Hemingway: the bigger the beard, the better the writer? Photograph: Corbis
Should all novelists under 30 be banned from publication? That might sound a bit extreme or even absurd, but let's dig a little deeper. How do you begin to validate such an outrageous proposition? For starters, consider these authors: James Joyce, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, Richard Brautigan, Knut Hamsun, Sherwood Anderson and Mark SaFranko. The later work of all these writers is undeniably superior as it is more rounded and contains greater emotional depth.
Most writers take years to get to grips with their chosen craft. And to produce anything of literary worth, they need to have lived a little, taken jobs, travelled, had a series of love affairs, shot a man in Reno. How can you write about life if you haven't even lived it?
Most masterpieces are composed by writers in their 30s. Authors produce some of their best work as they stumble towards mid-life and beyond. Of course there will always be stunning exceptions like The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, whose work arguably deteriorated as she matured (because of illness?). Then there's Mary Shelley and Frankenstein, Digging the Vein by Tony O'Neill or The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. There will always be a few ebullient individuals who cram several decades of living into a few years, and still have the ability to transmute their experiences into art, but generally these prodigies are few and far between.
So why is it that our bookshelves and book columns are filled with work by young and talented but underdeveloped writers? One quote from an unnamed publisher will probably suffice: "When I saw the new writer was under 30 and very photogenic, I breathed a sigh of relief." The majority of publishers do not want to publish great books by older, maybe less attractive authors. Sex sells, beauty sells, and - wouldn't you know it - youth sells. Look around at the current crop of much-vaunted young writers, male and female: there's not an ugly duckling among them. Coincidence? Perhaps, but go to their work and it just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. The writing is as flat as the paper it is printed on.
Ultimately, publishers and marketing folk have to take some responsibility for this systematic denigration of our precious culture. Brilliant writers will be lost forever, and publishing young, not-yet-ready authors and hyping them into oblivion does the writers themselves few favours. Where do they go from there? If they are told they are good when they've yet to develop, how can they judge the validity of everything they do afterwards?
Maybe banning all novelists under 30 is a fanciful idea, but if publishers used this awkward notion as some sort of yardstick, our bookshelves might contain a good deal more than just pretty covers, pretty pictures and problematic prose.
