – how
could you measure a scholarly biography that has taken years of archive research
against the emotional pull of a narrative that often details painful
experiences in the author’s life (and how does an outsider arbitrate on whether
that narrative is objectively “factual”)?
But suggesting that
like should only be compared with like in one category makes the very idea of
the Baillie Gifford – a prize open to all nonfiction across politics, science,
history, sport and the arts – seem a comically impossible project, and in any
case, part of its appeal is the sheer variety the shortlist throws up. When it
was founded in 1999 as the Samuel Johnson prize, the name was a tribute to the Enlightenment values of the
great man of letters who could turn his voracious curiosity to any and all
topics. Indeed, Johnson would likely not have recognised the modern distinction
of “literature” to mean only fiction, a peculiar idiosyncrasy of the
contemporary English-speaking publishing industry, with its insistence on genre
labels.
Personal stories have
tended to dominate popular nonfiction in recent years; in 2014, 2016 and 2017,
three out of the four shortlisted titles for the Costa Biography prize each
year were memoirs that explored wider cultural themes rather than traditional
biographies. The unstoppable rise of the TED talk culture has also had a double-edged
impact on nonfiction writing; on the plus side, it has helped to feed an
appetite among a young, educated demographic for enthusiastic, well-qualified
experts sharing cross-disciplinary ideas in easily digestible and accessible
chunks.
But there’s a heavy
bias towards the realm of self-improvement that has been reflected in the kind
of books being commissioned by commercial publishers (all those “How to Be…”
titles), leading the critic Sam Leith to write in 2015 of a “crisis in nonfiction publishing”, in which he lamented that
mainstream publishers were playing it safe with simplistic “talking-point
books”, while the most interesting, serious explorations of ideas were coming
off the university presses.
But perhaps the great
political upheavals of the past two years are changing that. The Baillie
Gifford shortlist often reflects current concerns and this year the emphasis is
on history, technology and how society and genetics shape identity – all areas
with profound implications for the way we live now and in the near future. The
great pleasure and challenge of the best nonfiction is immersing yourself in
the company of writers who are unabashed experts and who will broaden your
knowledge of their subject with references that go beyond a purely personal
take. We need publishers to
keep investing in this kind of serious nonfiction and prizes to keep
celebrating it; books such as these are solid foundations when so much of the
written word is quicksand.
