William Nicholson

William Nicholson is a writer whose work I have greatly enjoyed: Shadowlands, especially, but also the play The Retreat From Moscow and his two novels. He has a new novel out in Britain, to be released in July in the States, and the trouble he had finding a publisher speaks loudly to the defects of contemporary literature. Several publishers balked at the book, The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life, because it did not present comfortable, middle-class characters as malformed objects of derision. Perversion and degradation in the suburbs? Fine. But enlightenment can only be accessed through 98-pound heroin addicts living in Zanzibar. Nicholson was actually told, "We can't publish a novel about a people who drive 4x4s." The book was "not quirky enough." For his part, Nicholson says that "in the little details of domestic life are offered intense forms of existence that aren't often presented in books." I am eager to read it.