The Man Booker Prize might soon be open to American writers. Anything for the rest of us to worry about?
Imagining the American landscape as it had been when Nathaniel Hawthorne
started out as a writer, Henry James talked in terms of absences, producing a
list of more than 20 items that started with “no court, no personal loyalty, no
aristocracy, no church” and ended with “no Epsom nor Ascot!” The passage is
usually quoted as a sign of James’s own character – the contempt for America and
affection for Europe that made him the first great Anglo-American novelist. What
is less often remembered is the caveat that James offered by way of conclusion:
“The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains – that is
his secret, his joke, as one may say.”
More than 130 years since James was writing, almost 200 since Hawthorne set
out to invent a characteristically American tradition (“no literature, no
novels”, James exclaimed), it could be said that the secret is out and the joke
is on us. A rumour that the Man Booker Prize, which has existed under different
sponsors since 1969, will be extending its current remit – the Commonwealth and
Ireland – to include American authors has apparently struck fear into the hearts
of British writers.
The first thing to say is that some kinds of English novel will suffer more
than others. A recent winner of the Booker Prize such as Howard Jacobson’s The
Finkler Question, placed next to books published in the same year such as
Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom,
starts to look “English” in complacent, unflattering ways: spiritually
unadventurous, shallowly comic, callous and deficient in sympathy, provincial in
its metropolitanism, grumpy rather than melancholy. On the other hand, Alan
Hollinghurst’s novel about homosexuality and Thatcherism The Line of Beauty, the
richest Booker winner of recent times, exhibits many of the strengths that have
lain more or less dormant in the American tradition since the death of F Scott
Fitzgerald.
It would be hard to name the day when British novelists first had reason to
fear American writers – perhaps it was when James published his exercise in
anything-George-Eliot-can-do-I-can-do-better, The Portrait of a Lady, or when
D H Lawrence published Studies in Classic American Literature. “We like to think
of the old-fashioned American classics as children’s books,” he wrote. “Just
childishness, on our part.”
More
More