I'm going back to Proust this August. The truly long read is a summer treat
Short hits might seem preferable to vast narratives, but stories that take time to absorb offer special pleasures
Mon 6 Aug 2018 01.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 6 Aug 2018 03.10 EDT
The Man Booker longlist 'was a sign, perhaps, that the hegemony of the conventional narrative – a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, told in a roughly recognisable 'literary' style – was waning'. Photograph: John Stillwell/PA
Another summer, and another assault on the unscaled mountains of literature. Having woefully failed at 2017's attempt on Henry James, who fell foul of a sudden addiction to his sleuthier cousin PD, I'm once again preparing to tackle Proust, courtesy of a 50th birthday present of a beautiful boxed set of In Search of Lost Time. Thank God I shan't be doing it alone, but in the company of novelist Susan Hill, who explained in last week's Spectator Diary that, having got so far and no further on multiple previous occasions, she too was going back in. She is now on Book 5, and I salute her.
Perhaps if we succeed, we can meet up, together with other Marcel completists, and debate the merits of the essay by Perry Anderson that recently featured in the London Review of Books. Anderson argued, at some length, that we should regard Anthony Powell, the author of the 12-volume novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, in a kindly light, possibly even kindlier than that we reserve for Proust's magnum opus.
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The argument for Powell can be crudely summarised as an argument for the close, but crucially detached, observation of what Anderson called, way back in 1984, "the greatest fictional representation" of "the last true leisure-class in metropolitan history". Powell's narrator, Nick Jenkins, goes to a lot of parties; Proust's, not so much. Where Proust wove magical sentences around his alter ego's profound interiority, Powell abandoned his to the cut and thrust of the elite's social and political lives. What he was aiming for, wrote Christopher Hitchens in 1998, was "the harnessing of counterpoint"; he also quoted VS Pritchett's description of Powell as "a Proust Englished by Wodehouse".
Pritchett, unsurprisingly, was on to something there: not merely that Powell had a talent for spotting the jocular side to human, class-based interaction, but also that it led him to a particularly fruitful blend of humour and satire. Nobody who has followed the adventures of Kenneth Widmerpool – a humourless, pompous man on the make who goes from Labour MP to member of a cult – could doubt it.
But whether you are in #TeamProust or #TeamPowell, it might seem the time is right to question whether these long, fictional trajectories are, themselves, now a part of Lost Time. When the Man Booker prize judges announced their longlist of the 13 novels in contention for this year's £50,000 prize, much was made of the inclusion of types of book not previously recognised by the award – notably the graphic novel and the thriller, in this case Nick Drnaso's Sabrina and Belinda Bauer's Snap respectively. It was a sign, perhaps, that the hegemony of the conventional narrative – a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, told in a roughly recognisable "literary" style – was waning, and that the arbiters of what was good and worthwhile in contemporary fiction were starting to loosen their stays. There was a novel in verse, Robin Robertson's The Long Take; a multi-vocal dive into London life, Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City; and a terrifying, gendered dystopia, Sophie Mackintosh's The Water Cure.
Simon Russell Beale (right, with James Purefoy) played Kenneth Widmerpole in the TV adaptation of A Dance to the Music of Time. Photograph: Table Top Productions
And of course, the last three winners of the prize – Marlon James, Paul Beatty and George Saunders – stake a large claim to the idea that traditional narratives are no longer holding sway when it comes to handing out the cheques; Saunders's Lincoln in the Bardo, in which dozens of the newly dead congregate in the afterlife to discuss the fate of Abraham Lincoln's deceased son, is a masterclass in bewildering, and then beguiling, readers.
As culture, politics and social life appear to fracture and atomise, and find representation in short, sharp hits of writing – Olivia Laing's Crudo, for example, both set and written in seven weeks last summer, or Ali Smith's against-the-clock quartet of novels – does a place remain for the long sequence, written over many years, filled with recurring characters, looping themes, patterns that emerge only in retrospect?
Happily, yes. Take Alan Hollinghust, for example, whose technique of progressing the story in blocks of time, with unchronicled years between them, worked to vivid effect in his most recent novel, The Sparsholt Affair. Others eschew the strict parameters of the series – each novel following on from the previous in obvious chronology – by creating works that bear a strong family resemblance, and which, taken together, seem like attempts on the summit via different routes.
Amanda Craig's novels, Hearts and Minds and The Lie of the Land, take the nation's pulse with wit and insight, and she is now deep into the next instalment. Jonathan Coe's new book, Middle England, will be published this November, a quarter of a century after What a Carve Up! appeared, melding a very British love of comic B-movie culture with a panoramic view of the tyranny and loathsomeness of the ruling classes. This after a series of ambitious assaults on the establishment. His last novel, Number Eleven, managed to combine both the passage of time with painfully acute swipes at the idiocies and venalities of contemporary culture (you might never watch I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! in quite the same benign light again). So the purveyors of the longue durée are still in business, just over 100 years after the first instalment of In Search of Lost Time. I'll do my best with Proust this summer. But the best news for lovers of fiction is that we don't have to choose between the long view or the short run-up; we can have them both.
• Alex Clark writes for the Guardian and the Observer