Why Not Just Say That a Good Novel Is "Good"?
On the public acclaim for Charlotte Wood's "Stone Yard Devotional"
I spent a long time—a decent chunk of the autumn—umming and ahhing over what I wanted to say about Nicholas John Turner’s Let the Boys Play. Every time I resolved to just get it done and write something, I’d set down some thoughts and then walk away, ruminating awhile on my scant remarks before I could find the resolve to return to them and reconsider whether I meant what I’d said. Let the Boys Play is a ferociously difficult book to discuss. It resists all the readily available language we have for talking about literature. And as most of my struggles came about when I knuckled down over the last two or three weeks, they were thrown into relief by a novel I read in tandem with the writing: Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional.
It’s not my intention here to review Stone Yard Devotional. Many have done that already: see Frank Cottrell-Boyce and Blake Morrison, see Astrid Edwards and Fiona Wright. See anything said by anyone who commented on the 2024 Booker Prize, for which Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted. I also don’t really want to review the reviews, at least not in any systematic way. They all basically say that Stone Yard Devotional is a good novel and I’d basically agree with that assessment. But that’s the thing I feel moved to press harder on at the moment. Stone Yard Devotional is so plainly and obviously “a good novel”—so demonstrative of the qualities that mark out “a good novel” in our literary discourse: a timely premise, deft psychologising, quiet lyricism—that you can’t really call it anything else. But nor, for that very reason, can you say anything more about it. I read it in a state of somber recognition: it took no risks, contained no surprises, and raised a number of thematic concerns for contemplation of a satisfyingly untroubled sort. It is a model of literary fiction as fodder for chitchat at an upper-middle-class dinner party.
A sense of this, albeit suppressed, comes across in all the reviews above, even as they indulge in wild overpraise. Cottrell-Boyce calls the novel “powerful” and “generous,” while Morrison takes the opposite line and celebrates it for being “austere.” Edwards likewise notes its quality of “austere contemplation,” lauding Wood’s “tremendous craft,” and Wright sees it as “a beautiful and masterful book,” a novel of “quiet force.” Yet none of these reviews quite says why the novel deserves such plaudits or demonstrates how it earns them. The praise appears in each review as a non sequitur to a summary of the narrator’s situation and voice, as if, in combination, the novel’s subject and its quintessentially “literary” style make it self-evidently worthy of adulation. But in the lack of textual evidence to substantiate the excessive acclaim, I can’t help sensing an indirect admission of underwhelm: not because Stone Yard Devotional is bad, but because a writer who is so adept at producing “a good novel” decided not to whet her skills on something more ambitious. If, with their praise, these reviewers meant to protest that Stone Yard Devotional is more than just “good,” they protest too much. Bloggers like Rohan Maitzen and Whispering Gums are comparatively measured, less hyperbolic, closer to the spirit of the sedate responses this novel truly deserves.
The question I kept coming back to while reading Stone Yard Devotional, while battling to write about Let the Boys Play, was: why? Why can it not simply be said that Stone Yard Devotional so fully embodies our expectations of “a good novel” that that is exactly and finally what it is? Why is it so hard to say that the novel is clearly the work of an intelligent and capable writer, but not a visionary one?—that it holds the reader’s attention for its duration, but not a moment longer?—that it ticks the boxes for programmatic admiration, but is otherwise unremarkable? I suspect that the above reviews overreach precisely because the novel is otherwise unremarkable: as if, today, there’s something intolerable about speaking of a novel whose straightforward competency deserves only polite appreciation. So, I suppose, I came away from those reviews feeling as if we’ve lost a discursive category. Many terrible novels are published every year, along with many mediocre ones. Stone Yard Devotional is neither terrible nor mediocre: it’s a cut above the best of any year’s most middling books. Equally, though, every year, many new novels reach so much further than Wood’s does—flirting more freely with failure, meeting with varying degrees of success—that to hail Stone Yard Devotional as an act of literary bravado reeks of desperation. Desperation for what? For an appropriate lexicon and a tone that jointly enable “a good novel” to be identified as such, at a time when there’s no shortage of supply.
Look around at the world; look at what’s out there for your entertainment. There are so many similarly good novels, and films and streaming series that are “good” in comparable ways, that it’s faintly embarrassing—isn’t it?—to come across another one and have to call it what it is. More satisfying, surely, to trump up the achievement: to pinpoint a few pleasing idiosyncrasies and declare them proof of a revolutionary novel, eliding all evidence of the conventionalism that is their context. But when I encounter this rhetorical manoeuvre in reviews these days, I can only cringe. I think again of Let the Boys Play and of my struggle to address it. If someone were to ask me whether Let the Boys Play is a good novel, I honestly wouldn’t know how to answer. What would the question be getting at? The word “good” loses all meaning in the presence of a novel like Turner’s; the value judgments it rests on collapse. Whether a reader deems it “good” or “bad” in an ultimate sense is almost beside the point. What matters is its refusal to conform to, or even appeal to, any commonsense notions of what constitutes “good” and “bad” in contemporary fiction: it forces each reader to find their own way towards an expression of how it works its art. In light of a novel like Let the Boys Play, there’s something egregious about seeing a much safer, more down-the-line novel receiving such unmerited reverence. The discrepancy, to me, feels symptomatic of an impoverished literary discourse: one whose terms of reference have been diluted by a surfeit of the merely adequate.