{"id":334,"date":"2015-02-10T09:48:02","date_gmt":"2015-02-10T09:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/?p=334"},"modified":"2015-02-10T09:48:02","modified_gmt":"2015-02-10T09:48:02","slug":"linda-grant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/linda-grant\/","title":{"rendered":"Linda Grant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"linda<\/a><\/p>\n

Linda Grant was at the Creative Writing Reading Series on Wednesday to read from and talk about her latest book, Upstairs at the Party<\/em>, a campus novel set in an new university in the early seventies \u2013 a university that, though unnamed, is clearly the University of York, where Grant herself went as an undergraduate in the early seventies \u2013 it was then, she said, eight years old, with only 2,700 students.<\/p>\n

Though Grant dismissed the tendency of critics and interviewers to search for autobiography in her books \u2013 describing it as a \u2018modernish idea about authenticity\u2019, this novel, given its setting in time and place, clearly has a quasi-autobiographical setting, even if the events \u2013 leading up to, and then exploring the repercussions of, a tragic event that happens upstairs at a party \u2013 are not necessarily \u2013 though it seemed to me that they perhaps also were closer than Grant explicitly said. However, this seemed needful to Grant in this novel \u2013 which seemed to be focused around trying to understand her generation \u2013 and finding that to do so, she needed to go back, in her own words to the intimate place in people\u2019s lives they return to, their formative influences\u2019. She was interested, she said, in her generation\u2019s idealism and what became of it \u2013 and the novel, and her thoughts on it, seem permeated with the ideologies of the early seventies.<\/p>\n

She described this time, at first. as the dead period between the sixties and punk, but it soon became clear that to her, and for many, this was in intensely active time, a time of heated left wing politics among her generation \u2013 of feminism, Marxism, explorations of gender and sexual identities \u2013 a time when Peter Hitchens could be found on campus hectoring fellow students into taking the Marxist pamphlets he was handing out. Grant now, and in the novel, her narrator, maintains a skepticism towards the fervor of these ideologies \u2013 it is clear that this was a time of political experimentation with identity \u2013 which is perhaps why she describes it as dead \u2013 its experimentation and ardor being both something potentially damaging to individuals, and something that has had long term societal legacies. The age perhaps needed, she said, those that would experiment with and discover the boundaries of these ideologies and identities, and those who fall off the edge.<\/p>\n

This, she said, was what differentiates her novel from other campus novels \u2013 it is the opposite to Brideshead<\/em>, the novel, she said, that they were all reading at the time, because, at York, the halls of academe didn\u2019t really exist: the students themselves were actively creating the mythology and themselves. York, she said, was fascinating, in its ideology that totalitarianism could be defeated by the amalgamation of arts and sciences in a collegiate system built from concrete and centered around a plastic-bottomed lake. There wasn\u2019t, she said, really any pastoral care, its students were left to sink or swim on their own. And many of them sank.<\/p>\n

Asked about the relation of her work to the historical novel \u2013 given that Upstairs at the Party<\/em> is, like her other novels, set post World War II \u2013 that is to say in the relatively recent past, Grant replied that she is far more interested in in what she feels she thinks of as modern times \u2013 with WWII providing a cut off point \u2013 she wouldn\u2019t she said, ever write a novel set during WWII, she\u2019d find it too like dress up, but the legacy of that war, and post world war reconstruction is something that very clearly she thinks of as part of what h some to define modernity.<\/p>\n

She was asked too, about likeable characters \u2013 citing Doris Lessing\u2019s The Good Terrorist<\/em> as an excellent example of a brilliant novel with no likeable characters. The popularity of the likeable character, of someone you can root for, she dismissed, saying the questions you should ask of your characters are: are they alive? are they interesting? is their monstrousness interesting? do you recognize their flaws\/mistakes? If you want to make friends, she said, don\u2019t go to fiction, go to a party.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Linda Grant was at the Creative Writing Reading Series on Wednesday to read from and talk about her latest book, Upstairs at the Party, a campus novel set in an new university in the early seventies \u2013 a university that, though unnamed, is clearly the University of York, where Grant herself went as an undergraduate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39849,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39849"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=334"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":336,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/334\/revisions\/336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/centreforcreativewriting\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}