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The comic novelist takes aim at the industry’s elitism, but his story of a farcical literary festival is dated – and overly focused on Will SelfFunny ha-ha is tricky. For every reader who cackles with laughter at an author writing “this person was making plans to micturate upon one’s pommes frites”, there’s one who will wince. Some will feel the universe joyfully lighten as they read: “There’s a personage at the parsonage.” Or: “I believe it was Roland Barthes who said I love it when a plan comes together.” I can’t pronounce this unfunny, since funny is so largely in the hi-de-hi of the beholder. I cannot, however, report that any laughter issued from my own personal hilarity hole.Dan Rhodes’s half-dozen comic novels have their fans, and he is upfront in Sour Grapes that a falling-out with his publisher (what he calls his “ongoing scrap with the biz”) prompted a satire on the industry. Some of the barbs here, about publishing’s exploitation of young workers and the inertial classism, hit home. But the actual story, concerning a literary festival in a picturesque English village, feels like something out of the 1950s. Continue reading...