The Girl On the Page

by John Purcell

  ‘No one writes exclusively from the vat, just as no one writes exclusively from life. Writing is a series of compromises. Writers from life need to be understood, so they borrow from the vat. Writers from the vat need to be new, so they take from life.’

  Malcolm stopped speaking.

  The audience seemed to be leaning forward, just as Angela and Michelle were. They expected him to say something more.

  He looked across at Angela, then over at me.

  ‘I just thought of something Dylan Thomas said while giving a lecture,’ said Malcolm: ‘“Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me.”’

  The audience laughed.

  ‘No, no, Malcolm,’ said Angela, ‘not at all. So you think literary fiction is the consequence of a particular combination of a writer’s direct experience of life and their reading?’

  ‘Well, of course it is,’ said Liam. ‘Literary fiction is . . .’

  ‘Literary fiction doesn’t exist, Liam. Not the way you think it does. You set out to write a literary novel as though the word “literary” describes a genre the way the word “crime” does. Literary fiction. Crime fiction. But “literary” describes a quality. It defies genre because it can apply to all genres.

  ‘I thoroughly enjoyed Tangential, Liam. But it isn’t literature. It’s a work written by a writer steeped in a particular kind of literary fiction. At a guess, I’d say your particular vat was filled with novels by Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, John Banville, Roddy Doyle and, for a bit of extra zest, Will Self. It doesn’t mean your book isn’t any good. It is good and thousands of people have already enjoyed it. And thousands more will, too. And that’s a wonderful thing . . . Bringing enjoyment to thousands of readers. It is, isn’t it?’

  Liam stared at Malcolm and nodded.

  ‘We’re all here because we love reading. Especially novels,’ Malcolm continued. ‘To be honest, I’ve never particularly liked the idea of literature. I’m still suspicious of the word. When I was growing up in London’s East End, it always seemed to be a stick with which to beat the lower classes. As a teen I resented those who read and enjoyed the classics, who went to see Shakespeare at the theatre, who could drop quotes into their conversation. And I was right to. Many people did use literature as a weapon. And they still do. And I would hate for anyone to think that I thought of literature that way. To me, literature is the fastest and surest route to understanding something of this life. At eighty-one, I know how brief our lives are. Mine has flashed by. And any help making sense of the world is still most welcome. The quicker the better. What is literature? Literature is life’s cheat sheet.

  ‘As my beloved late wife, Helen Owen, said, “Great writing is rare. With so little time on this planet, shouldn’t we spend at least some of that time getting acquainted with the writers most often acknowledged as exceptional?”’

  And with that Malcolm placed his hands in his lap and was silent.

  For a moment the audience was silent, too. His fellow panellists were looking at him, expectantly.

  As the silence lingered, I had an awful feeling that I was the only one in the audience who appreciated what he had just said.

  Then the audience applauded all at once. Some stood and whistled. His fellow panellists were applauding, too.

  I stood up and raised my hands above my head, clapping like a child.

  Malcolm turned and saw me, his face a smile.

  Further Reading

  Recommendations from the principal players:

  Helen Owen

  1.Middlemarch by George Eliot

  2.Persuasion by Jane Austen

  3.Howards End by E.M. Forster

  4.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

  5.The Death of the Heart by Elizabeth Bowen

  6.The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles

  7.Night by Edna O’Brien

  8.Stoner by John Williams

  9.The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

  10. The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald

  11. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather

  12. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

  13. The Echoing Grove by Rosamond Lehmann

  14. Brief Lives by Anita Brookner

  15. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte

  16. Three Lives by Gertrude Stein

  17. A House and its Head by Ivy Compton-Burnett

  18. Stories by Alice Munro

  19. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

  20. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

  Malcolm Taylor

  1.Tom Jones by Henry Fielding

  2.Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

  3.Emma by Jane Austen

  4.Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

  5.Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

  6.Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann

  7.Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens

  8.New Grub Street by George Gissing

  9.Lost Illusions by Balzac

  10. Vanity Fair by Thackeray

  11. Esther Waters by George Moore

  12. The Turtle Diary by Russell Hoban

  13. Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess

  14. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

  15. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino

  16. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass

  17. Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford

  18. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

  19. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser

  20. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut

  Amy Winston

  1.Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling

  2.The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

  3.Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

  4.Alex Cross by James Patterson

  5.The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough

  6.Flowers in the Attic by V. C. Andrews

  7.The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

  8.Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer

  9.Jack Reacher novels by Lee Child

  10. A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin

  11. The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins

  12. Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

  13. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

  14. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson

  15. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins

  16. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

  17. The Godfather by Mario Puzo

  18. Shōgun by James Clavell

  19. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

  20.Maigret novels by Georges Simenon

  Liam Smith

  1.The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré

  2.For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

  3.The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

  4.Roots by Alex Haley

  5.London Fields by Martin Amis

  6.On the Road by Jack Kerouac

  7.White Teeth by Zadie Smith

  8.The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

  9.Red Storm Rising by Tom Clancy

  10. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

  11. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri

  12. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

  13. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières

  14. Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon

  15. On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

  16. The Stand by Stephen King

  17. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  18. Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

  19. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

  20. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

  Max Lyons

  1.Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust

  2.Ulysses by James Joyce

  3.The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

  4.Hunger by Knut Hamsun

  5.Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

  6.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

  7.Madame Bovary by Gust
ave Flaubert

  8.Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

  9.The Red and the Black by Stendhal

  10. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

  11. Rudin by Ivan Turgenev

  12. Hamlet by William Shakespeare

  13. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

  14. Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

  15. The Awakening by Kate Chopin

  16. Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald

  17. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

  18. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

  19. The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

  20. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

  Trevor Melville

  1.The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham

  2.Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence

  3.Our Man In Havana by Graham Greene

  4.The Naïve and Sentimental Lover by John le Carré

  5.The Darling Buds of May by H.E. Bates

  6.The Ginger Man by J.P. Donleavy

  7.Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes

  8.Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy

  9.Silas Marner by George Eliot

  10. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens

  11. The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

  12. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos

  13. Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon

  14. A Room with a View by E.M. Forster

  15. As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning by Laurie Lee

  16. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

  17. Kipps by H.G. Wells

  18. The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim

  19. A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway

  20. The Story of San Michele by Axel Munthe

  Julia O’Farrell

  Julia declined the invitation to submit a recommended reading list, so Amy, who knows her best, provided one for her.

  1. The Bitch by Jackie Collins

  2.The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  3.Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

  4.Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith

  5.Don’t Read This Book If You’re Stupid by Tibor Fischer

  6.Malice by Danielle Steel

  7.Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams

  8.Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh

  9.Ignorance by Milan Kundera

  10. The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  11. The Insulted and Humiliated by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  12. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young

  13. Mantrap by Sinclair Lewis

  14. Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope

  15. You Can Heal Your Life by Louise L. Hay

  16. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum

  17. The Burden by Agatha Christie

  18. The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb

  19. Eating People is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

  20. Nice Work by David Lodge

  The Author

  1.Middlemarch by George Eliot

  2.Clarissa by Samuel Richardson

  3. Persuasion by Jane Austen

  4.Daniel Deronda by George Eliot

  5.Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

  6.The Egoist by George Meredith

  7.War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

  8.Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

  9.Mademoiselle de Maupin by Théophile Gautier

  10. The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

  11. The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather

  12. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser

  13. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead

  14. Maurice Guest by Henry Handel Richardson

  15. Weymouth Sands by John Cowper Powys

  16. Gertrude by Hermann Hesse

  17. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man by Thomas Mann

  18. North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell

  19. Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis

  20. Stories by Anton Chekhov

  Acknowledgements

  My wife, Tamsin, is the reason this book exists. Without her love and support, and her stubborn refusal to read any part of it until I was finished, I would still be perfecting the first few pages. Thank you, my love.

  And thanks to Catherine Milne, my publisher at HarperCollins, who had faith in me as a writer long before she had the chance to sign me up as one of her authors. You have helped my writing immeasurably.

  Thanks to Simone Camilleri, my agent and friend, who took me on when no one else would.

  Thanks to my parents, Pat and Terry Purcell, who encouraged me from the very first, even when, as a cocky nineteen-year-old, I sat down to write my autobiography. The best of parents, they let the world burst that bubble. And to my brother, Tim, who was one of the very first readers and loudest supporters – ta.

  Thanks to Isabel for being awesome.

  Thanks to Ben for all the material. And to Andrew Cattanach, my one-time colleague, my friend, my sounding board, thanks for your faith in me.

  Thanks also to Sarah McDuling, who has been on this writing rollercoaster with me for years.

