On coming across Jessie Greengrass’s novel – her first, following her peculiarly arresting prizewinning collection of short stories An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It – you could be forgiven for thinking it a standard representative of a certain kind of fiction. The sort that bookshops and prize lists are full of, comprising heavily researched material, usually historical and biographical, that is filleted into – and more often than not just plain stuffed inside – a story that appears to be a work of the imagination. So the facts bump up against the fanciful to give the whole enterprise weight and substance, and readers can feel they are not wasting their time in a world of invention but are learning something.
Thus capitalism has its way with the novel; and the novel, in a highly competitive marketplace that sees Netflix and movies and games muscling in on its consumers, gets to live another day. The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton is a perfect recent example of this kind of phenomenon; George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, while more subtle, is another.
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