by David Lodge
Uncle Zeno held the corn stalk up like a scepter, as if seeing it better would help Jim answer his questions. ‘Jim, this was just a mistake until you tried to hide it,’ he said. ‘But when you tried to hide it you made it a lie.’
Jim looked at the front of his overalls. He felt a tear start down his cheek and hoped that Uncle Zeno hadn’t seen it.
David Guterson, who has enjoyed considerable success with his novel Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), offers an extract from a novel-in-progress set early in the century in Washington State’s apple country. ‘He remembered the new, fresh orchard country of his youth and the rows of apple trees his father had planted on the east bank of the Columbia River’, it begins, and goes on in the same idyllic vein, evoking the childhood of the central character Ben and his brother Aidan. Their father takes them on a hunting trip, and shoots a buck. They kneel and thank the Lord for providing them with meat; then the father shows his sons how to dress the carcase.
Five minutes later, riding down the ridge, their father halted his horse. There was blood across the front of his coat and on his jaw and nose and hands.
‘That’s how it’s done,’ he said to his sons. ‘That’s just the way you’ll want to do it when I ain’t around anymore.’
One is reminded of Hemingway, of Cormac McCarthy, and occasionally, in passages of local chronicle, of Faulkner; but the tension, the possibility of evil that is always present in those writers seems quite absent here. Perhaps it will appear in later parts of the novel, when the story reaches modern times.
Mona Simpson’s forthcoming novel has a similar regional setting to Guterson’s. ‘Jane was born in Gray Star, a settlement in remote Eastern Oregon, where her cries were lost in miles and miles of orchards stilled by a constant rain’, it begins. She is the daughter of a hippyish single mother and a rich but absent father. Jane’s mother teaches her ten-year-old daughter to drive a truck, with wood blocks tied to the pedals so she can reach them, and sends her off in it one night to seek her father. ‘The most terrible and wondrous experience in Jane di Natale’s life was over by the time she was ten, before she’d truly learned the art of riding a bicycle.’
The interest in childhood, roots and origins cuts across ethnic boundaries. The extract from Fae Myenne Ng’s novel Bone (1993) is another affectionate memoir of childhood – in this case of attending the funeral of the narrator’s grandfather in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Sherman Alexie’s central character is a native American Indian adopted by a white middle-class couple. The account of his problems with white middle-class girls in adolescence is somewhat predictable, but the extract begins with the hero imagining, and partly fantasising, his own birth on an Indian reservation, and being immediately snatched away by helicopter to his waiting adoptive parents. This striking sequence has the pace and immediacy of a movie and incorporates hallucinatory images of movie mayhem:
The jumpsuit man holds John close to his chest as the helicopter rises. Suddenly, as John imagines it, this is a war. The gunman locks and loads, strafes the reservation with explosive shells. Indians hit the ground, drive their cars off roads, dive under flimsy kitchen tables. A few Indians, two women and one man, continue their slow walk down the reservation road, unperturbed by the gunfire. They have been through much worse. The what-what of the helicopter blades. John is hungry and cries uselessly.
Jeffrey Eugenides has a Shandean take on the story of the narrator’s origins, going back to his own conception. The context is an American-Greek community in which inherited superstitions struggle against the scientific know-how of the New World. The narrator’s parents want a girl, since they have two sons already. Father has been told that the best way to conceive a girl is to have intercourse twenty-four hours before ovulation, as determined by a temperature chart. Mother thinks it is a matter best left to God and the predictive power of grandmother Desdemona’s silver spoon. Father presents Mother with a state-of-the-art thermometer and mixes them both dry Martinis to put his spouse into a receptive mood.
When he brought hers over, my mother took a sip, closed her eyes and said, ‘This is going to go straight to my head.’ She put the thermometer into the glass like a swizzle stick. She stabbed the olive with it, brought it to her mouth and ate it.
As a writer with some experience in this vein of comedy, I tip my hat to Mr Eugenides.fn6
There are extracts from two more novels about families. Kate Wheeler’s young heroine sits at the bedside of her dying grandmother, a feisty and loquacious old lady who startlingly claims to have had an affair with an Asian Indian early in her married life. Is this senility, mischief, or true confession? The question disturbs the calm surface of the white middle-class family. David Haynes writes with a pleasantly light touch about tensions within a black family in St Louis, adopting the point of view of a woman in her late thirties, Deneen, who returns to live with her mother and young sister on the rebound from an unhappy love affair. Deneen’s taste for lurid clothing and junk food offends her mother’s notions of thrift and aspirations to middle-class respectability. There is an effective comic sequence involving a gadget new to me, a speaking supermarket trolley.
