Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Battle of the Booker Prize? Bring it on

The Man Booker Prize might soon be open to American writers. Anything for the rest of us to worry about?

Philip Roth: the big beast of American letters would have presented a formidable threat, but is now retired
Philip Roth: the big beast of American letters would have presented a formidable threat, but is now retired Photo: AP
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.” 
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