As I put it in my discussion of Clive James, the journalist David Owen is “serious, earnest, somewhat intelligent but a bit of a blockhead. Which I mean in a good way. Not clever-clever or even clever, but he wants to get things right.”
Another example would be Nick Hornby. And we’ve already discussed James Atlas.
These are writers with a sort of Tom Hanks vibe: the earnest everyman.
For an example of someone who’s not a member of that class, consider Stephen King. Yes, he famously described his writing as “the literary equivalent of a Big Mac with fries”—but, nah, King has some special spooky inspiration. He’s not a straight-ahead teller-like-it-is of the Owen or Hornby variety.
The thing about Owen and Hornby is that they don’t come across as particularly brilliant or well-informed . . . but obviously they do have lots going for them or they wouldn’t be able to write so well.
Another example would be George Orwell, whom I’ve enlisted as a literary ally before and also defines his own class of objects.
P.S. For more Clive James, see here and especially here.
With the disclaimer that I’ve never, as far as I know, read David Owen, or even heard of him, I wonder if Bill Bryson fits this category. (Disclaimer #2: it’s been at least 15 years since I read Bill Bryson, but I remember liking several of his books, especially A Brief History of Nearly Everything, quite a lot.) Bryson is certainly very clever, but the cleverness is applied to making his topics funny, and he seems genuinely interested in being a non-expect who explains the topic well.
Raghu:
I’ve never read anything by Bryson, but I’ve heard of him, and I heard a radio interview with him, and he does give off a similar vibe to Owen.
I’ve read a lot of Owen and a lot of Bryson, and yeah, they are very similar. Bryson goes for laughs more, but they both have a sort of everyman outlook.
Phil:
In his early book railing against college admissions tests, Owen was positively angry in a way I do not associate with Bryson. Also his High School book was implicitly kind of angry, or at least disturbed with the state of the world. I haven’t read Owen’s latest books, but, going to his website, I see his three latest books are not about golf. Excellent. I just went to the public library website and put all three on order.
I’ll report back in a few months.
Bryson is sometimes angry too. In “The Road to Little Dribbling” he rails against people paving their front gardens. He recounts visiting a street where he used to live, which was formerly (according to him) a charming street with trees and cheerful flowers, and finding that people have paved their front yards and that they are now used for parking cars and storing trash bins. Ah, this review ( https://www.whittierdailynews.com/2016/01/28/book-review-bill-bryson-walks-all-over-england-again-in-new-book/ ) says “There seem to be two Brysons on the journey — call them Angry Man Bryson and the other Grandpa Bryson. Angry Man sometimes distracts from the narrative, ranting against “young men with gel in their hair,” but then Grandpa surfaces to enjoy an “excellent cup of coffee with a free small biscuit” in Ironbridge.”
He’s upset about trash, too. In 2012 he wrote “”Litter is becoming the default condition of the British roadside. Often these days you feel as if you are driving through a kind of large, informal linear tip. Surely we are entitled to expect better. A clean and lovely countryside shouldn’t be a surprise. It should be a right.”
Oh, and evidently he founded “Campaign to Protect Rural England,” I’m not sure if that’s a response to “anger” at what he was seeing in the countryside, but surely something anger-adjacent.
I’m not sure who is more prone to showing anger or upset in their writing, but I could at least make the argument that it’s Bryson.
Yeah, there is the very weird part of Road to Little Dribbing where Bryson calls a teenager an idiot because the boy correctly points out that Bryson has accidently walked into an H&M, and the Marks and Spencer’s he meant to go into is next door. I mean, it’s almost certainly made up, but he does have a habit of making jokes about being a total jerk to young people working for a living that’s offputting.
I really do like the writings of Bill Bryson, but there is one strange aspect to his stuff. For reasons I have never understood, he deeply dislikes Al Jolson. The next time he is interviewed on a call-in program, please phone in and ask why. Or, if you already know, please reply to this blog. Thanks.
I’m 99% sure Owen wrote one my favorite New Yorker humor pieces ever, a short story persistently deploying root words that usually only appear with negative prefixes (un-, dis-, non-). At the end, the narrator works up the nerve to approach someone at party, “feeling gruntled, yet chalant.”
Googling this description, it is not hard to find, and not David Owen:
“How I met my wife” by Jack Winter (published 25 July 1994 in The New Yorker). https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-1304,00.html
It is, certainly, excellent!
Ahhhh, I guess 99% isn’t what it used to be!
99% sure has always admitted of being wrong 1% of the time. We’ll just have to wait to see what the long term frequency of success is for of Kyle C.’s “99% sure” statements! ;)
dang
I would put Nicholson Baker’s nonfiction in this class, though I greatly prefer his fiction, which is definitely not in this class.
And what about John McPhee? Isn’t he the ur-New Yorker in this vein?
Jonathan:
I prefer to pretend that Nicholson Baker has written only two things:
– The Mezzanine
– U and I.
On the basis of these, he’s brilliant, not a member of the objects of the class “David Owen” at all.
As for John McPhee, yes, he’s a New Yorker writer, but he doesn’t give off the same regular-guy vibe as Owen. McPhee comes across to me as an irritating patrician. Hey, what can I say, that’s just me; I know that lots of people think McPhee is great. My take on him is that he tries too hard to write in a boring style, and he succeeds at it. In contrast, I feel that Owen puts in the extra effort to be entertaining. I’m not saying that entertainment is required for a writer, just that I would not put McPhee in the “objects of the class David Owen” category.
I’m thinking of the Nicholson Baker of Double Fold, which I grant was probably written by another author with the same name of the fabulous The Mezzanine and U and I.
Your point about McPhee is fair; but I always assumed the patrician air was something inserted by William Shawn and he just kept it up. I assumed the same about Roger Angell on baseball.
But this helps me understand the class: it’s guys you meet in a bar and ask: What’s your article about? and they explain it thoroughly without your ever taking delight in the conversation. For this, though, I would definitely exclude Owen’s writings on golf,