Viewed collectively under the aspect of fictional form and technique, this sampler confirms what Robert Stone calls, in a letter quoted by Ian Jack, ‘the resurgence of realism’ in American writing. The trend began in the 1980s, and Buford was typically quick to spot it. In 1983 he dedicated a whole issue of Granta, the one immediately following the first Best of Young British Novelists, to something he called ‘Dirty Realism’, represented by such writers as Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff and Jayne Anne Phillips, who wrote serious literary fiction about the concerns of ordinary Americans living in dusty small towns and trailer parks, ‘low-rent tragedies of people who watch day time television, read cheap romances and listen to country and western music’. Stylistically, these writers belong to the Twain–Hemingway tradition in American writing, concealing poetic and metaphysical resonances under a deceptively simple and colloquial language. It was the beginning of a reaction against the rhetorical exuberance and postmodernist experimentalism of the 1960s and ’70s that now seems to be complete, if the current Granta is reliable evidence. Of the twenty pieces gathered together here, every one is written in the code of realism. Apart from the occasional dream or fantasy, clearly framed and controlled by a realistic context, there is no surrealism, no magic realism, no mythic subtext, little overt intertextuality, no metafictional frame-breaking,fn7 no word-games, no abrupt switches of style or type of discourse, no parody, no radical deviation from well-formed syntax, no unconventional layout and typography. There is not a trace to be seen of the influence of John Barth, Richard Brautigan, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, or other luminaries of the ‘renaissance’ in American writing hailed by Buford in his inaugural editorial in Granta.
It is also noteworthy that the contributors to The Best of Young American Novelists are, compared to that older generation of writers, conspicuously restrained in their use of four-letter words and descriptions of sexual behaviour. Apart from O’Connor’s piece which, for obvious documentary reasons, is full of expletives, there is little here which the prudish New Yorker of forty years ago would have hesitated to print. This may be connected with the puzzling absence (not remarked upon by Jack) of any novel or story dealing with gay or lesbian relationships, since such fiction tends to focus on the erotic life of its characters.
A surprising reversal of the literary situation described by Buford in 1979 seems to have occurred. Young American novelists today are (to judge by these samples) less idiosyncratic, less experimental, and certainly less raunchy, than not only older American writers, but also their British contemporaries. In contemporary British fiction fabulation (represented variously by writers like Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Ben Okri, Lawrence Norfolk, Jim Crace) flourishes alongside realism which fully earns the epithet ‘dirty’. There has been a spate of novels by young writers (including women writers) in Bri
tain recently, dealing with contemporary society in a way designed to shock, full of obscenity, scatology, violence, sexual perversion, alcoholism and drug addiction, black humour and opaque slang. Much of this fiction is crudely sensational and clumsily constructed, but it has a raw and reckless energy that is a sign of life. (Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting is a paradigm case.) There is no bad writing in The Best of Young American Novelists, but there is nothing very startling or ambitious either – nobody who, to invoke Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself, seems to be running for president in his or her head, who would ‘settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time’. Ian Jack
. . . was struck by the kindness and humanity of most of these authors; their concern to be domestic and geographically specific . . . their anxiety to write open and spare prose. A lot of new British fiction is altogether wilder and stranger – less interested in clarity, less competent at storytelling. In America the influence of creative writing schools and an older generation of writers – Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff – is obvious.
If there is a certain sameness, and tameness, as well as a high standard of technical competence, in The Best of Young American Novelists, it is certainly tempting to look for an explanation to the influence of creative writing programmes in colleges and universities. On the evidence of the short biographical notes prefixed to each contribution, at least two thirds of the writers are graduates of master’s or doctoral programmes in creative writing, and/or teach creative writing themselves, and it’s a fair bet that most of the remaining third had some experience of creative writing courses as undergraduates. Creative writing as an academic subject has only recently established itself in Britain, and is virtually unknown in the rest of the world.fn8 It is a very distinctive feature of American literary culture. But by the same token it has been an influence there for a very long time. It is hard to think of more than a handful of significant postwar American writers, including the postmodernist experimentalists of the 1960s and ’70s, who were not involved in some way with creative writing programmes.
So what’s new? Could it be the climate of what, for lack of a less tendentious phrase, one must call political correctness, pervading the American campus these days? An intellectual environment in which it is frowned upon or expressly forbidden to say or write anything which might offend any individual’s or group’s values, self-esteem, sense of cultural and ethnic identity, religious beliefs, or special interests, is not one in which the budding literary imagination is likely to flourish. Important writers are often rebellious, arrogant, irreverent, even outrageous in their apprenticeship years, and some (like Norman Mailer) remain so. Political correctness encourages caution, parochialism and self-censorship. It is interesting to note how Robert O’Connor has deftly slipped the handcuffs of such inhibitions. By choosing to write in the mode of the non-fiction novel he has provided himself with an impregnable defence against anyone who might find his subject matter offensive: that’s the way it is. And by making himself the narrator and central character he is able to voice the liberal pieties of tolerance, decency and fairness while exposing their total inadequacy to the facts of prison life. The irony goes deeper: venturing into the prison ostensibly to bring the hardened convicts sweetness and light, redemption through creative writing, he has stolen from them a priceless hoard of material, and carried it back to his safe suburban home to work on it as he knows, much better than they ever will, how.
