The Year of Henry James

by David Lodge

  There were two other developments in publishing in the early 1980s with which the fortunes of Granta became entwined. The Booker Prize, which had been trundling along for a decade without making much impact on the reading public, suddenly became the focus of intense media interest, and a powerful engine for generating book sales. Before 1980 the shortlist was announced and the winner secretly chosen at the same time. Under new rules, the meeting to decide the winner was held some weeks after the shortlist meeting, on the very day of the banquet at which the result was announced. This meant that bookmakers would accept bets on the outcome, and turned the banquet into an occasion of high drama and genuine suspense, a kind of literary Oscar night, broadcast live on network television. In 1980 the competition between two of England’s most distinguished novelists who were on the shortlist, Anthony Burgess and William Golding (the eventual winner), caught the public’s imagination. In 1981 the prize went to Rushdie for Midnight’s Children, making him famous and confirming Buford’s skill as a talent-spotter.

  At around the same time a body called the British Book Marketing Council was formed. It was, as Buford recalled later, a typically ’80s phenomenon, an application of ‘enterprise culture’ methods to a notoriously stuffy and conservative sector of retail trade. Under the direction of Desmond Clarke, the council instigated a series of promotional campaigns for literary fiction, children’s books, travel writing, etc., under the general heading, ‘Best of . . .’. Participating publishers and booksellers mounted special window displays and organised signing sessions. How the books were selected, and by whom, was not disclosed; but whoever chose The Best of Young British Novelists in 1983 had excellent taste. Perhaps Buford was involved, because he published specimen work by the twenty writers, all under forty, in the seventh issue of Granta. They were: Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, Ursula Bentley, William Boyd, Buchi Emecheta, Maggie Gee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Alan Judd, Adam Mars-Jones, Ian McEwan, Shiva Naipaul, Philip Norman, Christopher Priest, Salman Rushdie, Lisa St Auban de Teran, Clive Sinclair, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and A. N. Wilson. Few of these writers failed to fulfil their early promise, and several have become very well known indeed.

  Ten years later, in 1993, with the Book Marketing Council no longer in existence, Buford organised a new round of The Best of Young British Novelists under the aegis of Granta, and published extracts from their work in his forty-third issue, with an introduction that (for the first time) named the judges. They were: Salman Rushdie, A. S. Byatt, John Mitchinson (marketing director of the Waterstone’s bookshop chain) and Buford himself. The writers chosen were: Iain Banks, Louis de Bernières, Anne Bilson, Tibor Fischer, Esther Freud, Alan Hollinghurst, Kazuo Ishiguro, A. L. Kennedy, Philip Kerr, Hanif Kureishi, Adam Lively, Adam Mars-Jones, Candia McWilliam, Lawrence Norfolk, Ben Okri, Caryl Phillips, Will Self, Nicholas Shakespeare, Helen Simpson and Jeanette Winterson. The publication of this list provoked a considerable amount of controversy in the British press. The chief complaint was not that the judges had overlooked deserving young writers, but that the new list compared so unfavourably with the class of ’83 as to discredit the whole exercise. The implication was that whereas the earlier list drew attention to genuine talent, the new one was merely hyping mediocre or immature young writers. The judges retorted with some justice that, at the time, most of the writers on the 1983 list had yet to prove themselves. Certainly the 1993 list already looks more impressive than it did three years ago.fn2 And it would be absurd to pretend that the 1983 list had some kind of canonical status, uncontaminated by commercial considerations. But what had begun as a mere marketing strategy, its promotions forgotten as soon as the special window displays were dismantled, had become, partly as a result of Granta’s involvement, something like a literary prize shared between twenty people: the right to put ‘Selected as one of the Best of Young British Novelists’ on one’s dust jacket. In an overcrowded marketplace, where too many authors and titles clamour for review space and the reading public’s attention, such distinctions matter, and the controversy generated by competitions is grist to the media mill. In short, the ‘Best of . . .’ story illustrates one of the most striking features of recent cultural history, the collaboration – some would call it an unholy alliance – of big business, the mass media, and high art, to their mutual material advantage.

