I have just read Wrote For Luck: Stories. I know D.J.Taylor as a literary critic although the fly leaf of this collection tells me he has written a number of novels. Eleven to date. I must be honest here and say that I had not read any of his fiction until now, and now I am not convinced that I will read any more.

Perhaps it's the smallness of his canvass: East Anglia, academe, literary types. In Wrote for Luck (all the stories have dates on them) but I kept thinking he had written them in the 1950s, except I knew he had yet to be born then. His England is almost entirely white (a single student in the English Department of a provincial university comes from Taiwan), and because he clearly grew up in Norwich and now lives there again, his geographical reach is small too. When he creeps into London, for example, he seems not to grasp it at all. Let me be fair, though. The two stories set in Brooklyn and Chicago DO work much better (for me), which may be a comment on my own ignorance of those places.

What troubles me most is two things. His characters are insipidly neither here nor there. It's not that I don't not care about them - I just can't remember them two pages on. And his language is oddly ponderous, grammatically heavy and at times extraordinarily old-fashioned, and people in their 20s sound as if they are well past middle age. Not once in these stories did I look up from the page in appreciation of a lovely sentence, or image, or idea. I didn't feel I learned anything. And yet they're not bad, these stories. They're just...