This is a story of buried treasure.
It involves alcohol too, though I can't be entirely sure rum was involved. Or pirates. It goes like this.
A couple of years ago, Ben Yard-Buller was sitting in the pub with one of his authors and a bookseller after a launch event in Croydon. The bookseller - one Jonathan Main - is an inveterate blogger who often praises his latest discoveries online. Main had been banging on about John Williams's novel Stoner long before it reappeared in print two years ago and became a huge word-of-mouth success.
"After a few beers," Yard-Buller recalls, "I said, 'have you got a few tips?'' And he said 'I've been banging on about Tom Drury for ages. Give him a try. He's wonderful.'"
Yard-Buller did. And it turned out, he discovered, that Drury's novels were indeed just that. Wonderful. "I loved them and they were funny in ways I'd never read before," he says.
And so earlier this year Yard-Buller's publishing house, Old Street, republished Drury's novel The End Of Vandalism, some 21 years after it originally appeared. At the start of July Drury's follow-up, Hunts In Dreams, will appear, with the third in the trilogy, Pacific, scheduled for later in the year.
Meanwhile in the last few days I've been working my way slowly, pleasurably through the pages of Jernigan, a novel by American author David Gates, first published in 1991. It's a funny-sad novel powered by the antsy, constantly juiced first-person narrative of its title character. I'm doubting many of you will have heard of it. But that may change.
Serpent's Tail is republishing it this autumn. The British writer Stuart Evers suggests in an introduction to the new edition that "if there is one book that deserves to come in from the cold in the way Revolutionary Road, Alone In Berlin and Stoner have, it's David Gates's Jernigan."
In doing so Evers is seeking to add Gates to the Rediscovered Author's Club, alongside Richard Yates, Hans Fallada and Williams (to take them in order of the above comparison). The same thing, in short, as Yard-Buller is seeking to do with Drury; offering to a public the work of a writer shamefully ignored by readers first time around.
We readers seem to have discovered a taste for them. Both Drury and Gates are to some degree beneficiaries of the Stoner dividend of course. When John Williams's 1965 novel was republished in 2013 it became an unexpected success, "a best-seller of the purest kind," Julian Barnes suggested at the time, "one caused almost entirely by word-of-mouth among readers", racking up sales of almost 150,000 in the space of five months. Publishers understandably feel there is a market to be pursued here.
The question is why? Why, when there is no shortage of new novels being published every single week, are we readers constantly looking backwards?
Maybe it's because we've always known there is buried treasure out there. After all, if we confine ourselves to American literature, Stoner and Revolutionary Road are hardly solitary cases. When it was published in 1925, The Great Gatsby was met by sniffy reviews and slow sales. Dusty copies of the second print run were sitting in a warehouse when Fitzgerald passed away in 1940. And of course John Kennedy Toole committed suicide long before his novel A Confederacy Of Dunces ever found a publisher.
The idea of the one that almost got away is powerfully attractive. But maybe it reflects too the idea that we have a surfeit of choice these days. Every week sees more and more new novels clamouring for our attention. How do we choose what to read amidst all the hype?
And so books that have been around, that have weathered the storm of critical and commercial indifference, that have been dug up and - once you clean away the murk of neglect - are found to brush up well, to emerge from the past gleaming and shining, have a particularly golden aura.
Or maybe - and let's be optimistic for once - it's a lot simpler than that. Maybe, eventually, good will always out. It just sometimes takes a while.
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