`Young, gifted and black" was an empowering slogan in the America of the 1960s, and if you were all three, there was just no way of stopping you in your pursuit of fame, wealth and happiness, though Sam Cooke and Jimi Hendrix might disagree.
"Young, Gifted and Irish" seems to be the equivalent literary formula for the Nineties. Well, young and Irish, anyway. Well, maybe just young, if current publishing trends are anything to go by.
We've already had Dubliner Lara Harte, whose first novel, a teenage rites-of-passage story, was written when she herself was a teenager; while across the water last year, Jenn Crowell was pronounced a prodigy (by her publisher, anyway) when, at seventeen, she wrote Necessary Madness.
These are just two of many - among other recent muchhyped novels are Chris Wooding's Crashing (written when he was nineteen), Caitlin Moran's The Chronicles of Narmo (written at thirteen) and Bidisha Bandy-Opadhyay's Seahorses (written at sixteen).
So are these all whizkids the real McCoy or is youth their strongest - indeed, only - selling point? Jenn Crowell's editor at Hodder Headline admitted to the Independent on Sunday that Necessary Madness "wouldn't have got the attention it did if we hadn't mentioned her age" - or indeed hadn't rushed a staggering 25,000 hardbacks into the shops (the normal print-run is 3,000) to maximise the huge marketing push the book was given.
Penguin are being equally candid about Richard Mason, whose first novel, The Drowning People (written when he was twenty), is due for publication next year. They forked out £110,000 for the privilege of publishing it, and their publicity manager concedes: "Yes, it does help that he's young and looks like a cross between Hugh Grant and Rupert Everett. He's a good news story."
But is this approach good for the business? Auberon Waugh thinks not, arguing that publishers "could make a perfectly reasonable living from good novels that sell 3,000 copies. Instead they want to publish one rubbishy novel by a teenager and hype it up."
It's "desperately regettable," agent Bill Hamilton says, "that books are being sold as showbiz, which has nothing to do with literature," while David Milner of Secker & Warburg regards it as "a fruitless pursuit of the next big thing," with forty-year-old editors "dictating what twenty-year-olds want to read".
Dan Franklin of Cape has a different take on it, though: "Now that bookshops have computerised tills, booksellers can look up an author and see that their last novel only sold 800 copies. An author can't be reinvented. That's why editors hunger for new blood."
And David Milner paints an equally bleak picture of the way publishing is going: "New high-quality fiction is a rare commodity, so when something vaguely competent but marketable comes along, there's a feeding frenzy."
Note that "vaguely competent but marketable". Look on their works, ye mighty, and despair.
ANYWAY, what's the point of hyping these teen prodigies when their contemporaries can't bother to read books anyway? And if you don't believe that, you're not a parent or a teacher and you certainly haven't paid heed to a new UNESCO survey, which reveals that more teenagers in Ireland and England live in homes possessing a computer than in homes possessing twenty-five or more books.
These findings have led to a resurfacing of the old computers-versus-books debate, with defenders of the former arguing that computers are merely a development of the printed word and that to set one against the other is deeply irrational.
Perhaps it is, but I'm not convinced, and certainly I find UNESCO's implication that "twenty-five or more books" in a family home denotes a commitment to literate and literary values very depressing - unless the "more" means at least ten times that figure.
SCOTTISH novelist A.L. Kennedy recently summed up the London literary world accordingly: "It goes like this: I write a novel, you write a novel; I review your novel, you review my novel; we have an affair and I review your novel about having an affair and you review my novel about having an affair; I write a novel about having an affair with someone who reviews my novel, you review my novel about having an affair with someone who reviews my novel. And so on."
But are things any less incestuous north of the English border? Not according to fellow Scottish writer Allan Massie, who, after reading Ms Kennedy's remarks, offered this insight into the Glasgow literary world:
"A writes a novel which B praises lavishly but doesn't/can't read. B writes a novel which A praises lavishly but doesn't/can't read. A and B come together to give a reading at a bookshop. A tells the audience that B is marvellous. B tells the audience that A is marvellous. After several drinks, A leads A's fanclub to a pub, while B leads B's fanclub to another pub. A tells A's fanclub that B can't write but you can't say so in public. B tells B's fanclub that A can't write but you can't say so in public. Several whiskies, vodkas and pints later everyone is happy."
Sounds awfully like Dublin to me.