Questionable Claim of the Day

Chris

That (Waugh, Powell and so on) is a very telling list. They were decades ago. Very little of any quality has been written (or at least published) in the way of novels, on either side of the Atlantic, for years.

Rhoda Klapp

"In the first place the notion that there's some kind of unofficial competition between British and American novelists is itself absurd but so too is this kind unseemly prostration before over-written (that is, "exuberant"), ponderous, flabby American novels"

If this sentence is railing against over-written ponderous and flabby, it acts as a good example.

John Lea

There are a number of good British novelists writing at the moment, but they are not self-publicists, in the Rushdie or Amis (M) mould, so tend to get overlooked. I would point to Sebastian Faulks, William Trevor, and Piers Paul Read.

dearieme

That Mark Twain was pretty good though. In fact, isn't Mark Twain the only American that Americans don't overrate?

BCS

Holinghurst?

ben

Anyone who likes Philip Roth hates literature.

ndm

The claim of supremacy for American over British fiction is a common one. If the opening paragraph, nay the opening sentence, of a New Yorker story is anything to go by I find it hard to believe that American fiction is better than anything. I read Oblivion by the (vastly) (overrated) David Foster Wallace and was underwhelmed (See note 16).

I blame MFA programs in writing for all this. In none of literary biographies of some great European 20th century writers I've read is there any mention of two years in a writing programme in Amherst followed by a leisurely summer as a writing tutor in the Adirondacks.

digbydolben

Flannery O'Connor is one great American short story writer who DID attend a "writer's workshop," but, on the whole, I agree with you. However, I'd also recommend to you Alan Gurganis and Walker Percy. In general, however, I prefer your British novelists' work--and particularly those of the 20th century.

Ronnie

It's simply a matter of taste and anyway, the writing of novels is a very individual business and cannot be reduced to this sort of silly nationalist nonesense. Philip Roth, for example, happens to be American. He could just as easily not be.

Personally I enjoy reading current American fiction more than any other at the moment but that is my choice, it certainly cannot be seen as a comment on the superiority of American letters. It is simply 'where I am at'.

Read, enjoy, grow.

A. MacAulay

Why is Gore Vidal always left out? He has written plays, scripts, essays, satires, belle-lettres and historical novels and all of the highest quality. Why is an existential angst-pooper from any side of the Atlantic mentioned before an author who can really write?