Book competition no laughing matter for judges

Those who chair the jury on book prize panels have to contend with the usual discomforts of the job: too many books, eye strain, a piffling salary for months of intensive reading, and refereeing clashes between other jurors.

When television producer Daisy Goodwin agreed to chair this year's Orange Prize for women's fiction, she was unprepared for a new problem - the barrage of "misery literature" that came her way.

So many of the 129 books she waded through to select a longlist dealt with the subjects of bereavement, child abuse and rape that, she said yesterday, "I felt like a social worker by the end of it".

She added: "A lot of them started with a rape. There was child abuse, there was even one anal rape with needles."

Speaking to the Independent, Goodwin said the trend in this year's novels by women, judging by the material submitted for consideration for the prize, was towards depressing, humourless, dismal stories.

As well, she said, some of these novels suffered from the curse of the bookclub - "a story with an issue at its heart rather than a book you can't put down".

"There was very little wit, and no jokes. If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists."

Goodwin, who is herself writing a novel, was critical of publishers who had evidently championed such books.

"Having an issue [at the heart of a novel] is not enough. The pleasure of reading counts for something," she said. "I don't think editors think enough about this pleasure [when they publish a book]."

Goodwin commended the diversity of books on the longlist, including Roopa Farooki's "humane and funny novel" about an autistic teenager, The Way Things Look to Me, which she said was, in spite of its serious subject matter, a "pleasure to read", as well as Amy Sackville's "beautifully written" The Still Point, in which the central character, Julia, tries to sort her explorer great-uncle's archive while struggling with depression and a sense of foreboding about her marriage.

She also liked The Very Thought of You, by Rosie Alison. Quality fiction strong on the misery factor includes the longlisted M. J. Hyland's This is How, in which the lead character is dumped by his fiancee, drops out of university and ends up in prison.

Last October, Annie Proulx's collection Fine Just the Way It Is supplied an unmitigated blast of pessimism, with such stories as Tits Up in a Ditch about an unhappy childhood and casualties from Iraq. In Eva Hornung's novel Dog Boy, set in contemporary Moscow and dealing with homelessness - an abandoned 4-year-old boy wanders the streets and finds comfort in suckling the teat of a mongrel stray.

- INDEPENDENT