The elaborate and scrupulously democratic procedure by which The Best of Young American Novelists were selected, designed to resist the dominance of the East Coast publishing establishment, and to open up the competition to the regional variety of new American writing, has rather surprisingly produced an anthology in which resemblances of form and content are more striking than differences, and the reader is charmed and disarmed more often than challenged. This may be an accurate reflection of the work being produced by young American writers. Or it may reflect more accurately the priorities and preferences of the regional judges, themselves perhaps sensitised by the ideological climate referred to above. The final list might have been more interesting, and conceivably more representative, if Ian Jack and his colleagues had reserved a few places on it for writers, like Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, and Richard Powers, whose absence from the regional lists they noted with surprise.
After my review was published I received a number of letters from eligible writers who were not represented in the anthology generally agreeing with my comments. Some made the point that three of the four judges were themselves practitioners of realistic fiction and likely to be biased, consciously or unconsciously, in its favour. I omitted to mention in the review that the Granta volume contained fetching photographic portraits of the selected authors by Marion Ettlinger, from which young aspiring writers might have inferred that, whatever technique you favour, to succeed in the literary marketplace you should wear black and dress up if you are a woman, but dress down, in drab grungy clothes, if you are a man – and never, ever, wear a tie. This is probably still good advice.
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fn1Granta was founded in 1889, as a magazine produced by and for students, and was a stepping stone for many aspiring professional writers in its time, mainly in the area of ‘light literature’. A. A. Milne, who edited it when he was an undergraduate, said later that he wanted ‘He was a Granta man’ engraved on his gravestone. (Ian Jack, ‘Twenty-five going on 120’, Guardian, 1 October 2004.)
fn2And even more so ten years later.
fn3Ian Jack wrote in his editorial introduction to Granta, ‘Professor Gates, unfortunately, could not be traced by fax or phone during the judging, and has spoken to no judge since’. Gates wrote a letter to the New York Review (17 October 1966, p. 62) explaining that, a late substitute for another judge who had resigned, he found he was unable to participate in the judging because of other commitments, and had telephoned Robert Stone after the final meeting to say he would accept the verdict of the other judges.
fn4As far as I am aware, this work-in-progress was never published as a completed novel. I must admit that I failed to recognise in the extract the promise that would be richly fulfilled in Franzen’s fine novel, The Corrections (2001), though on rereading it seems obvious enough.
fn5It was published in 1997 as The Speed Queen.
fn6In the autumn of 2004 I met Mr Eugenides for the first time, at the Gothenburg Book Fair. He told me that this piece was a fragment of a project he had more or less abandoned and that my compliment had encouraged him to go on with what turned out to be the very successful Middlesex (2002). It’s pleasing to discover that one’s literary journalism can have such disproportionately beneficent effects occasionally.
fn7In the original review I wrote ‘no intertextuality’. Mr O’Nan wrote to the New York Review, claiming that references to the work of Stephen King in his novel were both intertextual and metafictional. In reply, I agreed and apologised on the first count, but pointed out that I had referred specifically to ‘metafictional framebreaking . . . a radical subversion within the text of the illusion of reality which has been created for the main narrative’, which I did not find in the extract published in Granta. (New York Review, 17 October 1996, p. 62.)
fn8It is now of course an accepted part of the curriculum in many (perhaps the majority of ) British universities at either the undergraduate or postgraduate level or both. An MA in creative writing is an increasingly familiar item in the CVs of young British writers, and some support their professional careers by occasional or part-time teaching in such courses. The literary cultures of Britain and America are in that respect growing more alike, but it is still too early to assess what effect, if any, this is having on new British writing.
* * *
J. M. COETZEE:
Elizabeth
Costello
* * *
This essay is a lightly revised version of a review originally published in the New York Revie
w of Books, in November 2003. A few hours after I finished writing it, the award of the Nobel Prize for literature to Coetzee was announced, and reference to this was hastily inserted into the text of my article. Some subsequent related events and publications are described here in a Postscript.
Elizabeth Costello requires, and rewards, at least two consecutive readings, but even then its import remains ambiguous, partly because of the way it mixes and transgresses generic conventions and boundaries. Its publishing history is also unusual and unsettling. The novel (as one must call it for want of a better word) consists of eight chapters and a Postscript, though the chapters are called ‘Lessons’ (whether they are lessons for the central character or for the reader is not made clear – perhaps both). Six of the Lessons have appeared in print before, which is not in itself remarkable, but two of them have been published previously as an independent work, which is. These were the Tanner Lectures, a series dedicated to the discussion of ethical and philosophical topics, which Coetzee gave at Princeton University in 1997–8, under the title ‘The Lives of Animals’. Instead of delivering conventional lectures, he read to his audience a work of fiction, about a distinguished Australian novelist called Elizabeth Costello who is invited to Appleton College, a fictitious institution in Massachusetts, to give the annual ‘Gates Lecture’ and disconcerts her hosts, who expected her to choose a literary topic, by delivering a root-and-branch polemic against the treatment of animals, in zoos, scientific research and above all in the production of food. This lecture, ‘The Philosophers and the Animals’, and a talk Elizabeth gives to the English Department entitled ‘The Poets and the Animals’, are followed by debates with members of the faculty, informally over dinner, and formally in a seminar.
