David Sexton, the London literary editor whose nib is frequently (and most enjoyably, for those not jabbed by it) dipped in acid, came down on this year’s Man Booker longlist like a barrel of concentrated sulphuric. The 19 novels on the list represented, Sexton jibed, “a curious incident of authors missing”. And number one among those missing, as the allusion made clear, was Mark Haddon.

Haddon is a writer who pinballed all over the cultural scene, in some very unlikely places, before striking it rich with his first novel for the adult market. The acclaim that The Curious Incident received was what all novelists dream of — but ought perhaps to fear. After that early (premature? unearned? lucky?) triumph comes the ominous question: “Where do I go from here?” Is there, one may wonder, any other direction for the too instantly famous writer than down, into that capacious wallet for literary oblivion labelled “one-shot wonder”? Must the novelist who gets too much too soon, as Dickens put it, go “up with the rocket and down with the stick”?

It was with what Haddon himself has called the “horror of the second novel” in mind that Lucy Astor established that most therapeutic of British literary prizes, the Encore. It’s awarded for the best second novel of the year. I’ve been a judge on the Encore twice: the first time Colm Toibin won it, with The Heather Blazing (1993); the second time Amit Chaudhuri, for Afternoon Raag (1994). The Encore award, I would like to think, got both (now solidly distinguished) careers on track and over the first fence, which brings down as many literary fast-starters as does the Grand National.

Getting out from under your own early fame is a perennial problem for those lucky enough to win, precociously, what unluckier writers labour to attain over many years or decades, and (most of them) will never attain, however long or diligently they labour. Has Salman Rushdie, for example, ever managed to throw off the feeling that “he’ll never get beyond where he was in 1981, with Midnight’s Children”? I believe he has, but the allegation of being doomed forever to fall below his own highest mark has pursued judgment on almost everything Rushdie has subsequently written. Unfairly, I would maintain.

There is also the observable phenomenon of the pendulum swing. The Gadarene opinion- formers rush one way, then — conscious that they may have rushed too far and too fast — either skid to a halt or, in the most extreme cases, rush headlong in the other direction. I don’t, for example, think that Ludmila’s Broken English (DBC Pierre’s follow-up to his Booker-winning first novel, Vernon God Little) was as good as its predecessor. But nor do I think it was quite the heap of steaming literary ordure that most reviewers found it to be.

There is a distinguished cohort of one-shot wonders in literature: Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), Margaret Mitchell (Gone With the Wind), Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), Sylvia Plath (The Bell Jar) and JD Salinger (fitful follow-ups to The Catcher in the Rye such as Franny and Zooey don’t count). To what extent, one wonders, were they paralysed by “Haddon’s horror”? Or had they merely said it all?

There are other novelists who seem to be able to remake themselves drastically from one novel to the next, and can find any number of grooves for their “esemplastic” (Coleridge’s wonderful word) genius. John Updike and Philip Roth, for example, both of whose careers display a consistent maturing, along with wholly unexpected changes of subject, style and tone. How can even the most ingeniously forensic literary criticism find any link between Portnoy’s Complaint and Everyman, or between Couples and Terrorist? If, as Scott Fitzgerald said, there are no second acts in American lives, nor are there any second novels in great American literary careers: every novel is, in some sense, a first novel. But despair not, Mark. You still have a shot at the Encore.

John Sutherland’s How to Read a Novel was published last week by Profile, £9.99