La Muselivre

All trades have some kind of professional jargon – hacks must have their spikes, and cobblers their lasts – but there's something different about the patois of Grub Street. Admittedly, it relies on the same sorts of abbreviations as other trades: "I couldn't put it down" becomes "unputdownable"; "It was so funny I laughed out loud" becomes "laughoutloud funny". Publishers and critics need these terms like they need terms for genres, such as chicklit, ladlit, bonkbusters, sexandshopping and killerchillers. Somehow, the way we talk about writing has become rich in clichés. It affects the way we publish books, the way we cover them, and the way we consume them. You could devise a circle of clichés, starting (because we have to start somewhere) with the publishers. Publishers have to tell journalists, shopkeepers and readers what a book is like as quickly as possible, so find themselves using an immediately recognisable language. There is no counting the books that have subtitles beginning with the words "the extraordinary true story of", or the times when the story is untold and the truth shocking. One publisher told me that a book was a "lie-in-the-bath-with-a-glass-of-wine" kind of book; another that a work was "Alan Bennett meets Victoria Wood". (I wish I'd stopped myself from suggesting that they might have met already.)

The "x meets y" construction is an invaluable way of summarising a book whose disparate elements might call for lengthier description. Another is to talk of an author's progeny – he or she could be the bastard offspring, or bizarre lovechild, conceived in a crack house by the union of Marcel Proust and Jeanette Winterson. Yet another is the culinary image: take Tobias Smollett, stew him in his own juice, reduce, mix in some finely chopped Poe, season with Patti Smith and serve with late Henry James.

L'art (?) de faire des critiques littéraires.