  Thanks to the incredible HarperCollins team: patient Scott F., honest Alex C.; Nicola Y. and Claire G.; the indefatigable Alice and Sarah, wonderful Kate M., Michael W. supporting from the wings, James who steered from above, Emily and Tom, Hazel Lam for that cover, and many others.

  For all those who have put up with my writerly pretensions over the years: Anne, Jane, Matt, Dawn, Trish, Keith, Claire, Tina and many others – thanks.

  Thanks also to my long-suffering work colleagues, some of whom read early versions of the book: Tania (pink), Ben, Rob, Olivia C., Jo (fashion consultant), Tanaya (meh), Bron E., Olivia F., Tracey, Angela, Kirsty, Hayley H., Jill, Liz E., Nick, Zia, Mark, Bron D., Sara, Elana, Sam W. and many more. It’s a privilege to work with such great people.

  Special thanks to Hayley Shephard for her Mr Bean GIFs and inspiring notes from abroad.

  This novel about novelists wouldn’t be the same without all the fictional cameos from real-life authors. Thanks to Val McDermid, Michael Robotham, Jeanette Winterson, Paul Beatty, Kathy Lette, Michelle de Kretser, Angela Meyer, Jojo Moyes and the dozen or so other novelists mentioned. I hope you all appreciate that this novel is a love letter to books and writers.

  Thanks to Christopher Tomkinson for recommending I read Catch-22 back in Year 12. This is all your fault.

  I also want to thank all the people who have taken the time over the years to talk books with me – from the delightful oddbods who frequent second-hand bookshops to the writers who allow me to pick their brains every chance I get.

  And finally, thanks again to my wife, Tamsin. Loving a writer is no easy thing.

  About the Author

  While still in his twenties, JOHN PURCELL opened a second-hand bookshop – imaginatively called ‘John’s Bookshop’ – in which he sat for ten years reading, ranting and writing. Since then he has written (under a pseudonym) a series of successful novels, interviewed hundreds of writers about their work, appeared at literary festivals and on TV and been featured in prominent newspapers and magazines. He lives in Sydney with his wife, two children, three dogs, five cats, unnumbered goldfish and his overlarge book collection.

  Praise for The Girl on the Page

  ‘In The Girl on the Page, John Purcell triumphs with a scalpel in one hand and his heart in the other. It is a gripping, dark comedy of a novel which eviscerates the cynicism of contemporary publishing while uttering a cri de coeur for what is happening to writers and readers this century. Through this dark comedy – I squealed with laughter, page after page – flash questions about cultural life that Purcell asks but leaves us to ponder’ – BLANCHE D’ALPUGET, author of Winter in Jerusalem, Turtle Beach and Robert J. Hawke: A biography

  ‘It’s like getting on a fast-moving train, or maybe a rocket, filled with people who love books as much as you
do. You cannot and don’t want to get off, but must follow every dynamic, insatiable, brilliant character right to the stunning end’ – CAROLINE OVERINGTON, bestselling author of The Ones You Trust, The Lucky One and The One Who Got Away

  ‘A juicy page-turner that takes a scalpel to the literary world, written with deep insider intel and a gleeful sense of mischief, The Girl on the Page is a wickedly clever, razor-sharp satire of lust, betrayal and ambition’ – CAROLINE BAUM, broadcaster and author of Only

  ‘You could strip The Girl on the Page of all its publishing insider juiciness; what remains is a searing take on integrity, commerce and the consequences of compromise. Purcell is a born storyteller, having spent a lifetime surrounded by books and having learned from the masters of the craft. The Girl on the Page is moving, hilarious and ultimately heart-wrenching. It’s a love-letter to literature, for sure, to its creators and its readers. But it’s so much more than that, too’ – SIMON MCDONALD, Potts Point Bookshop, Sydney

  ‘A rollicking, sexy read about great fiction, trashy readers, writerly egos and the industry that feeds them all’ – MICHAEL ROBOTHAM, Gold Dagger winner and international bestselling author of The Other Wife and The Secrets She Keeps

  ‘Whilst questioning the very definition of what makes fiction commercial or literary, Purcell himself brilliantly genre-straddles, moving his novel from what starts as a comic romp to a serious rumination on literary integrity, commercial realities, ambition and the importance of flexibility and compromise, both personally and professionally’ – SCOTT WHITMONT, Lindfield Bookshop, Sydney

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction set in the literary world. While some of the authors and books mentioned in this book are real, all the events are purely fiction and the contents are not endorsed by any of the people mentioned.

  Fourth Estate

  An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers