Granta / Best of Young American Novelists 3 / Introduction

Emma Cline
Poster by T.A.

INTRODUCTION

Sigrid Rausing

25th April 2017

I

n spring 1979 the first issue of Granta, a Cambridge student magazine dating back to 1889, was published in its new incarnation: a literary quarterly, in paperback format. Bill Buford and Pete de Bolla were joint editors. The title was New American Writing, and it featured work by Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Bryson, Tillie Olsen, Leonard Michaels and Susan Sontag, alongside pieces about writers – some in the vein of literary criticism, some mere notices or magazine articles – including Cheever, Updike, Bukowski and others.

The introduction began with a complaint about contemporary British fiction, which, the editors wrote, was ‘neither remarkable nor remarkably interesting’.

‘Current literature,’ they merrily concluded, ‘is unsatisfying simply for the sense it suggests of a steady, uninspired sameness, a predictable, even if articulate prattling of predictable predicaments.’

They were young and they were enthusiastic, and they had a point to make: that American fiction – ‘challenging, diversified, and adventurous’ – was not as well known as it should be in Britain, whose publishers were slow to pick up American gems. This neglect, they argued, was a sign of the dearth of debate, the lack of literary criticism and the absence of ‘a place for the imagination to practise’. The new incarnation of Granta was launched to fill that cultural gap, and the editors would do it by bringing American fiction to Britain.

Granta took off, and within a few years the editors conceived the idea of a Best of Young British Novelists issue: Granta 7, published in partnership with Penguin in 1983, was the first issue of the Best of Young Novelists series. It was a much-fêted list, probably more so than any of the subsequent ones, including now-famous authors like Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. The concept was launched, and the second Best of Young British Novelists issue was published in 1993; the third in 2003; and the fourth in 2013.

I

an Jack was the editor of the first Best of Young American Novelists issue, published in 1996. A somewhat onerous system had been devised whereby five regional judging panels sent their own shortlists to a central jury. The panels famously missed some of the most interesting up-and-coming names – Nicholson Baker was absent, a decision Ian Jack described as ‘insane and perverse’ in his introduction to the issue. David Foster Wallace, Donna Tartt and William T. Vollman didn’t pass the regional panels either, though many outstanding writers did: Sherman Alexie, Edwidge Danticat, Jeffrey Eugenides, Jonathan Franzen, Elizabeth McCracken and Lorrie Moore, amongst others.

‘Who are the best young novelists in the United States of America?’ asked the cover copy, immediately renouncing its own query with this caveat: ‘A bad question. Writing can’t be measured like millionaires, athletes and buildings – the richest, the fastest, the tallest.’ One senses Ian Jack, sceptical and intelligent, in the copy. He gives in, of course – the rest of the blurb is a defence of the concept, which was said, at least, to pose ‘a useful question’.

In 2007 we did it again. This time the judging process was simpler, with one panel consisting of Edmund White, A.M. Homes, Meghan O’Rourke, Paul Yamazaki, Ian Jack and me. We emailed back and forth (people were less worried about leaks and hacking then), and finally met in New York to discuss the shortlist. ‘No list of this kind can offer anything approaching a final judgement,’ Ian wrote in the introduction. ‘That is up to posterity, if there is one.’

But still: it was a good list. Ian also mentioned the preoccupation with death in contemporary American fiction, noting that ‘the dead’, ‘the memory of the dead’ and ‘the post-dead’ made frequent appearances in the works we had read. He quoted Zadie Smith on American writing – ‘why so sad, people?’, she had written in her own preface to an earlier anthology of American writing. But what about Ian Jack’s phrase above about the judgement of posterity: ‘if there is one’? Why so sad, Ian?

The truth is that fantasies of the apocalypse have snuck into us like a virus, embedding themselves into the core of American writing. American dystopia was a strong theme in fiction ten years ago, and it seems strongly present still: pandemics, war and dysfunction predominate (though we noted a good bit of humour too). From the outside one feels the origins of that sadness are all too obvious – 9/11; war; coffins draped in American flags; PTSD; torture scandals; Guantánamo Bay; school shootings and gun crime; the war on drugs; the crash of 2008 . . . Where is the good news? From bee death to the loss of manufacturing; from climate change to populism, it’s all looking bleak.

But then it always did look bleak: here is a big troubled country with a free press – of course it’s going to look bleak. Have you ever read a newspaper in a country with censorship? Try it – that’s where you find the good news, the bland news, the happy stories.

T

his year’s list has been a momentous undertaking. Ten years ago we read over 200 novels for the longlist. This time, submissions doubled. Rosalind Porter, Granta’s deputy editor, was on maternity leave, but carried on reading. Luke Brown, Luke Neima, Francisco Vilhena, Eleanor Chandler and Josie Mitchell read voraciously. Our Granta Books editors read too – Laura Barber, Bella Lacey, Max Porter, Anne Meadows and Ka Bradley all contributed. Alex Bowler, our publishing director, was hired when the longlist was more or less done, but took an interest in the process. I chaired weekly meetings, where we discussed and logged the merits of each book.

Lauren Groff

We decided to have an all writers’ jury, reasoning that most fiction writers are now deeply engaged in other people’s writing too; teaching, editing or publishing. We asked five writers we admire to be on it: Paul Beatty, Patrick deWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link and Ben Marcus.

All lists are a reflection of the tastes of their judges. We are very aware of the authors who might have been on the list had the conversation gone slightly differently. Paul Beatty unfortunately had to drop out when he won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sellout – the calls on his time became too great to carry on. We can’t know what influence he might have had on the final discussions. Some of us regretted Laura van den Berg, Tao Lin, Brit Bennett, Téa Obreht and Steven Dunn. Katy Simpson Smith and Maggie Shipstead could have made the list, too. NoViolet Bulawayo, a marvellous writer, unfortunately turned out not to be eligible, but she was part of our original selection.

For the first time ever, there are more women than men on the list: twelve to nine. Last time around we had nine women and twelve men; the first list had seven women and thirteen men. Progress, I guess – or chance. We didn’t count until we were done. In 2007, immigrant writers were more prominent: seven had been born or raised in other countries. This time, only four of the writers were born abroad.

Every list is a compromise – of course it is. But then it takes on a life on its own. Tobias Wolff, a judge in 1996, the year of the famous misses, wrote this:

It seems to me that we could make up another issue of Granta entirely of writers who aren’t in this one, and lose nothing in quality. The idea of choosing twenty writers to represent a generation makes some sense in your country, but in ours, immense as it is, and teeming with young writers, such a process mainly exposes the biases of the judges, my own included.

Which isn’t to say that our list is not a fine one. It is. And on it you will find many writers of eccentric and even visionary gifts . . . We read a great number of good books, and drew attention to some of them, and gave occasion for aficionados to celebrate their own neglected favorites by ridiculing our list. I’m proud of the unsatisfactory, incomplete job we did, and hope that its incompleteness, by stimulating outrage and disbelief, will awaken others to the wonderful range and vitality of the writers now coming into the fullness of their powers.

That was true then, and it’s true now.

I

want to thank everyone who made this issue possible – the judges, Patrick deWitt, A.M. Homes, Kelly Link and Ben Marcus, first of all. They were conscientious and deeply insightful, and very good company too. Josie Mitchell, one of our editorial assistants, was in charge of all logistics, and did it brilliantly. Daniela Silva, Granta’s designer, conceived the concept for the cover and commissioned and photographed the light installation. Anthony D. Romero of the ACLU kindly allowed us to meet in their boardroom – thank you for that. Mimi Clara helped with logistics, as did our publicists Suzanne Williams and Elizabeth Shreve. Agents and publishers have been uniformly helpful – thank you for all the generous support.

Ottessa Moshfegh

Most of all, however, I want to thank the writers on the list – because this, of course, is not just a list, it’s also an anthology. Here is Ben Lerner, with the poignant story of Dale. Here is Greg Jackson, on the old politics of the left and the new politics of the right; here are Sana Krasikov, Karan Mahajan and Dinaw Mengestu touching, one way or another, on terrorism. Here is fantasy by Jesse Ball, Mark Doten, Jen George and Ottessa Moshfegh; and exciting new stories by Halle Butler, Emma Cline, Rachel B. Glaser, Lauren Groff,Yaa Gyasi, Catherine Lacey and Chinelo Okparanta. Here is Garth Risk Hallberg with another New York character; Anthony Marra on escaping fate on an Italian island; Esmé Weijun Wang on mental illness, racism and murder; Joshua Cohen on a soldier in the Israeli army; and Claire Vaye Watkins on a past relationship . . .

I want to write more, but I don’t want to give the stories away. Read them, and judge for yourself.

GRANTA

 Granta's first Best of Young British Novelists list, 1983. back row (l to r): William Boyd, Adam Mars-Jones, Julian Barnes, Pat Barker, Clive Sinclair. Middle row: Buchi Emecheta, AN Wilson, Ursula Bentley, Christopher Priest, Maggie Gee, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis. Front row: Shiva Naipaul, Kazuo Ishiguro, Philip Norman, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain and Lisa St Aubin de Teran. (Two winners were missing from the photograph: Alan Judd and Salman Rushdie.) Photograph: Camera Press/Snowdon

Granta's class of 2013: picking the 20 best young British novelists

Howls of outrage are bound to accompany next month's unveiling of Granta's list of top 20 young writers. Here a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel reveals how the list takes shape

Alex Clark
Sunday 17 March 2013 00.05 GMT

T

en years is a long time in the literary game: it can easily take someone until then to finish writing a decent novel – although that's less and less likely to wash with contemporary publishers. But a decade is also more than enough time for a writer's fortunes to change dramatically.

Take Hilary Mantel. In 2003 she was a highly respected novelist and critic, the author of such enthusiastically reviewed novels as Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, The Giant, O'Brien and A Place of Greater Safety, the epic fictional portrayal of the French revolution published a decade previously that had probably been her most widely read novel. In the spring of 2003 her extraordinary memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, came out. But Beyond Black, her macabre novel of psychic shenanigans in the home counties, was still two years away; and we would have to wait several more before Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies would scoop two Man Booker prizes and transport Mantel to the highest echelons of writerly fame. Ten years ago she was the very emblem of the seriously talented and audacious female writer who was somehow rarely mentioned in the same breath as the holy trinity of Amis, Barnes and McEwan. Now, she cannot express a mildly contentious view in a literary journal without waking to find an outraged press pack camped on her front lawn.

Both scenarios are mad, and flipsides of the same issue. The pigheaded undervaluing of certain writers and the overnight obsession with others suggest problems with scale and perspective; problems that are perhaps related to Jonathan Franzen's analysis of the trappings that come with mega-successful authorship. The money, the hype, the limo to the Vogue shoot, he wrote, might once have been the perks; these days they're supposed to be the prize itself. Such baubles are, he regretfully maintained, "the consolation for no longer mattering to the culture". In the interests of accuracy, I should point out that Franzen has softened his pessimism a little in subsequent interviews, and one might also retort that the work obviously does matter; people are surely reading The Corrections and Wolf Hall and Freedom and Bring Up the Bodies, not simply waiting for Franzen to appear on Letterman or Mantel on Loose Women. But he has a point. When, these days, a writer becomes well known, when they are successful, when they are said to have "broken through", what does that actually mean?

In 1983, when Granta magazine published its first ever list of the Best of Young British Novelists, it meant something slightly different. That's not to say that the waters were crystal clear, nor that the literary arena was immune to the very idea of celebrity or to the lure of Franzen's consolation prizes. And no enterprise of this nature ever takes place in a vacuum. Work by the first 20 BOYBN created the seventh issue of Granta. Its inaugural issue had been entitled "New American Writing", its second "The Portage to San Christobal of AH", the title of a novella by the French-born, Austrian-descended polyglot George Steiner which appeared alongside pieces about Don DeLillo and William Styron and an interview with John Barth. The issue after that had been called "The End of the English Novel". You get the picture.

