Everyone remembers an inspiring teacher. The teacher who sticks in my mind was a bearded sage who loved Hardy and celebrated Winterval. I know in hindsight that he was a self-indulgent charlatan; but his wide-reading and enthusiasm were enthralling. That last quality made him a good teacher as well as a memorable one: it encouraged pupils to read beyond the plain texts set by stolid examiners, and allowed them to think for themselves, just a little bit.
But his enthusiasm could be his undoing. He had a weakness for making drastic announcements about the ‘state of fiction’ or the ‘role of the author’, which even his enraptured students recognised as absurd. One of these statements was that: ‘American novelists have owned post-war English literature. The British Isles have nobody to match the giants Bellow, Updike and Roth. Except perhaps Martin Amis — and even he is half-American’.
It’s a drunken parlour game (or the last resort of bored literary editors): to choose the ‘Five Greatest Authors in English Since 1945’. The comparison between authors of different countries and cultures is largely false — like comparing sportsmen between eras, playing in dissimilar conditions against diverse opponents. British writers, even without the emergence of Asian and African influences in the recent past, are separate from American writers. It’s not that the content is substantially different (often it is not); it’s that they sound different, just as writers from Ireland have their own mellifluous voice. Compare in your mind’s ear, the great American suburban chronicler, John Updike, with the modern English master, Julian Barnes. Updike is sharp, whereas Barnes is urbane. They are strangely incomparable despite their shared subject and mutual admiration.
Barnes himself drew a more political contrast between modern British and American writers in an interview with the Paris Review twelve years ago:
‘American novelists are so different from English novelists. They really are. No point trying to write like them.’
‘What’s the difference?’
‘Language, primarily; also vernacular (as opposed to academic) form; democracy of personnel; newness. On top of this, contemporary American literature can’t not be affected (as was British Victorian Literature) by coming from a world-dominant nation. It’s vices and virtues are inevitably linked. The best American fiction displays scope, audacity, and linguistic vigour; the worst suffers from solipsism, parochialism, dull elephantiasis.’
The insularity of American fiction is a regular complaint from the outside world, although it may be unjustified. Jonathan Franzen remarked of the phenomenon in cutting terms in his more recent interview with the Paris Review:
‘The people at the Swedish Academy, who bestow the Nobel Prize, recently confessed their thorough lack of interest in American literary production. They say we’re too insular, we’re not writing about the world, we’re only writing about ourselves. Given how Americanised the world has become, I think they’re probably wrong about this — we probably say more about the world by writing about ourselves than a Swedish author does by writing about a trip to Africa. But even if they’re right, I don’t think our insularity is necessarily a bad thing… true cosmopolitanism is incompatible with the novel, because novelists need particularity.’
Barnes and Franzen as archetypes? They’re not exactly birds of a feather. A comparison between them and the literary cultures from which they’ve emerged hardly seems fair or constructive.
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