New Grub Street (Vintage Classics)

amazing book...in amazing condition...love it...kudos to amazon..

Magnificent. Gissing's bleak manifesto of a writer's life.

'New Grub Street' was written by George Gissing, a jobbing writer of his day, little appreciated for most of his life and largely forgotten now. The story tells the life of Edmund Reardon, a writer who, after one reasonably successful novel, is on the road to obscurity. The parallels between author and protagonist are so marked that the story often reads less like a novel than a memoir.'New Grub Street' is a flawed book and one which, interestingly, makes it flaws part of its story. In order to make money from writing, Gissing had to produce ‘three volume novels’, the preferred choice of the publishers of his day. Yet many books really can’t justify three volumes. Gissing has his characters rage against the necessity of stretching work out to that extra volume: “A triple-headed monster, sucking the blood of English novelists.” The second volume, he points out, is usually weak “simply because a story which would have made a tolerable book… refuses to fill three books.”New Grub Street is a clear example of exactly what Gissing complains of. The second volume demonstrates exactly those faults which Reardon identifies in his own work. It consists “almost entirely of laborious padding”. In fairness, Gissing is being unduly critical: there is good stuff in the second volume, but you have to wade through an awful lot of superfluous dialogue to find it. Dialogue, as Gissing points out means “the space is filled so much more quickly, and at a pinch one can make people talk about the paltriest incidents of life.”Gissing has a sharp eye and if he makes Reardon sometimes rather cruel and cynical, that reflects Reardon’s increasing desperation as he moves further and further into poverty. Gissing was almost obsessed with poverty and its social implications, largely because he spent so much of his life poor himself. Gissing’s author characters starve in garrets not figuratively but literally. Even so, many of his observations on life read well in today’s world. One of his minor characters administers a charitable trust – “a charity whose moderate funds were largely devoted to the support of gentlemen engaged in administering it.”Most of Gissing’s observations, though, are confined to the effects of poverty (Reardon lives close to a workhouse and is terrified he will die in there) and to the iniquities of the publishing world. It is his comments about publishing that might be expected most to touch a nerve with today’s writers, for they suggest that many of the issues that we see as being unique to the 21st-century have afflicted publishing since the 19th.Reardon is writing in a world where the market is saturated with cheap books.“The quantity [of literary work] turned out is so great that there’s no hope for the special attention of the public unless one can afford to advertise hugely.”It’s a complaint I hear all the time from authors today and, like today, it leads publishers into arrangements for profit splitting which were relatively uncommon later in the 20th century but which, with the glut of e- books, have come back with a vengeance.“[A publisher] offered to bring it out on the terms of half profits to the author. The book appeared, and was well spoken of in one or two papers; but profits there were none to divide.”The secret, Gissing says, is to be well-connected in society so that your book is talked about by people who matter.“Year by year, such influence grows of more account. A lucky man will still occasionally succeed by dint of his own honest perseverance, but the chances are dead against anyone who can’t make private interest with influential people.”Nowadays, of course, we don’t need to invite influential people (or ‘influencers’ in 2018) into our homes. That’s what social media are for.So much of what Gissing says is relevant to publishing today, it’s almost uncanny, but the most uncanny of all is his understanding of the appeal of modern media like Twitter. Here one of Reardon’s friends comes up with the idea for a new magazine – one which eventually makes his fortune:“I would have the paper address itself to … young men and women who can just read, but are incapable of sustained attention. People of this kind want something to occupy them in trains and on ‘buses and trams.… What they want is the lightest and frothiest of chit-chatty information – bits of stories, bits of description, bits of scandal, bits of jokes, bits of statistics, bits of foolery. Am I not right? Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention can’t sustain itself beyond two inches.”The idea for a typical modern media offering is worked out in immense detail – right down to the click-bait headlines. It’s a terrifying foresight into modern publishing.Gissing also has a way with words. I particularly liked his description of Reardon trying and failing to extract the ideas from his brain and put them down onto paper – surely an experience all writers have had.“Twice or thrice he rose from his chair, paced the room with a determined brow, and sat down again with a vigorous clutch of the pen; still he failed to its excogitate a single sentence that would serve his purpose.”‘Excogitate’ is a word I would love to see in common currency.There is a lot wrong with Gissing’s book. His love life was a miserable failure (he quite probably died from the effects of tertiary syphilis) and misogyny is a recurring theme. It’s too long, possibly too bitter and remorselessly cynical, but it remains a fascinating insight into writing and writers, just as true now as when it was written. I wholeheartedly recommend it.

