Clee felt he suffered 'too many self-conscious works of fiction, and writers who didn't feel like novelists to their fingertips. There was some pretty bad stuff - disguised autobiography that didn't really work as fiction, books that were poorly structured, quite a lot of posturing from people who seemed to regard fiction as a kind of exercise, a too common desire to shock, quite a lot of overwriting and a certain amount of underwriting. A few were hard to read: the writers weren't engaged with the reader.'