Andrew O’Hagan

This chapter explores the writing of Andrew O’Hagan from his non-fictional beginnings in the late-1990s to his most recent published novel – The Illuminations (2015). The chapter follows the same chronological format established by the previous revealing two key intertwined concerns underpinning O’Hagan’s writing. These are a concern with the nature of contemporary celebrity as it relates to the postmodern commodification of selfhood, and the tentacular grip that the past holds on the present, especially in the context of Scottish nationalism. The idea of a missing, or corrupted core, unites both these themes and focuses O’Hagan’s writing round a consideration of the weight and freight of realness.

Ali Smith

This chapter explores the writing of Ali Smith from the late 1990s to the publication of How to be Both (2014). It concentrates primarily on her novels and short stories, though some attention is paid to her occasional writings. The chapter is broken into two broad generic sections, the first addressing her short stories together, the second her novels in chronological order. Each text is given close analytical study through formal, stylistic, and thematic critique, building to an overview of an author whose moral sense of duty for the care of the other is paradoxically set against her confusion at the impenetrability of that other’s being.

Tom McCarthy

This chapter explores the writing of Tom McCarthy and situates him as one of the exciting experimental voices of contemporary British writing that is seeking to explore the limits and tolerances of the realistic. The chapter situates McCarthy within the notion of the contemporary avant-garde novel and contextualises his fictional writing alongside his non-fiction and his work as a conceptual artist. This is followed by close analysis of his fiction up to Satin Island (2015). McCarthy’s writing absorbs the cultural novelty of digital convergence, channelling the technological sublime of the 21st century back into the shell of the realist novel to examine the extent to which it any longer has representational credibility.

Introduction: contemporary criticism and the untimely

This introduction outlines the critical aims of the study, identifying the authors covered and placing them within the context of post-millennial writing in Britain. It also centrally addresses the problems involved in practising literary criticism on very contemporary material, and contextualises debates around the end of the postmodern and its aftermath. It seeks to establish (and justify) a critical methodology that eschews broad synopticism in favour of close attentiveness to the reflections and refractions of one author beside another. It also introduces the themes of Materiality, Connectivity, and Authenticity that emerge repeatedly in the analyses that follow.

Sarah Hall

This chapter focuses on the writing of the Cumbrian novelist Sarah Hall, and explores her work’s close engagement with place and landscape as constitutive of social identity. By examining her fiction up to and including The Wolf Border (2015), the chapter explores her insistent concern with the material heft of the physical world in an increasingly weightless, digitised realm. Material stuff matters in Hall’s work, and manifests a ineradicable relationship between the human being and the beauty, pain, and violence of the world.

Jon McGregor

This chapter traces the development of Jon McGregor’s writing up to the publication of his collection of short stories This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone Like You (2012). It establishes McGregor’s deep interest in the resonance of the everyday and the overlooked, and examines the ethical importance of mutual recognition and the import of the other in his writing. McGregor’s fiction always demands the gaze of an often disinterested world both as an act of charity, and as a statement of human connectedness.