  In 1995 Bill Buford gave up the editorship of Granta, and returned to America to edit the literary pages of The New Yorker. Perhaps he felt he had done what he could for British fiction; or perhaps he felt that American fiction now needed his attentions more urgently. At any rate, he handed over his editorial seat to Ian Jack, a highly respected journalist and former editor of the Independent on Sunday, who had evidently had enough of the circulation war of attrition waged between British quality newspapers in recent years. Jack seems to have inherited, rather than instigated, an American version of ‘The Best of Young British Novelists’, the fruits of which are displayed in the Summer 1996 issue of Granta. The rules are the same – eligible writers must be under forty and have published at least one work of fiction – but the process of selection has become much more open, democratic and (one is bound to say) bureaucratic, in deference to American notions of fair play. Nominations were invited from many different constituencies, and several hundred titles were submitted. These were distributed among five regional judging panels, who forwarded their recommendations, fifty-two in all, to the final judges: Ian Jack, Robert Stone, Tobias Wolff, and Anne Tyler. There was a fifth appointed judge, Henry Louis ‘Skip’ Gates, professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard, who dropped out in contentious circumstances.fn3

  Many judges of literary competitions embark on their task with pleasurable anticipation of publicly exercising their judgement and bestowing patronage, and then panic as they become aware of what is entailed: the grief and rage of disappointed writers, publishers and agents; the derision and disgust of critics who disagree with the judges’ verdicts; the possible humiliation stored up for years to come if the chosen writers fail to live up to expectations. It is clear from Ian Jack’s introduction that he and his colleagues suffered all these misgivings. Indeed, The Best of Young American Novelists is prefaced by so many apologies, caveats, rhetorical shrugs and handwringings, as almost to undermine the whole enterprise. The regional judges, says Jack, ‘got [the writers] wrong, as judges tend to do . . . We wondered for a time if we might not override previous decisions and call in one or two glaring omissions [but] we decided to let the shortlist stay as it was; emendations would need to be wholesale . . . In other words, we would have picked another bunch of wrong writers.’

  In fact the exercise was by no means as futile as that remark implies. Everybody knows that ‘best’ in this context is not an absolute and authoritative judgement, but it is not a totally arbitrary one either. A selection arrived at through such careful sifting of so many writers by such well-qualified judges must have some sort of representative value, must tell us something useful about the younger generation of American literary novelists and short-story writers. It can be used as an illustrated reading-list of young writers to look out for – on this level, it is the differences between them that matter. Or it can be used to try and identify the dominant characteristics of contemporary American prose fiction, in style, narrative technique, and subject matter – on this level it is the similarities between them that are interesting. I may say that I approached the selection with an open mind and very limited acquaintance with the work of young American writers. I recognised the names of only three or four of the chosen twenty and had previously read the work of only one, Lorrie Moore.

  Perhaps for that reason, I find it hard to think of Lorrie Moore as a young writer, in the same category as the others. She needs no introduction, as the saying goes. She is already a master (or mistress) of her art, represented here by a characteristically accomplished story, wry but compassionate, called (with faint connotations of martyrdom) ‘Agnes of Iowa’, about a woman struggling with the
fate of being plain and uncharismatic. Only once in her life does Agnes glimpse the possibility of passion and romance, when a South African poet visits the college where she teaches night-classes, but nothing comes of it, except that for some weeks after his departure the departmental secretary’s memos come written on the back of scrap paper salvaged from surplus posters for the poet’s reading.

  She would get a simple phone message – ‘Your husband called. Please call him at the office’ – and on the back would be the ripped centre of Beyerbach’s nose, one minty eye, an elbowish chin. Eventually there were no more, and the scrap paper moved on to old contest announcements, grant deadlines, Easter concert notices.