An examination of the intellectual literary milieu of which Gissing was part. Talent is insufficient to succeed in the business of publishing. Who you know is more important. Gissing reveals the tawdry nature underlying success and the tragic despair of failure through a collection of believable characters and their very different fortunes.

Some people regard this as one of the classics of English literature. For me, it shows the distance between the very best - Austen, Eliot, Conrad, etc. - and the next best.In many ways, it is a very good book. The milieu, clearly one with which Gissing was intimately familiar, is perfectly realised and, as documentation of the lot of a workaday author in late nineteenth century London, it would be hard to better, assuming we can trust the prejudices of the author.Judged as a novel, however, it falls well below Middlemarch, Vanity Fair and The Way We Live Now. Its focus is extremely narrow, dwelling on the tiny contemporary population of London based novelists and literary journalists. Perhaps, I missed it, but there was little attempt to extrapolate from the lives of these members of the intellectual proletariat to those lived outside this charmed circle.The main protagonist, Jasper Milvain, is beautifully drawn and I loved the way the author presents his shameless opportunism and casual betrayal of his fiance without moral judgement. In the author's eyes Milvain simply could not help himself, any more so than Aesop's scorpion. But Amy Reardon, who is crucial to the plot, is no more than a cipher and I could not believe in her transformation in the last pages of the book.And then there's Reardon himself. In some ways, he is the jewel at the centre of the book, but he also incarnates its major weakness. Reardon is a caricature, a satire of art for art's sake. But it is a pusillanimous satire; Dickens or Thackeray would have taken the joke much further and to much greater effect.Heaven knows the book could do with more humour! It's a very depressing tale, with many deaths and even more defeats. Gissing, being of the second rank both intellectually and in terms of literary quality, allows himself to wallow in this. I would like to see the rewrite by Oscar Wilde which, with greater lightness of touch and intellectual insight, would have had much more fun with the apparent dichotomies of the inaccessible literary masterpiece and the populist prose of the professional writer, of the over-educated and under-financed and the over-moneyed and the under-educated, and of those that aim for posterity and those that settle for the here and now.If you have already read most of Dickens, Thackeray and Trollope (and/or Balzac and Zola for that matter), then this is a book for you. If not, I would start with the European Super League of Austen, Eliot, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Conrad and James, before moving on to the First Division of Dickens, Thackeray et al, and only then start on Second Division players like Gissing.

A gripping read, tackling a dilemma that seems as real today as it was a century ago. What are promising young artists who find themselves on their uppers to do? If, in order to keep family, body and soul together, they 'sell out' and produce poor work that sells, are they waving goodbye to their integrity? If, beset by anxiety, they fail, are they letting down their promise and those who had faith in them? Is plodding on into destitution really the honourable course or is it deluded? Gissing shows us with wonderful acuity what it is like to be a struggling artist, and what it is like to live with one - and also how, out of poverty the seeds of corruption, breakdown and despair set in. But don't worry, this is not a gloomy book. In anatomising a range of characters whose circumstances and choices vary, he makes all come alive on the page, and we feel compassion for every one, even the hilariously worldly and the angrily disappointed. This is a book by someone who knew how pitiless the world of the young writer could be, and I'm amazed that I've only just discovered it.

Gissing has been decribed as the English equivalent of Emile Zola and its easy to see why.This book tells the story of writers, would be writers and their friends and families.Most are struggling to scrape a living but one in particular takes a more mercenary view of his craft.The book resembles Zola, particularly His Masterpiece, in that it deals with a similar theme - the persistence of the "artist" in sticking to what he considers worthy and the inability to compromise those values even at the expsense of his health and the love of his family.Not an upbeat novel but worth reading nevertheless. For something a little more cheery I would recommend In The Year of the Jubilee