Repeat offenders

George Dunford October 25

In the book trade, it’s a widely held truism that you get your first novel for free – there are no expectations. But with the second, it’s a different story. In the September edition of Meanjin, George Dunford examines a few pertinent cases of SNS (or Second Novel Syndrome), from Harper Lee to Arundhati Roy, with a view to understanding this very particular kind of inertia. A brief extract is below and you can read the full essay on our editions page.

Craig Silvey’s second novel, Jasper Jones, is actually his third. He had been working for several years on his second, unnamed, manuscript before he found it getting out of control. ‘I kept expanding it and it turned into this amorphous blob and I just got lost inside it.’

The idea for Jasper Jones came tapping at Silvey’s window late one night and—though he tried to ignore it to keep working on his still unfinished second manuscript—he reluctantly let the idea in. ‘Once I started Jasper Jones I felt so incredibly guilty about shelving the second book that I was working on both, so I was just working crazy hours.’

Silvey lets a book or an idea direct him. ‘I start a book with a lot of faith in a very small idea and then trust that instinctively I know where it’s going or that it’ll sort itself out.’[1] His approach paid off with his third book, Jasper Jones, which earned him the 2010 NSW Premier’s Prize for Fiction, a short-listing for the Miles Franklin Award and probably his nomination for Cleo’s Bachelor of the Year.

The condition has afflicted so many writers that it has its own initialism: second novel syndrome (or SNS). Diagnosing SNS in 2006, critic, novelist and literary surgeon Malcolm Knox treated several patients, including Zadie Smith and DBC Pierre, who have both brought out disappointing second books since Knox’s article.[2] According to Knox, the condition can afflict some novelists to such an extent that it can be terminal, as in the case of Pulitzer Prize winning John Kennedy Toole who ‘died before A Confederacy of Dunces was published—a deft way of evading questions about how he was going to follow it up’.