  What are the other best young American novelists writing about? Well, there are two novels-in-progress about Haiti. One is a historical novel by Madison Smartt Bell about the slave revolution of the early nineteenth century which reads, in the extract printed here, like a literary Western, as it describes the heroic endurance of an escaped slave searching in a pitiless landscape for the legendary General Toussaint Louverture; the other, by the gloriously named Edwige Danticat, herself born in Port-au-Prince, is about the massacre of Haitian refugees on the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic in 1937, told from the point of view of a Haitian servant in a bourgeois Dominican family.

  There are two novels about librarians. One is Alan Kurzweil’s hero and narrator, uneasily married to a French artist called Nicole, whose fractured English (‘You are the apple of my eyeballs’) charms him, but whose chaotic methods of storing things around the house offend his occupational devotion to order. As the man Nicole calls his ‘shrimp’ tells him: ‘my impulse to catalog functioned as a kind of “belief system,” one I maintained “with an ardor others reserve for their gods.”’

  The heroine of Elizabeth McCracken’s first novel, The Giant’s House, librarian of a small town on Cape Cod fifty years ago, also broods on such stereotyping:

  Librarians are supposed to be bitter spinsters, grudging, lonely. And above all stingy: we love collecting fines on overdue books, our silence.

  I did not love collecting fines; I forgave much more than I collected. I did not shush people unless they yelled. And though I was, technically, a spinster, I was only bitter insofar as people made me. It isn’t that bitter people become librarians; it’s that being a librarian may turn the most generous person bitter.

  There is a touch of the bizarre (rare in the volume as a whole) in this story, inasmuch as the narrator is infatuated with a pubescent boy suffering from abnormal growth, but its strength is the revelation of her passionate character through, and in spite of, her dry, ironic, declarative prose style.

  There are extracts from novels about young men from provincial backgrounds negotiating the puzzles and pitfalls of new social territory. Ethan Canin tells a Fitzgerald-like story of a freshman from the Midwest at Columbia, who comes under the spell of a charming fellow student and his cultured, eccentric family, whose male members are gifted, or cursed, with photographic memories. The hero of Jonathan Franzen’s novel-in-progress is a compulsive liar whom we meet successfully defeating a polygraph test to obtain full security clearance as a federal employee.fn4 Tom Drury’s hero Paul, from rural Rhode Island, is working his way through college, and takes a night job punching felony statistics into an ageing computer under the supervision of a dour and disapproving criminologist with a passion for old cars called Leonard Draco. When Draco dies suddenly, Paul attends his funeral.

  Some of Leonard’s friends got up to talk about his life. They said he liked the art of the Southwest, that he was a gifted mimic and that he had a well-hidden generous side. No one mentioned cars. Paul imagined a speech he could give: ‘I did not know Leonard Draco well and yet I say to you that he loved cars and car parts.’ Then the priest and his helpers gave communion. Paul knelt at the rail eating the bread and drinking the wine. He did not believe in God, but he believed in communion.

  The story of his subsequent seduction by the widow is told in the same droll, deadpan style. One wonders if the hero is named in homage to Evelyn Waugh’s Paul Pennyfeather.

  There are four pieces about crime and/or prison. The one that made the deepest impression on me was an extract from Robert O’Connor’s non-fiction novel-in-progress, based on his experiences of teaching composition to convicts in a high-security penitentiary. The narrative manages to convey both the brutality and terror of prison life (generated by conflicts between prisoners rather than between prisoners and warders) and the comedy of the total incompatibility of the author’s liberal humanist values with the macho ethics of his students. In one episode O’Connor sets an assignment in which the students have to tell a story and then draw a moral from it. A convict who answers to the name AKA Diaz tells the story of two men who are drinking together. Fred takes a quarter from the counter that belongs to Bill and they begin to quarrel about it:

  . . . whereupon Bill pulled out his piece which he happened to have handy, shot Fred to death and received a sentence of twenty-five to life. It was, Diaz mentioned, a true story, Bill being a pseudonym for his brother-in-law, now serving time at another state prison.

