and yet early Ian McEwan is great - the macabre, twisted short stories and the novellas like The Cement Garden. In those days, some talked of him as a 'punk novelist'
after that he does go 'mature' and definitely m-brow
(although On Chesil Beach is actually a great little book (movie is poor though))
most things dissed as middlebrow are good as far they go
there are three avoidance strategies used by those who social and educational background would naturally consign them to middlebrow taste (meaning in music, Radiohead / Chemical Brothers / Kendrick)
- the avant path (anything extreme or uncompromised or challenging or dense or unpalatable - Henry Cow / Morton Feldman / power electronics / Derek Bailey)
- the lumpen path (h-core, ragga, uk drill, trap, street beats of every kind etc etc), not slumming exactly because you venerate this stuff as the true art-not-art of its time.
- the pop path (embracing the mass produced, Hollywood / Tin Pan Alley / TV voice contests etc, disposable, manipulative / exploitative, - the ultimate power move here in recent years would be K-pop but there are many gradations up to that including Nashville, Stock Aitken Waterman, that swedish producer dude etc). Again this can be done camply and kitschly, or the non-slumming, this is actually better, it's true popular art, it's streets ahead on the production etc etc
these are all strategies for disidentifying from a weak idea of "art" / "literary" with its correlated notions of well-made, improving, virtuous, that those of the same class background as oneself fall into line behind
you get those moves in nearly all zones of art/entertainment
e.g. Stewart Home had that whole thing about pulp novels and Richard Allen's skinhead books