READ IT AND WEEP | July 3rd 2008

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Britain's bestsellers are under fire. But are they any worse than their American counterparts? Tom Shone curls up with several books from each list to find out ...

The third instalment of autobiography from the former page-three model Katie Price, "Jordan: Pushed to the Limit", sees her through many trials and tribulations--post-natal depression, a miscarriage, a near-miss with Posh Spice. It ends, however, on a jubilant note. "Next year I'm thirty and I'm planning a massive party. I've got more novels coming out, more TV series, more trips to America and more merchandise," she writes. "I should also have had my boobs done again. This time it's going to happen! They need some serious tweaking." So, too, does the British publishing industry, according to some.

At a Royal Society of Literature debate in March, Clare Alexander, president of the Association of Authors' Agents, criticised a literary culture in which ghostwritten celebrity books, misery memoirs and Richard & Judy endorsements have "tainted publishers' minds". Contrasting the current British non-fiction bestseller charts with the more high-minded titles on the New York Times list, she said, "We have the stupidest bestseller list in the world at the moment."

The New York Times list does have a notable heft to it, coming freighted with the latest works of Norman Mailer, Michael Chabon, Garrison Keiller, Don De Lillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Nicholson Baker and Oliver Sacks. The German list is full of books about travel and the great outdoors, and even finds a space for Germany's civil code at number nine; while the French devour Gallimard novels by the bucketload. The British bestseller list, by contrast, has recently boasted four books by celebrity chefs (Gordon Ramsay, Delia Smith, Rick Stein, Jamie Oliver), two by "Top Gear" presenters (Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson), and two by people whose final push to the summit of celebrity came from reality TV, Jordan and Russell Brand. Ouch. The only work of non-fiction in the French list is the autobiography of Simone Veil, the Holocaust survivor who became the first female president of the European Parliament; the biggest-selling work of non-fiction in Britain has come from a survivor of "I'm A Celebrity...Get Me Out Of Here" who recently had her breasts surgically reduced from 32g to 32d.

To be fair, critics have detected a slight darkening in tone in "Jordan: Pushed to the Limit" by comparison with the earlier volumes. The Price clan seem to spend so much time in hospital that they end up recognising the porters; at one point her mother and grandmother find themselves sharing the same breathing apparatus. "Why does this keep happening to us?" she laments before screeching off to the emergency room, one more time, in her new Ferrari. The book is all OK magazine photo shoots and ruptured uteruses and nothing in between. The best thing that can be said about it is that, the odd ghostwritten leer aside ("girl on girl action"), it's not written for men. The dominant tone, for all her pinks and feathers and bling and fairy dust, is one of simmering rage, "as if I had a gremlin of anger building up inside of me and at any moment I would explode and tell everyone to fuck off!" She never does, more's the pity, instead dutifully trotting along to a Blackpool gay bar in hot pants and high heels, pregnant, to promote a new album, smothering her objections as she goes. "Who knows," she muses, "maybe one day my image will be on a stamp."

What's behind the Jordan phenomenon? Partly it is the nature of fame these days. At a time when most a-list celebrities have pulled up the shutters and retreated behind their press
officers and PR consultants, the public need for celebrity access has outstripped the supply of celebrities willing to give it, thus allowing others to step into the breach: it is precisely because Julia Roberts doesn't do one-on-one interviews any more that Katie Price feels the need to come clean about her blood clots.

The other reason seems twinned with the reality shows that gave rise to her, which is to say, it has to do with the weakened power of fictional story lines to hold the public's attention. Say what you like about someone whose first instinct on seeing her dead grandmother is to whip out her camera-phone and take a picture of her in the casket, she certainly registers more vividly than the wan lawyers and downy movie stars who troop through the fiction of John Grisham and Danielle Steele.

You can't fault either of these titans for not trying to keep up with the times. The new Steele novel, "Honour Thyself", is all about a "legend of film and stage" who is holidaying in Paris when she is caught in a terrorist bomb blast; the new Grisham, "The Appeal", is all about an unscrupulous Wall Street millionaire who tries to fend off an ecological lawsuit by buying himself a judge on the Supreme Court (they cost $8m, apparently). Neither book escapes the flatness of the newspaper clippings that inspired them: America may simply be more of a non-fiction kind of place right now.

The last few years have seen the non-fiction lists turn into something like the conscience of the nation, with lots of sharp, fierce, anguished  books about the war on terror, the Bush presidency, the war in Iraq, the corruption of the judiciary, the erosion of civil liberties and so on. If Delia's "How to Cheat at Cooking" appears to be the level of British self-incrimination, it could be because it is America's turn to feel bad about itself right now.

What of its fabled ability to feel good? There's another, more prosaic reason for the top-heaviness of the American lists; in 1985, the New York Times editors grew so weary of titles like "Jane Fonda's Workout Book" dominating their list--it had spent six months at number one, and more than 16 months in the top five--that they sectioned off all the self-improvement titles into a separate list, called "Advice". If you remerge the two lists, to show which books have actually sold the most, things don't look so civic-minded for the Americans. In, with a bullet, come titles like "Stop Whining Start Living", "Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat?" and "How Come That Idiot's Rich and I'm Not?", a common feeling for those perusing these lists.

