The Curious Rise of Biographical Novels about Novelists

The Sunday Times has a story about the increasingly prevalent novels about writers genre.

From the piece...

Certainly, the biographical-novel-about-a-writer is an odd, deceptive hybrid: a book which can be made entirely out of other books through an assiduous textual collage. Yet its artifice is often concealed in the final product, which can easily resemble the classic realist novel. It is a very double-edged genre, which can be read both as fiction and as manipulated fact. The basis in facts of the biographical novel appeals to an audience – and perhaps more so, to writers – who can no longer believe wholeheartedly in the more openly fictional; it also answers to a sense of crisis in literary biography, in an age where we demand more verification of facts, are saturated in them, and yet treat them with rising levels of scepticism. The biographical novel is “honest” in this regard: it makes no pretence to authority in matters of fact. It also neatly – perhaps too neatly – sidesteps the vexed ethical concerns over privacy, propriety and intrusion with which literary biography is enmeshed.

There are, however, many ways of writing such books, especially in terms of how close to the factual record one keeps. In his disclaimers to his campus novels Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984) and Nice Work (1988), Lodge was keen to stress the imagined element of his fiction. In Author, Author – and in A Man of Parts, his second biographical novel, about the life of H. G. Wells – he emphasizes the extent to which he has been faithful to the facts. “Nearly everything that happens in this narrative is based on factual sources”, he tells us, “‘based on’ in the elastic sense that includes ‘inferable from’ and ‘consistent with’.” He wants us to feel that what we are reading really happened. Thoughts, feelings and talk, he assures us, have merely been lightly embroidered over the factual scaffolding; imagination here is closely aligned with empathy and intuition, rather than outright invention. And by staying so close to the facts Lodge does secure a certain amount of blind faith from the reader. He is determined not to forfeit “the great advantage of writing a novel about a real person, namely, the reader’s trusting involvement in the story”, as he puts it in The Year of Henry James; yet at times he also seems anxious that he has not distanced his work from conventional literary biography.