Oxford's oldest student newspaper

Independent since 1920

Review: The Failed Anthology

The Failed Novelist Society has been holding weekly meetings around Oxford since its inception at 2am on Friday of 8th week, Michaelmas 2005, when the members of a post-bop gathering realised that they had all, without exception, tried to write a novel at some point in their childhood. A brief history of the collective is given in Selena Wisnom’s adroit prose and forms the anthology’s introduction.

Failed novelists, according to the introduction, do not need to have failed in any formal sense of the world, although the fact they rely on meeting each other in coffee shops for critical appraisal suggests they have not yet reached a wide audience. Their existence is validated by a quotation from successful author Zadie Smith: “All novelists are failed novelists, even the published ones, because no novel will ever live up to the expectations we set ourselves.” Wisnom teases out the ideas behind the group with assured tricolons: “What is important is humility, not to take ourselves too seriously, and to keep on failing. The café we started in failed too, shutting down twice since we left.”

Her introduction is promising, spanning years with humility and humour worthy of David Nicholls, but the final sentence lets it down: “Almost everyone in Oxford seems to have had precocious dreams of novelistic grandeur at some point in their lives. Whether they come to Failed Novelists or not depends on whether they mind failing at it as part of the process, whether they can risk laughing at themselves, whether they can allow themselves to waste time playing games like the cosmopolitan wasp gloated incrementally homewards.” The clunkiness of this simile masks a deeper flaw in the anthology. 

The idea that (broadly) undergraduates can or should consider themselves ‘burnt out’ seeps into most of the prose in this collection, and is symptomatic of an awareness of form (creative writing) and situation (unpublished, in Oxford) that permeates and, to my mind, vitiates the anthology. Fiction should be original and it should make this originality seem effortless; creativity should betray nothing of the self-referential cynicism of Overheard in Oxford. When the authors in the Failed Anthology talk about the fact that they are writers, failed and at Oxford, the illusion is shattered and any sense of originality is lost.

A review of a ‘failed anthology’ could be expected to take one of two trajectories. Either the author could rally against its unassuming title, eking out the jewels buried within its pages and simultaneously complimenting the editor and contributors on their modest choice of name. Alternatively, the reviewer could portray the title as laughably accurate, tragically reflecting the meritless works it unites in one volume.

The book heralds itself as a failure and it is easy for the lazy reviewer to evaluate the book’s claim in a self-referential way, referring to the fact that the book’s title has attempted review itself and then draw on the book’s self-awareness in a self-aware way, in order to elicit a wry smile from the reader. In reality, these approaches would fall into the same trap that The Failed Anthology does.

The first piece of writing following the introduction is a numbered list extolling the virtues of numbered lists. Occasionally, a successful turn of phrase brought Emma Levinkind’s BuzzFeed style take-down of BuzzFeed back from the brink, and its transition into narrative is undeniably clever. But the problem remains: its author is looking for wry smiles instead of just smiles, and this persists throughout.

The focus is on a punchline-style delivery, particularly in the first entries. This can be traced back to the format of the group: a writers’ group means that the work is read out, and the listener is carried along with the author’s diction instead of taking his or her time to allow the eye to linger on certain sentences or words. This is an understandable but regrettable feature of much of the humour of the anthology: it relies on absurdity or cadence rather than situation. The sudden introduction of a South Pacific tuna in an oral delivery of Alexander Newton’s ‘A tale of Koholeth and Lucifer’  would certainly provoke a chuckle of surprise, but on paper it smacks of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and undermines the story’s intriguing opening. Newton wears his influences on his sleeve: the diabolical cat has more than a touch of Bulgakov’s Behemoth in The Master and Margarita.

Elsewhere, Colin Smith’s ‘The Stone’ has a sting in the tail reminiscent of Roald Dahl. That is, if Roald Dahl were to obnoxiously transliterate regional accents and create slimy protagonists who qualify their description of busty barwoman Nancy with, ‘whose sweet scent and moistness lingered yet upon my mouth, hands and parts too numerous to mention’. The distasteful, clichéd thoughts of Smith’s protagonist would be understandable if they did not compare so incongruously with his elegant, skilful and syntactically elaborate opening.

As always when reviewing, it is easier to be negative than to be positive. No single piece of writing in this anthology is entirely devoid of merit, it is perhaps because of fleeting moments of transportation that I felt so disappointed by heavy-handedness.

The contributions from Ariel Sydney, Rebecca Roughan, Luke Rollason and Frank Lawton are almost completely flawless. Sydney in particular provides much needed respite from the anthology’s British focus. Her short story, Sunset Boulevard, is conversational but devoid of punchline. It is colloquial but with a lightness of touch that betrays talent and self-restraint, inserting us effortlessly into LA and the drunken teenage anecdote of the author’s adolescence. Roughan similarly sticks to what she knows, with prose that flows without a hitch. Instead of reading with eyes half closed, afraid to skip ahead in case the illusion is shattered by an awkward expression or clanging cliché, the reader is delighted and ensconced by Roughan’s prose.

It is these flashes of brilliance that redeem the anthology from the brink of failure. These successes demonstrate that nothing – story, poem, novelist, anthology – can ever entirely fail.

Check out our other content

Most Popular Articles