Hilary Mantel is terribly good at it, as is AL Kennedy. But neither of them has deposed Anita Brookner as our most powerful artist of the absence of the good. In Brookner's brilliant but repellant tales life, for both male and female characters, goes into reverse even before it has begun, leaving only a slow, wasteful descent into nothingness. Brookner's are quintessential anti-novels, although written in classical prose. Brookner's characters are female outsiders, unattractive, and unable to grasp life.
Women write differently, and yet in the best writing gender difference is transcended.
Let us insist on this. Virago did this. Orange, emphasising readability, is doing the work of mass market publishers. Last year's winner, Helen Dunmore's A Spell of Winter, is a readable post-Freudian fairy tale about incest. It is a curious world of primitive fears, in which women are childbearers, pleasure-givers or witches, and men either impregnate or police the wandering female psyche.