  Now came the moral. The moral of the story, Diaz wrote, was ‘You shouldn’t take what isn’t yours.’

  ‘Don’t you think this is an unusual moral?’ I asked.

  AKA Diaz looked at his paper. ‘I think this pretty well covers it.’

  ‘You might also conclude that Bill traded twenty-five years for twenty-five cents.’

  Diaz shook his head, as if disappointed at my obtuseness. ‘Fred took his money,’ he said. ‘No way Bill could let him get away with that.’

  After further argument, O’Connor finally understands what Diaz is saying: ‘In prison . . . the thresholds were set high. Once one took the first backward step, one would never take another forward.’ He gives Diaz an A.

  Chris Offutt’s ‘Moscow, Idaho’ is a story about two prisoners on some kind of parole work-scheme, unearthing coffins from a cemetery due to be covered by a new highway. They swap stories of prison life. Baker decides on impulse to steal a car and run. Tilden declines to join him.

  Tilden crossed the road and lay on his back beside the wheat. He spread his arms. Wind blew loose dirt over his body. The ground was soft, and the air was warm. In prison he had figured out that laws were made to protect the people who made the laws. He had always thought that staying out of trouble meant following those laws, but now he knew there was more. The secret was to act like the people who wanted the laws in the first place. They didn’t even think about it. They just lived.

  This is well done in a classic American vernacular style. Stewart O’Nan and Melanie Rae Thon use their first-person narrators in the more artful and self-conscious form of the dramatic monologue. O’Nan’s unnamed speaker is a young woman convicted of murder. The crime in which she was implicated seems to have been a callous killing of some innocent strangers by drink-or-drug-crazed young people. From Death Row, on the eve of her execution, she dictates a letter to Stephen King answering his questions about her life and her crime. The premise is that Stephen King has paid her for this information, as source material for a novel, and that she is giving it to him partly to vindicate herself, partly to provide for her child, and partly because she is a King fan. Now a born-again Christian, she contemplates her imminent death with eerie calm. It is not surprising to learn from the introductory note that the novel from which this piece is extracted is currently the subject of litigation, but one hopes that it will not be suppressed.fn5 The imaginative creation of a life, and a voice, evidently very different from the author’s own is impressive.

  Melanie Rae Thon’s narrator and her friend Emile are teenage prostitutes working on the streets of Boston to pay for their drug habit. On a cold Christmas night they seek shelter by breaking into an unoccupied suburban home. The narrative is addressed to the hypothetical absent housewife.

  I’m your worst fear.

  But not the wor
st thing that can happen.

  I lived in your house half the night. I’m the broken window in your little boy’s bedroom. I’m the flooded tiles in the bathroom where the water flowed and flowed.

  I’m the tattoo in the hollow of Emile’s pelvis, five butterflies spreading blue wings to rise out of his scar.

  I’m dark hands slipping through all your pale woman underthings; dirty fingers fondling a strand of pearls, your throat, a white bird carved of stone. I’m the body you feel wearing your fox fur coat.

  It’s another creditable effort to inhabit vicariously the life of the American underclass, though the lyrical elegance of the style tends at times to work against the story’s credibility.

  By far the largest group in this rough-and-ready classification are the novel-extracts about childhood, growing-up, family relationships, often viewed in a nostalgic and/or pastoral perspective, evoking and celebrating a more benign and innocent America than the one reflected in the media today. ‘[A] sort of Norman Rockwellization of the novel’ seems to be going on, Ian Jack observes, with a certain puzzlement. Representative of this trend is Tony Earley’s account of a fatherless boy growing up on a farm in the corn belt. On his tenth birthday he tries, prematurely, to enter the world of adult work, and learns from his uncle Zeno, a stern but upright man, that you can’t play at hoeing. Uncle Zeno finds a corn stalk that Jim accidentally severed and stuck back in the ground.