The novel that knocked Lolita off the top spot was Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, which stayed there for nearly 30 weeks. And it wasn't just Lolita, published in America in 1958, capturing readers' imaginations. What he went on to say is that "if you consider that Nabokov's Lolita was on the New York Times bestseller list for nine months, it's a different order of literature". My favourite riposte came from Self’s ex-wife, the journalist Deborah Orr, who, with the weariness of firsthand experience, tweeted: “Imagine him standing over you sneering in real time as you read your Sally Rooneys.”īut, pompous as he may be, Self makes a valid point about the state of literature today. If, as the saying goes, “intelligence is like underwear – it’s important that you have it but there’s no need to show it off”, Self has certainly never really grasped the concept. One gets the impression you’d never have to ask Self what he’s reading he’d have told you already. The response was particularly angry, I suspect, because it was Self who made the remarks. And if you fall between the ages of 16 and 35, the chances are you received at least three copies of Normal People, a love story about two childhood friends in Ireland, at Christmas. There are quickly diminishing piles of her novel in every bookshop window. It’s unlikely the notoriously contrarian Self, who once accused the Harry Potter books of turning out a generation of “dumb kidults”, will be remotely concerned but his comments have provoked a prickly backlash (not to mention generating publicity for his latest literary work – penning 88 fortunes wrapped around macarons and distributed to diners in Hakkasan restaurants in London).Īccording to all the right people, Rooney is "the voice of the millennial generation". "I don't mean to be overly critical but in terms of literary history, it does seem a bit of a regression." It was not quite on a par with the most memorable literary put-downs – after being punched by Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal famously managed to mutter from the floor: "As usual, words fail him" – but it was titillating enough nonetheless.
"It's very simple stuff with no literary ambition that I can see," he complained in an interview with The Times. Will Self caused a stir in literary circles earlier this month when he laid into novelist-of-the-moment Sally Rooney, a 27-year-old whose novel Normal People has been nominated for the Booker and Costa book awards.
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