Guardian lite

This is the advice that Anne Enright gives to her insecure creative writing students:

I say, ‘You have no confidence? No one who is any good has any confidence. So tell me, what makes your particular lack of confidence so special?’

Or, for the grandiose (because it can swing both ways) I say, ‘You think you’re a genius? Then why does this sentence you have written make no sense? Oh, because you’re a genius. I forgot.’

This is great advice – it’s a shame the writing in Enright’s article is so hopelessly bad.

Look at this:

The thing you have written is a piece of shit. Can I say this louder? And then repeat it really, really quietly? The thing you have just written is a piece of shit.

Or, the thing you have just written is the best thing that has ever been written, it is a truly wonderful thing. Alright it’s a piece of shit, but it’s the best piece of shit I’ve ever seen. It is both wonderful, and, yes you are right, truly awful. But it is mostly absolutely wonderful. We hope. Yes, we are sure that Beckett would have loved it, and so will WH Smith.

And this:

Sepia for old age: I am looking forward to the writerly sepia of old age.

And, most of all, this:

But actually when I think about it, the self-deceivers are fewer over there: most poets are a little sad-eyed, a little reluctant, with a twitch of failure in them somewhere (or, in some cases, a roar of it).

I’m sorry but this is just awful – twee, smug, full of unjustified relish, without self-awareness, the textual equivalent of Margaret’s ‘silver-bells laugh’ in Lucky Jim. It’s a style, easy to replicate, full of crafted asides and lazy profundities, that we can call ‘Guardian lite’.

I hope Enright tossed this off in twenty minutes and that she saves the best of herself for her novels.