Granta 54, Summer 1996: The Best of Young American Novelists. - book reviews

National Review, Sept 30, 1996 by James Bowman

TAKEN together, these stories represent the worst news for American fiction since William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize and inspired a generation of dreadful imitators. But, like most of the bad news from the front of the culture wars, this must be taken with a grain of salt. Look, for example, at the introduction, which he calls an "Editorial," by Ian Jack, in which he explains both the techniques of the judging and the outcomes.

In case anybody is counting by race or gender, the 52 shortlisted writers included one Native American, six African-Americans, two Chinese-Americans, one Haitian-American, one Cuban-American, one Jamaican-American, one Korean-American, and one Indian-American. There were 25 women and 27 men. The final 20 include one Native American, one African-American, one Chinese-American, one Haitian-American. There are 7 women to 13 men. The national judges were three white men and one white woman, unless, of course, you bring into that sum a fifth appointed judge, Henry Louis ("Skip") Gates Jr., the professor of African-American studies at the University of Harvard [sic]. Professor Gates, unfortunately, could not be traced by phone or fax during the judging, and has spoken to no judge since.

I just love that "In case anybody is counting . . ." That's as good a joke as "Skip" Gates simply disappearing from among the ranks of the judges. I don't doubt that Gates knew that his chief value to Granta was in terms of racial proportions and that there was no reason why he should have to do any actual judging, but there is just the beginning of a delightful doubt that Granta knew it. The point is that, mediocre as most of these stories or excerpts from novels are, it quickly becomes apparent that the principle of their selection had little to do with literary merit. Not only were the inevitable racial and sexual standards applied, but also the material has a curious sort of sameness to it. This may be because the judges were prepossessed in favor of certain subjects, or it may be that certain subjects are thought to be more appropriate than others in the university "writing" programs out of which most of these authors spring. These include authentic-sounding or quasi-autobiographical accounts of ethnic experience; sexual dysfunction, confusion, or fantasy; abused or neglected children; and life among a demimonde of criminals, drug addicts, and convicts. Of the 20 stories or excerpts from novels in this volume, 13 are of one of these four types. Some of the categories overlap. So an account of an elaborately unclassifiable transsexual also provides the occasion for quite a lot of authentic-sounding Greek-American experience in a story by Jeffrey Eugenides. It is satisfying to one's social conscience to reflect that such subjects are being tackled by the young and morally earnest wordsmiths being trained up by our great universities. But one cannot help noticing that the approved fictional subjects here are rather remote from the experience of the vast majority of the fiction-reading public. The bourgeois novel of middle-class life, which has accounted for most of the great fiction written in the last two or three centuries, seems to have all but dropped from the radar screens of our novelists and would-be novelists. Could this have something to do with their generally inferior product?