SOURCE: “Low Fidelity,” in New Statesman & Society, May 12, 1995, p. 37.

In the following review of The Faber Book of Pop, Thomson claims, “there is gold here, but also much that doesn't glitter at all.”

Rave novelist Irvine Welsh is reportedly unhappy at his acceptance by the literati. Hanif Kureishi would surely applaud it—indeed, would see it as inevitable. For he regards pop journalism in all its myriad forms as part of the literary continuum. In his introduction to The Faber Book of Pop. Kureishi dismisses Tom Wolfe’s 1989 “literary manifesto for the new social novel”, declaring pop journalism, biography, the “non-fiction novel” and “personal journalism” to be the late-20th century equivalent of Zola and Balzac. “It is absurd”, he writes, “to think that anyone today could write like Dickens … Pop may have rejected a certain notion of literature … but its progress was accompanied from the beginning by...