The doping scandal in literature

Reading between the lines, being scared of what I see

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Late last Sunday, still some distance from the bottom of a stack of books I was reviewing, I had to take another break. Maybe it was the fee I’d relented to (10p a page, or one Freddo in the old currency), maybe it was the writing. It’s not like it was uniform across the books, yet each in its own way, and to no purpose I could gather, lacked:

that elusive but essential something, that sense of music, of voice, of phrase-by-phrase unexpectedness, of constantly returned attentiveness, which makes some texts wine and whose absence leaves the rest watery.¹

Instead the writing read not far off what you’d get in an email. Speaking of, I went to idly check mine. Go fish, I got my wish: one had arrived at this newsletter’s address.

Admittedly it looked like spam. But what had me about to junk it was the same thing that stayed my mouse: the all-caps subject header.

My first mistake was in assuming ‘FOR RODCHENKOV’ meant the email was for the attention of someone called Rodchenkov, and/or that the sender thought someone by that name wrote for me. Reading their salutation, I was both vindicated and…