... an introduction to a novel.

Far from being an elitist, or seeing himself as writing for a select coterie, Johnson professed himself baffled by public and critical taste. Why shouldn’t his dazzling innovations, his ingenious re-thinkings of the novel’s possibilities, be winning him both critical respect and a wide readership? ‘The mainstream’, in other words, was exactly where he wanted to be: but a mainstream defined according to his own terms.

—Jonathan Coe, introduction to B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates.