US v England contemporary novels

[stlukesguild]

It's largely my contention that it has always been impossible to accurately assess the art of one's own time. If we lived in 1820 I have no doubt you'd be declaring that the poets of our time, such as Blake, Byron, and Keats, couldn't hold a candle to the past.

[mortalterror]

It's largely my contention that it has always been impossible to accurately assess the art of one's own time. If we lived in 1820 I have no doubt you'd be declaring that the poets of our time, such as Blake, Byron, and Keats, couldn't hold a candle to the past.

If I were living in 1820 I'd probably have heard of Byron. Keats career was brief and he probably died before he had a following, so I'm guessing his fame came later. Wordsworth and Coleridge were established for twenty years by then. I'm not a fan of Burns or Austen. Leopardi just started writing and was little known, but I'd have known of Shelley. Cao Xueqin and Nguyen Du were eastern so I wouldn't have heard of them. I'd probably be a big fan of Goethe and Sir Walter Scott though. And I'd scoff at people for thinking we were living in some great age because of Robert Southey and Leigh Hunt.

I won't claim to know what the best books of the last ten years were for a fact, but forty to fifty years ago I've got a pretty good idea. Even thirty years ago and I'm probably in the ball park. And I won't say that the art of our time is totally mysterious and unknowable. I just do not prioritize staying current when there is so much awesome stuff from a thousand years ago I still haven't read. If I was really interested I bet I could stay on top of the contemporary scene, but that would almost be a full time job.

[mgv1208]

James Fenton(UK) is considered by many to be the greatest living poet. Im not saying that he is, but he at least deserves to be in the conversation.

[mgv1208]

O and the point Amis was making was that the top American novelists (Pynchon, Roth, Dellilo) would be dead soon and that there aren't many good young american novelists, but young (or youngish) brithish novelists like Zadie Smith, Will Self, Chris Cleave, etc... were on the rise

[Pierre Menard]

^^^
As far as younger authors go, does anyone rate Michael Chabon as a young quality American author?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is meant to be excellent for example? As is The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

[JBI]

England, as I put it, never recovered from the death of empire. The great British Elegy is the work of Larkin, which would be a depressing poetry, if he did not hammer home with the recurrent, so what? who cares? what do we make of it? themes. The country I guess just crumpled and went on, and so its literature lost its big vision of its own grandeur, something bad for the world but traditionally good for literature.

How true is that artistically? I agree that a great deal of the finest art across the whole of history comes from those cultures who have some grandiose vision of themselves and their future. This is true whether we are speaking of the Greek Athenian Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, or the United States from the time of Emerson through perhaps the 1960s. But then we also have the Hebrew Biblical texts written after the fall and captivity of Israel, the Shanameh composed under similar circumstances, and one of your old favorites, Leopardi (I was just reading his Elegy for Italy). It seems to me that a good writer writes from whatever experience life brings. Writing from the position of an Empire in Decline (and we shouldn't ignore the fact that while Britain may be in Decline in terms of international influence and power, they remain the 6th wealthiest nation on the planet and London the 5th largest city in the world) seems no less likely to inspire great literature than writing from a position of increasing wealth and influence.

Perhaps true, but the novel, particularly the British novel, is very nationalist, if not imperial. The genre itself is credited with creating national identities, languages, and cultures on almost every continent. It is not hard to suppose that national welfare and the novel go hand in hand.

Still, I meant more culturally. I don't see a transformation, only a decline into unfeeling, something similar to a Coleridgean Dejection, is how I formulate it. Its as if everyone has kind of given up on creativity in search of pursuing the conventional - so now you have sensational novels written in England with omniscient narrators, or a focus on the past glories of "English humor" which, to an international audience is very hit and miss.

It could be worse though. Chinese authors are now completely absent internationally because they only understand or write about themselves. Even in China regionalism is a huge determiner in audience (North-Western authors for instance would have a North-Western audience, and a North-Western publisher). Still, the situation can be applied elsewhere.

Simply put, novels originated as a national pass-time. The English novel got its start as a rentable entertainment for middle-class educated women to read to their families, or read on train-rides or alone at home. It evolved into a national concept - the study of English literature in a sense was created for export - at that time the reading educated mass would be absorbed in classics, and not in novels - but for the Indian subclass of imperial subjects, well, they needed something to teach them how to be English.

Of course, that doesn't work anymore, but the Booker recognition is perhaps a shadow of the situation.

^^^
As far as younger authors go, does anyone rate Michael Chabon as a young quality American author?

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is meant to be excellent for example? As is The Yiddish Policemen's Union.

I found the work quite amateurish actually. The ending was rather weak, and he glosses over much of the important elements of history. In a sense, I found it weak as an historical novel, and couldn't help remembering that sarcastic line from Doctorow about New York, "There were no black people."

If anything, I think Chabon is too self-conscious as a novelist, and too textbookie to ever break into something. I doubt he will ever approach a subject without a sort of cleanliness to it, the same way he will never approach human sexuality, only write around it.

[Mr.lucifer]

How does Michael Chabon count as a young novelists? He's nearly 50.

[Desolation]

How does Michael Chabon count as a young novelists? He's nearly 50.

In novelist years, that's about 25.

[The Truth]

I don't read much contemporary but my favorite contemporary authors are definitely American, David Foster Wallace & Mark Z. Danielewski. I'm not even sure I've read a contemporary author who's British in a while.

[Paulclem]

Still, I meant more culturally. I don't see a transformation, only a decline into unfeeling, something similar to a Coleridgean Dejection, is how I formulate it. Its as if everyone has kind of given up on creativity in search of pursuing the conventional - so now you have sensational novels written in England with omniscient narrators, or a focus on the past glories of "English humor" which, to an international audience is very hit and miss.

I just read an article by Will Self "On Modernism and Me" where he writes:

For myself, I haven't been content to carry on producing books that merely strain against the conventions – as I've grown older, and realised that there aren't that many books left for me to write, so I've become determined that they should be the fictive equivalent of ripping the damn corset off altogether and chucking it on the fire. In 2010 I published Walking to Hollywood, a book which exhibited all the continental pretensions we – and I say "we" advisedly – instinctively abhor: the incorporation of the writer as a character in his own work, the abandonment of plot, the banjaxing of realism etc etc. Among the British – and the Scots in particular – the critical reception was good, but the sales tanked. If I had been motivated by seeking a readership – in the way Blairite focus groups sought an electorate – then I might have tried to rein back these tendencies in my next novel; instead, I found myself unable to do this. Never before – not even in those cold winter days of the early 80s – have I felt myself to be so at odds with everything, including my own facility with words. In the winter of last year I was staying in a flat in Dartmouth in Devon, which has been lent to me for 20 years now as a writing bolthole. It was bitterly cold, and as I hammered at the keys of the typewriter, I felt a dreadful intractability about the text I was working on – no matter that I had eschewed the simple past and dived into the dangerous waters of the continuous present; no matter that I had struck out from the safe shores of the third-personal to embrace the slippery evanescence of the stream of consciousness, still I felt the corset cutting into me, still I felt mired in convention.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012...dernism-and-me

He seems to be refuting what you are saying about being satisfied with cosy conventions in the Modern English novel. I haven't read any of his books, though I think I'm definately going to pursue this, and JG Ballard whom he notes in the article.

Certainly Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall is written in an interesting and unconventional first person stream of consciousness style that allows her to convey character and plot through Cromwell's thought.

I would also say the Rushdie's Midnight Children does not follow a cosy conventionality, and provides an interesting angle upon the end of colonialism in India. His use of multiple symbolism and scene contrasts makes for a great impressionistic experience.

I confess, though, that I am unable to compare these modern novels with modern US efforts.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I'm going to have to totally disagree with JBI on Chabon. I've read both of the novels mentioned above, and while neither one was flawless, I found Kavalier and Clay to be nearly so, giving it a 9.5. His real talent lies in developing plot, but his character creation is also wonderful. Plus, he won the Pulitzer for Kavalier and Clay, not something slouches usually accomplish.

I'm not sure what JBI means when he says, "The ending was rather weak, and he glosses over much of the important elements of history," because Kavalier and Clay (I must assume that's the book he's referring to, since Yiddish Policemen... is an alternate history/mystery novel) is a book about the history of comic books, a fictionalized history mostly, so I don't know what important parts of history are missing. Historical accuracy has little to do with it. I also found the ending good.

[ChicagoReader]

Very limited knowledge here and I am American but I'd have to side with contemporary American lit. In addition to the older but still active writers like McCarthy, Pynchon, and Roth, there's the likes of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Richard Powers, Junot Diaz, Richard Ford, and even Denis Johnson. While I might not like all these authors they still produce quality material. As for Britain I'm fairly ignorant, though I love David Mitchell and Ishiguro is good too if he counts.

[mortalterror]

What a lot of people here fail to grasp is that David Foster Wallace is dead and Midnight's Children was thirty years ago.

Also, if we're talking about younger writers then Junot Diaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is only 44. I haven't read this but it does make a lot of the critic's lists.

JBI, as a Canadian, what do you think of Rohinton Mistry? Does his later work live up to A Fine Balance? Could you put him on the same pedestal as Atwood say?

And has anyone kept tabs on Paul Auster since he left for France? He might have done some more good work there. He certainly has the brains, though I found him a bit too pretentious for my taste.

By the way, I don't think anyone has mentioned Chuck Palahniuk yet. The man obviously has talent, but every book he's written since the first has been more polished and less inspired than the last. I stopped reading him in 2005, but he might have written himself out of the rut since then.

[Kafka's Crow]

What a lot of people here fail to grasp is that David Foster Wallace is dead and Midnight's Children was thirty years ago.

Also, if we're talking about younger writers then Junot Diaz, the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is only 44. I haven't read this but it does make a lot of the critic's lists.

JBI, as a Canadian, what do you think of Rohinton Mistry? Does his later work live up to A Fine Balance? Could you put him on the same pedestal as Atwood say?

And has anyone kept tabs on Paul Auster since he left for France? He might have done some more good work. He certainly has the brains, though I found him a bit too pretentious for my taste.

By the way, I don't think anyone has mentioned Chuck Palahniuk yet. The man obviously has talent, but every book he's written since the first has been more polished and less inspired than the last. I stopped reading him in 2005, but he might have written himself out of the rut since then.

Of all the US writers mentioned here, only Gore Vidal, Pynchon and Cormac Mc-Carthy are considered as of some importance outside the US. The rest are national writers, not international writers. I spend quite a lot of time reading posts on this forum and have had significant interest in American Literature for over two decades, hence my knowledge of some US writers who are virtually unknown outside the US. I spent almost a year researching Walker Percy as I once was in the circle of Dr Marcus Smith who was a Fulbright professor at Loyola University at that time, a close friend of Walker Percy and had some hand in the publication of A Confederacy of Dunces after its manuscript was given to Percy by J K Toole's mother. I am a student of Dr Jerome McGann of U o Virginia, all these things pushed me deeper and deeper into the US Literature and my knowledge of this literature is, well, above average when compared with other non-US readers. So when somebody mentions Dellilo or DF Wallace or Austere or Pat Conroy, Danielewski or Chabon, I know who they are talking about. Don't expect this to be the case with other people who are situated in the same geographical location as I.

This comparison seems quite futile to me although no discussion is totally futile as long as it generates ideas. I am sure Gunter Grass or Gabo (Garcia Markez) or le Clezio would smile at all these arguments.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

I love seeing Danielewski's name pop up. I just finished House of Leaves. Man, what a trip. I'm looking forward to seeing where he goes.