Granta 97
Best of Young American Novelists 2 Edited by Ian Jack
Grove Press, 320 pp., $14.95
In 1983 the chic British literary magazine Granta published its Best of Young British Novelists issue. It was a prescient list. Six of the 20 selected writers--Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, and A.N. Wilson--went on to receive commercial and critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1993, Granta's editors produced a follow-up, Best of Young British Novelists 2. This time, however, the editors weren't so prescient. Only two of their choices, Alan Hollinghurst and Will Self (or three if you count Ishiguro, who made a second appearance on the list) received a wide audience and critical recognition. So it would seem as though the number of talented writers in a given 20-year generation is small.
That also seems to be the case with Best of Young American Novelists 2, a collection of short stories and excerpts from larger works in progress. In 1996, when Granta published its first Best of Young American Novelists issue, the pool of gifted and substantive writers from which the judges could choose was large. Sure enough, 8 of the 21 writers selected--Sherman Alexie, Madison Smartt Bell, Ethan Canin, Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Lorrie Moore, and Stewart O'Nan--went on to make noteworthy contributions to the national literature. (Whether these contributions will remain noteworthy is another question.) The prediction game is always risky, but it's a reasonable guess that this second list of Best Young American Novelists will turn out much like the second list of Best Young British Novelists. Which is to say: Best of Young American Novelists 2 is filled with a lot of duds.
In some sense, of course, the whole project is little more than a gimmick. Granta editor Ian Jack writes that the judges lowered the age limit for consideration to 35 in order to maximize the number of new writers on the list and avoid the inclusion of "establishment" writers like McSweeney's impresario Dave Eggers and The Namesake's Jhumpa Lahiri. That was a mistake. Eggers and Lahiri may be "establishment," but they are still two of the most interesting young writers working today, and their exclusion mars this collection.
The restriction is limiting in other ways. Because longevity is increasing, the definition of a "young" writer is open to negotiation. As the postmodernists like to say, it's all relative. Franzen is 47, which means, barring accident or illness, he has at least three decades left in his career. Such is also the case with David Foster Wallace, who is 45. Thomas Mallon, who at a sprightly 55 years is probably at the upper limit of young, still has plenty of writing ahead of him. All three are important writers who produce fine work.
Even skilled writers who are under the age limit didn't make the cut. Ian Jack laments the exclusion of Joshua Ferris, whose novel Then We Came to the End tackled office mores in a humorous and insightful manner. And the young writer who makes me laugh the most, David Schickler of the excellent story collection Kissing in Manhattan, and the uneven but entertaining novel Sweet and Vicious, is 38 and missing from Granta altogether.
Laughter is in short supply in Granta 97. The writers in the collection are so concerned with being serious that they devalue life's ironies and inanities. The stories are long on sex, drug abuse, violence, and profanity, but short on fellowship, commerce, goodwill, and laughter. Religion is absent, except when it's a force of ill will or the status quo. It's as though the writers here divided life into the "good" and the "bad," sliced off what they considered the "good," and decided to showcase the "bad." But life isn't that simple. And the absence of life's pleasures is noticeable.
It also speaks to a larger absence. The most striking thing about Young American Novelists 2 is that the writers here are unconcerned with America. The huge, rich, powerful, complex, dizzying country in which they live is missing. The writers are more concerned with identity--namely, their own--and American encounters with the Other in a globalized world. They want to focus on "over there," not here. They might as well be living in Vienna or Djibouti. The result is a reduction of the sphere of "American fiction." It used to be that the subject of American fiction was . . . America. Today the subject of American fiction is the American who is writing it.
Granta's judges "agreed on one thing," Ian Jack writes in his introduction. "Ethnicity, migration and 'abroad' had replaced social class as a source of tension despite the fact, as [Slate culture editor Meghan] O'Rourke pointed out, that the gap between the wealthy and poor in the United States is wider than ever." Jack says this may be because one-third of the 21 writers here are foreign-born, and that is probably true. But the overall myopia of American fiction writers today is staggering. Two-thirds of the writers in Best of Young American Novelists 2 went to elite colleges such as Harvard, Columbia, or Swarthmore. Almost all of them went to a writers' workshop or graduate school in creative writing. One-third of them teach writing at secondary schools or colleges. Two-thirds of them set the stories included here in cities. Most of the characters in these stories are college graduates who live in apartments in crowded cities--just like the people who wrote them.
The typical young American Granta novelist is Daniel Alarcón, who was born in Lima, Peru, in 1977, went to boarding school in Alabama and to Columbia University, and now teaches at Mills College in Oakland. His story "The King is Always Above the People" is set in an unidentified country experiencing the transition from dictatorship to democracy. The narrator is a nameless young man from the provinces who travels to the metropolis to work on the docks, but is forced to return home when his girlfriend shows up pregnant. It's a well-turned narrative about the tensions between the past and the present, the village and the city. And it has absolutely nothing to do with contemporary American life.
You turn from page to page in the volume looking for a mention of a suburb or an exurb, a visit to a shopping mall or big-box store or chain restaurant, all to no avail. There are no homeowners, office-park workers, traders, or farmers. Few of the characters have families. Current events, popular culture, and social trends are thrown to the wayside in favor of allegory, symbolism, and highly detailed portraits of relationships. Two stories deal with "war" as a concept, but only one deals with a specific war, the one in Iraq. Gabe Hudson's "Hard Core" is a graphic mess, however. It's set in the Iraq of 2003, not today, and so feels slightly behind the times. Also, it's derivative, slavishly copying antiwar clichés from movies such as Full Metal Jacket and Three Kings.
A few writers are worth watching. I liked Christopher Coake's "That First Time," about a soon-to-be divorced guy who goes into a fit of nostalgia when a former high-school fling dies of cancer. Coake's characters are realistic. That his story is set in Indianapolis and not New York or San Francisco is worth cheering. For some reason, though, Coake decided against using quotation marks to indicate dialogue, so I spent half the time trying to figure out who was talking to whom. The selection from Gary Shteyngart, "From the Diaries of Lenny Abramov," confirms that he's one of America's most perceptive, talented, and--this is always underrated--funny writers. Dara Horn's "Passover in New Orleans" is an engaging narrative dealing with race, faith, urbanity, and identity in American life. Too bad it's set in 1870.
If this is the best the young Granta can do, then American fiction is in greater trouble than we previously thought.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.