- guardian.co.uk, Sunday June 30 1996 15.10 BST
- The Observer, Sunday June 30 1996
It's a fruitful if tense relationship because it allows both sides to indulge in their favourite angst, a kind of cultural one-downmanship. The self-laceration of one party calls forth more and more specious praise from the other until they join hands and chorus: 'Fings ain't what they used to be !'
This looking-glass world is well illustrated by Ian Jack's editorial for issue 54 of Granta, the British literary magazine. Following the Granta/Book Marketing Council selection of two half-generations of 20 'Best of Young British Novelists' (1983 and 1993), the decision to do the same for young American novelists was only a matter of time. But, according to Jack: 'Under Bill Buford, my predecessor at Granta, the submissions and the judging (for the British lists) had been informal and private. Publishers were consulted, novels invited, a list was agreed without much fuss. Even if, with ruthlessly corrupt and metropolitan behaviour, this had been possible in America, it didn't seem desirable, so a four-stage process was invented.'
The irony is that this four-stage process five American regions each with their own sub-panel; nominations invited regionally; sub-panels advancing regional short lists; short lists going to a national panel; a national short list; and this national final list has, despite its avowed political correctness (the gender and race of all judges and writers is listed and accounted for), produced a rather stodgily homogeneous assemblage of writing. To put it bluntly: some ruthlessly corrupt, metropolitan behaviour wouldn't have gone amiss here.
Obviously, on completing this fair-minded process the national judges (Jack himself, Tobias Wolff, Robert Stone and Anne Tyler WM, WM, WM and WF respectively) were more than a little freaked out. There was no William T. Vollman, no Nicholson Baker, no Bret Easton Ellis. But, says Jack: 'We decided to let the shortlist stay as it was: emendations would need to be wholesale, which would snub the hard work of the 15 regional judges, turn our exercise into a celebration of the previously celebrated and leave us accused of falling for the hype. In other words, we would have picked another bunch of the wrong writers.' How are we to take this 'another', except as evidence that we shouldn't accept this list as anything special? It's just a 'possible' list of 20 of the best, young American novelists under 40, rather than the list.
Both Stone and Wolff are quoted in the editorial. Wolff wondered about the 'well-behaved' tone of the selections, and noted the lack of 'deranged ambition'; Stone, perhaps ruefully given the politics of his own work, surveys the tendencies in contemporary American literary culture towards 'consensus', and agrees that the selection process has compromised in favouring the 'well-constructed, humane and sympathetic book'.
The truth is the selection has favoured the parochial in many, strange senses. Nine of the pieces here are concerned either directly or obliquely with the relation between the west (either far- or mid-) and the east, and by extension the town and the country. In some ways, this seems a refraction of the old divide in American letters between the northern and southern states; in others, it seems like a pale echo of the Unabomber, the Oklahoma outrage, and all the other supposedly traditional tensions that stretch the American polity to the tedium of its federal seams.
At their best the 'western' pieces aspire to the tense evocativeness of David Guterson's well-paced observations of rural life in the Pacific north-west; at their worst they collapse into what I call 'Carver Country': that unimaginative world dominated by short, descriptive sentences, pick-up trucks, six-packs and thinly veiled homicidal intent.
Thus, Chris Offutt writes of ex-con characters Tilden and Baker digging graves in rural Idaho; and Tony Earley treads the predictable rut of coming-of-age-hoeing-corn. There's an obligatory woman narrator on death row, courtesy of Stewart O'Nan, who may have done what she's accused of, and who's corresponding with Stephen King concerning the book of the killings. This is a rare, ludic touch, in a collection where writers on the whole seem to have forgotten that the first rule of fiction is that you can do anything.
Even when the parochial parts of America are subjected to outside influences, they come all too often in the form of writing about writing. Lorrie Moore gives us quite a bit of Iowa, but it's mediated through a description of a creative writing course, and the visit of a famous South African poet with 'bach' in his name.
The baleful influence of the ubiquitous American creative writing programme is felt in many other pieces as well. Robert O'Connor may be giving us a hard, docu-fiction insight into the rigours of a maximum-security prison in upstate New York; but the real horror of these Jack Henry Abbott-style anecdotes of stabbings and rapes is that they're filtered through the sensibility of a creative writing teacher.
Two of the writers, Allen Kurzweil and Elizabeth McCracken, manage to stagger just far enough away from this reductive arena to fetch their narratives up in the exotic setting of a library! Another one, Tom Drury, gives us the high drama of a vacationing student plugging crime reports into a computer. Drury's piece is notable because it's the only one in the collection to actually mention the existence of the computer all the others seem hell-bent on avoiding the technological realities of contemporary America.
There may have been a felt and very American drive to incorporate some of the disparate voices of this polyglot land in the selection, but really the effect of reading the prose is of apprehending the melting pot, rather than the salad bowl. By this, I mean that the non-white voices present here are quite remarkably. . . white. There is hardly any use of sprung rhythm or phonetic transcription to suggest the sounds of different voices. In the pieces by Edwidge Danticat, David Haynes and Fae Myenne Ng, Haitians, Afro-Americans and Chinese Americans all speak well-parsed and very English English. Only Sherman Alexie toys with syntax and occlusion to suggest a genuine otherness of tongue.
For some reason, I link this uniformity of voice to the prevalence among these writers of both graduates of creative writing courses and teachers thereof. Some, of course, have done both. Quite clearly, all of them have learnt how to construct their fictions properly but by the same token such a stricture allows little space for risk, for 'deranged ambition'.
Interestingly, where the nasty, gritty, metropolitan America we tend to perceive from this side of the pond does rear its head, it's in the form of a nameless 'other' the narrator of Melanie Rae Thon's fine story 'Xmas, Jamaica Plain'. Thon's young prostitute soliloquises on the fears of the middle- class whites whose house she has violated: 'I'm the one who got away, the one you don't know; I'm the long hairs you find under your pillow, nested in your drain, tangled in your brush. You think I might come back. You dream me dark always.' It's this 'other' that's generally excluded from the Granta selection, gently elbowed out by careful evocations of family crises, rites of passage and insistently measured prose. The judges of the selection characterise these writers as collectively 'likeable', while at the same time denying the possibility that they may represent a literary movement of any kind. This is just as well, for a literary movement should be something like a party: full of diverse, jostling elements competing in raucous tones, united however arbitrarily by the renzy of the moment.
A party full of 'likeable' people doesn't bear contemplating.