Sticking the word "you" into titles seems to act as rocket fuel: there's "Become a Better You", not to be confused with "You: Staying Young: The Owner's Manual for Extending Your Warranty", or indeed "Are You Ready! To Take Charge, Lose Weight, Get in Shape and Change Your Life Forever". So does a reassuring feel of bestsellers past. The top non-fiction title on the merged list for the first ten weeks of this year is Rhonda Byrne's "The Secret", a small book with a "Da Vinci Code"-ish cover and a sonorous blurb. "You hold in your hands a great secret. It has been passed down the ages, highly coveted, hidden, lost, stolen and bought for vast sums of money. This centuries-old secret has been understood by some of the most prominent people in history: Plato, Galileo, Beethoven, Edison, Carnegie, Einstein..." Already you're on guard: how can it be lost if it's so widely known?

There are plenty of quotes from other self-help gurus--motivational speakers, "life adventurers", and self-proclaimed "spiritual messengers"--and lots of pseudo-scientific jargon (magnets, vibrations, wavelengths and the like), but basically it boils down to this: think positively. To those who object that they have been thinking positively ever since Norman Vincent Peale's "The Power of Positive Thinking" in 1952, you haven't really been trying. Really concentrate: "Look at the back of your hands, right now. Really look at the back of your hands: the colour of your skin, the freckles, the blood vessels, the rings, the fingernails. Take in all those details. Right before you close your eyes, see those hands, your fingers, wrapping around the steering wheel of your brand new car..." The book peddles the same brand of spiritual uplift that has long found favour in America: free yourself from the cares and wants of this world, follow the road less travelled, but feel free to do so in a brand new Lexus.  Byrne advises against reading newspapers or watching television (too much of a downer), and urges us, at the end of the day, "if any events or moments did not go the way you wanted, replay them in your mind in a way that thrills you." Thus "The Secret" represents the more feverish and forgetful strain of the American character: it could well turn out to be George Bush's favourite book.

I'm not sure what Bush would make of Khaled Hosseini's "A Thousand Splendid Suns", which completes its global victory tour with a British number one. Admittedly, Hosseini got there with a leg-up from daytime telly in the form of "Richard & Judy", but still: a work of fiction! A work of foreign fiction!

Hosseini's first novel, "The Kite Runner", told of the friendship between two Afghan boys against a backdrop of turbulent war-torn history. The new one, with a cunning switch of focus, tells of the friendship between two Afghan women against a backdrop of turbulent war-torn history. First up is Miriam, a beautiful bastard child disowned by her father and married off to a foul, abusive shopkeeper with sagging breasts called Rasheed. Cut forward a decade, the communists have been routed by the mujahideen, and Laila, the daughter of a bookish family in downtown Kabul, is dreaming of the day her boyfriend will return from the mountains. When a rocket slams into the side of her house, however, she is found in the rubble by none other than Rasheed, now shopping for a second wife. Of all the luck: the one flabby-breasted symbol of male bigotry in the whole of Afghanistan and she falls into his clutches.

The rest of the book is spent waiting for Rasheed to get it in the neck, if only to put an end to this kind of thing: "Meet our real masters: Pakistani and Arab Islamists. The Taliban are puppets. These are the big players and Afghanistan is their playground." It's Hosseini who is the puppet-master here, pulling together over three decades of recent Afghan history, and all too often letting you see the strings: "If she could articulate it, she might have said to Nana that she was tired of being used as an instrument, of being lied to, laid claim to, used." If she could articulate it? There's a strong whiff of authorial condescension here, as if Hosseini were worried that his Western readers wouldn't really get these funny foreign characters, and needed an extra helping of liberal outrage to smooth the way.

He lives in California now and "A Thousand Splendid Suns", for all its teeming detail, feels a strangely uprooted piece of work, foreign fiction for those who can't be bothered with a translation. It faces West, not East, to the land of Disney and "Titanic" showing on movie screens while Taliban shells lay waste to Kabul. "Inside Laila, too, a battle was being waged...How could she care about statues when her own life was crumbling to dust?" Big news, I guess: the age of terror has finally found its Herman Wouk.

The New York Times's creation of a ghetto for all their dumbest books seems like a bright idea, and could easily catch on in  other countries. The Germans could siphon off all their travel books, the Japanese all their health and beauty titles, and the British could issue a moratorium on all their tv personalities. On the other hand, it's hard to see what would be left. Russell Brand is working on a second "Booky Wook" which is said to focus not on Brand himself but on everything else, including "football, sex and the school rabbit". Come back, Delia--all is forgiven.

AMERICA's bestsellers--pulp fiction and self-help

1 The Appeal - John Grisham  708,000
2 7th Heaven - James Patterson  329,000
3 Plum Lucky - Janet Eavonich  277,000
4 The Secret - Rhonda Byrne  276,000
5 Duma Key - Stephen King  265,000
6 Rodrick Rules - Jeff Kinney  184,000
7 A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini  173,000
8 You: Staying Young - Mehmet C. Oz  145,000
9 New Moon - Stephanie Meyer  131,000
10 World Without End - Ken Follett  125,000

BRITAIN's bestsellers--big on celebrities and chefs

1 A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini  281,000
2 Delia's How to Cheat at Cooking - Delia Smith  229,000
3 Jordan: Pushed to the Limit - Katie Price  135,000
4 Jamie at Home - Jamie Oliver  121,000
5 Remember Me - Sophie Kinsella  65,000
6 My Booky Wook - Russell Brand  57,000
7 Lords of the Bow - Conn Iggulden  53,000
8 7th Heaven - James Patterson  53,000
9 Nigella Express - Nigella Lawson  49,000
10 The Appeal - John Grisham  49,000

Picture credit: cindiann/flickr

(Tom Shone is the author of "Blockbuster". His first novel will be published next year by Hutchinson.)