Such determined iconoclasm was perhaps unsurprising, given that Granta had been founded by an American, Bill Buford, and one with a nose for an attention-grabbing editorial statement to boot. Now, in the midst of these celebrations of writing from elsewhere, he launched a sort of home talent show, adapting an original initiative from the British Book Marketing Council (allow me a brief and probably deeply unfair diversion: have four words ever so readily summoned up the image of a committee meeting with green cups and saucers and a plate of Peek Freans?). Buford's boldest innovation was to insist that his bright young things be, well, young, imposing an age limit of 40 on candidates.

Then he slapped the work of, among others, Martin Amis (with an extract, of course, from Money, the era-defining novel that would appear the following year), Graham Swift, Kazuo Ishiguro, Pat Barker, Ian McEwan, Rose Tremain and Salman Rushdie between vibrant covers that depicted two fountain pens clashing against an exploding Union flag. He must have known that this kind of thing would be dynamite; the book was called Best of Young British Novelists 1.

Buford's confidence was not misplaced. Every decade since 1983, Granta has produced its 20-strong list of 20- and 30-somethings (although there's no lower age limit, I don't believe a teenager has ever been included). In the mid-90s, the brand was clearly thought to be so successful that it diversified, and there have now been two instalments of Best of Young American Novelists. And since the beginning of this decade, there have been two more additions to the stable: 2010's Best of Young Spanish-language Novelists and last autumn's Best of Young Brazilian Novelists. In one sense, the Spanish-language issue is the most barrier-breaking list to date; bringing together writers from nine countries, its editors argued in their introduction that "the literary homeland, as this collection shows, is the language itself". No wonder they bent the rules to allow themselves 22 writers; they also lowered the age-limit to 35, meaning that all the shortlisted writers had been born since 1975, the year that Franco's death wrought seismic changes in the Spanish-speaking world.

But back to the Brits and, as the sharper among you will have realised, to this year, when the once-a-decade alarm clock is primed to ring again. On 15 April, Granta will announce its fourth list of future fictioneers. The judges – the magazine's publisher, editor and deputy editor, Sigrid Rausing, John Freeman and Ellah Allfrey respectively, novelists Romesh Gunesekera and AL Kennedy and literary journalists Gaby Wood and Stuart Kelly – will have done their work. (This is not quite true of Kelly, who is doing double duty this year on the Man Booker prize jury. He deserves a gong and a lifetime's supply of coffee.)

No sooner have they put their reading specs to one side and allowed themselves a celebratory amontillado, however, than another task begins; that of soaking up the flak. It may come in the form of straightforward disagreement or be of the more politely framed "I beg to differ" variety; it may focus on an outrageous inclusion who has no business even putting pen to paper or on an absent writer who immediately conjures a heart-rending image of genius unrewarded. It may take issue with the whole enterprise. But flak there will be – because there is no list compiled in the whole of contemporary culture that doesn't provoke dissent. And that, in part, is the whole point.

Ten years ago I was on the panel, alongside the chair, Ian Jack, then the editor of Granta, the aforementioned Hilary Mantel, the Observer's literary editor, Robert McCrum, and Nicholas Clee, then the editor of The Bookseller. A very quick word about Mantel, whom I remember – no surprise here – as an exceptionally astute reader and the keeper of more detailed and more illuminating notes than the rest of us put together (no offence, everyone else). But aside from that, an obvious question arises. Why wasn't she a BOYBN?

As is so often the case, it's a matter of the stars aligning. In 1983 Mantel had yet to publish a novel; in 1993, when she had published five, she had just passed 40. Judging that second BOYBN list was AS Byatt, one of this country's greatest novelists; her date of birth meant that she wasn't eligible for even the first list. In 2003, one of those just outside the cut-off date was Ali Smith; there can be little doubt that she would have been included had she been born a while later. I cite these examples not to denigrate either the lists or those on them but simply to underline the fact that they are inevitably snapshots, vivid but partial pictures of a constantly evolving culture.

I cannot pretend, even for the sake of drama, that the creation of that third list was a fraught affair; the general sensibilities and tastes of the panel were too much in accord for trouble, and there were no particularly confrontational or maniacally idiosyncratic temperaments to accommodate. There were, of course, disagreements, and there were also a couple of crises in the form of much-admired writers who turned out, for one reason or another, to be ineligible. But the key to harmony is more than anything else a question of numbers: life is made far easier when you are choosing 20 "winners" rather than one.

I suspect most of the BOYBN panels have had a roughly similar experience: the first five, 10, even dozen places fill themselves pretty quickly with writers whose talents would make their omission merely bizarre, sometimes because of the sureness and quality of their early writing, sometimes because they have, by a comparatively young age, built up an impressive body of work – and sometimes both. But then come the writers who make the endeavour come alive; those in whom one can discern a flash of brilliance and originality that compel you to take a punt. The development and durability of a literary career is an unknowable thing; hence we are keener than mustard to try to divine it.

In 2003 much was made of the fact that we had included two writers whose first novels had yet to be published; Monica Ali and Adam Thirlwell. In both cases, typescripts had arrived late on in the proceedings, unaccompanied by anything much in the way of extraneous information. I recall losing myself in Brick Lane, becoming utterly absorbed in the tragicomedy of Nazneen and Chanu, feeling that I had rarely read a first novel so assured and fresh. Thirlwell's Politics was a different affair: it was explicit, sure, sexually and sexily, but it also seemed to have its roots in Europe, not Britain.

There was much discussion about both – but the fact that neither novel had been published was not a factor. When the list came out, this unavailability was held, by some, to be a weakness, almost a deception, even though it was very short-lived; Brick Lane and Politics were not in the early stages of gestation, and both were published soon afterwards. So the injury was not to the reader; was it, therefore, to the critics and journalists, who were somehow shut out, the evidence necessary to grant or withhold approval denied them?

Whether or not BOYBN 4 includes any as-yet-unpublished writers, the critical landscape has changed vastly in the past three decades. For a start, what Buford seized upon as a firecracker in 1983 is now a more commonplace feature of book promotion. Lists are ubiquitous, and perhaps none more so than those that promise newness or, even better, youth: the New Yorker's 20 American writers under 40, the annual announcement of Waterstones's 11 best debut writers, the less codified lists produced by all newspapers and magazines at frequent intervals. Their popularity might derive from a residual desire to believe in an authoritative critical consensus (although this seems less plausible by the day) or from a more pragmatic need to discover new work or from the understandable, if somewhat self-defeating, impulse to have something to rail against. But their co-dependent relationship with the publishing and bookselling industries mean that they are unlikely to disappear any time soon.

Meanwhile, the way we read is changing – with the probable consequence that the way writers write will change too. Overstating this is unwise; the fact that Jennifer Egan releases a story as a series of tweets, for example, doesn't mean that Karl Ove Knausgaard doesn't write a series of six autobiographical novels that run to thousands of pages. Just because a self-published author hits the jackpot doesn't mean that another writer won't collaborate with an editor to work painstakingly through numerous versions of a book. But it does mean that things are freeing up: that the idea of what constitutes a "literary" novel is changing, that genre writing is becoming less marginalised (look, for example, at the success enjoyed by the graphic form in this year's Costa Book Awards), that the career trajectory of a novelist is even less predictable than it ever was, if such a thing is possible.

Against that backdrop, one should embrace the Best of Young British Novelists and other entertainments of its ilk with a sense of adventure and discovery, rather than as the latest reiteration of a tired orthodoxy. Let's face it: a list is a silly thing. It is designed, as Adam Thirlwell wrote in a piece for Granta ahead of its Spanish-language special, to self-destruct; as an entity in itself, it can't last much longer than the present moment. "And so," he added, "although every novelist wants to be included on a list – sure you do, sure you do – the unread novelist also knows that the deeper history of the novel takes place in the future: where you float free of lists entirely, and enter the stratosphere."

Granta's fourth Best of Young British Novelists list will be announced on 15 April, followed on 16 April by publication of Granta 123 (£12.99), featuring work from all 20 writers.

THE GUARDIAN

The 1983 Granta list

Granta's class of 2013 / Picking the 20 best young British novelists

Granta / Pedro Páramo / The Best Book of 1955

Granta / Best of Young American Novelists 3 / Review