Ten years ago, Martin was struggling through his final year of an English literature degree at Glasgow University. “My professors used to sigh when I entered a tutorial,” he says with a wry grin. “I’d have been out for three nights on the trot, and I just glazed over whenever I heard the word ‘intertextuality’. I’d practically faint if they suggested writing an essay.” He ended up with a third. “Just.”
If only they could see him now. Martin has been reading his old modern-literature course books — James Kelman, Katherine Dunn and Irvine Welsh among them — and passing them on to the other members of his book group in the fashionable London enclave of Hoxton. “It’s my new favourite club,” he says, with the kind of enthusiasm he might once have reserved for a night at Fabric or Nag Nag Nag.
Martin isn’t alone. In the past couple of years, the once fusty and elitist world of literature has undergone a makeover: books have not only become a little less bookish, they have actually become hip. For a jaded generation of late twenty- and early thirtysomethings, literature is filling the slot once occupied by nightclubs, records, trucker caps and magazines. These neoliterati are just like any dudes and dudettes slouching on the Tube, wearing Converse All Stars, with scuffed hair and bulging pupils — only they’re more likely to be engrossed in the first-edition Anthony Burgess paperback they found on eBay than the latest issue of Dazed & Confused.
As if to illustrate the point, Martin pulls a dog-eared copy of Gwendoline Riley’s Sick Notes from his bag. “It’s pure class,” he gushes. This is hip lit incarnate, bridging the gap between yawning Radio 4 debate and an afternoon pub read. Riley’s flyleaf photo is of a 25-year-old, thrift-chic Mancunian photogene who looks as if she could quote Nabokov, but also drinks too much Guinness and probably lost her virginity in the back of a vintage Volkswagen Beetle on the hard shoulder, with the Smiths on the stereo. She is hip lit’s poster girl.
Hip-lit get-togethers are outside the mainstream of the current book-group boom. There are no mums in leggings cooing over Alice Sebold in their front rooms. These meetings of hipster minds take place in subterranean cocktail bars, the back rooms of pubs, clubs and hidden speakeasies. Ten years ago, The Fountain pub in Clerkenwell changed its name to Filthy MacNasty’s, and Gerry O’Boyle, the then proprietor, brought a bit of rock’n’roll to the written word with the introduction of events that have since become London legend. “The idea is incorporative,” says Tony Gaskin, the pub’s current manager. “It isn’t someone standing on a plinth and addressing their fans. It’s engaging with people.” Not like a Waterstone’s book reading, then? “Exactly. It’s for people who like books, poems and beer.”
The hip-litster’s annual gathering is the Port Eliot literary festival in Cornwall, launched last year as the scenester antidote to the stuffy aspiration of Hay-on-Wye. Their Wallpaper is Zembla, the brilliantly irreverent literary magazine that numbers Marc Jacobs and Jil Sander among its key advertisers and the Dior Homme menswear guru Hedi Slimane and Carrie Bradshaw footwear favourite Manolo Blahnik as contributors. (“Zembla is the future of magazines, because it has intelligent content,” says Slimane; “Zembla is the best magazine in the world for the written word. It is for originals, for people who think,” echoes Blahnik.) Their replacement pop stars are crossover authors Riley, Luke Sutherland and Hari Kunzru. And their style icon is Zadie Smith, so cool she makes a point of playing down her fashion nous with an official author’s photo that would shame a librarian. All it needs now is for Kate Moss to be papped with a copy of Madame Bovary under her arm and literature’s transformation into a fashion statement will be complete.
The process has been a stealthy one. “It basically started with Irvine Welsh and Trainspotting,” says the author Jake Arnott, whose own hip-lit novel, the ripping gangster yarn The Long Firm, is about to make the transition to television. “It was the first book in ages to connect with people outside the literary establishment.” Trainspotting and its descendants were passed from reader to reader with the vigour of a rare white-label 12in single. These weren’t novels for nerds. They were for hipsters.
The slew of drug-inspired literature that followed — including Matthew Collin’s Altered State and Sarah Champion’s Disco Biscuits — dovetailed perfectly with the rave era’s extended afternoon nap in the late 1990s. And these books made one further genius leap of marketing. Instead of confining their sales to bookshops, never the most inviting environment for the literary non-elite, they were sold through high-street record stores, cementing the status of books as the new CDs.
By the time the hip-lit hero JT LeRoy emerged in America, a couple of years back, literature was more than ready for its own radical underground pop star, a role he played out note by note. Bedecked in blond wig and permanent shades, LeRoy looked for all the world like Courtney Love’s 12-year-old niece — or, as was memorably noted in i-D magazine, “ET emerging from the dressing-up closet”. His books documented in intimate detail his childhood trauma — he was pimped out on a trailer-trash parking lot by his own mother. His lyrical angst and exposition outweighed both Kurt Cobain’s and Eminem’s. The style press devoured him, culminating in a 12-page fashion shoot in Pop magazine, shot by the former Louis Vuitton campaign maestro Steven Meisel.
“Readers and publishers have undergone a seismic shift over the last few years,” says the hot literary agent Johnny Geller. “A new generation of authors like David Mitchell, Hari Kunzru and Zadie have become the sort of people that readers could see themselves going out for a drink with. They aren’t traditional ‘author’ types, but their books are still literary events. Basically, the books have lived up to the hype.”
Zembla is the perfect forum for this new hip-lit elite, particularly at a time when traditional style magazines such as The Face and Sleaze are shutting up shop. When a Hollywood heart-throb fronts its next-but-one issue, it will only cement its reputation among the hipperati.
I leave Martin to ponder a copy of the magazine with his trusted afternoon pint, and await his reaction. “Awesome!” comes the text message three hours later. “I’ll take it to the club next week. We can discuss it over a martini.”
HIP-LIT HEROES
Gwendoline Riley, wizard-like Manc impressionist writer, wears thrift chic. Put the Northern Quarter, Manchester's Hoxton, on the map.
Luke Sutherland, genius author of Venus as a Boy, overcoated indie look. Hung around partially cool Glasgow music set in the 1990s — knows Arab Strap.
Zadie Smith, totem hip-lit authoress, swings between sobriety itself and sashaying around in Marc Jacobs. Changed name from Sadie — now sounds like a model.
Simon Prosser, hotshot Penguin editor. His look says: 'But I don't work in publishing.' Is Zadie's editor and co-director of the hipster-lit festival, Port Eliot.
