You know it's July when a critic's declaration of the novel's demise makes it as a news story. Serious fiction is dead, according to New York journalist Lee Siegel. Funny, I thought it was being reborn – but maybe that is a British perspective.
It is easy to see why an American critic might worry for the future of the novel. Any honest fan of modern fiction has to acknowledge the supremacy of American writers since the 1960s. For this particular British reader, to discover the novels of Philip Roth and Thomas Pynchon, in particular, was to be released from the tongue-tied mumblings of postwar English fiction into a new world of generous imaginative reach and exuberant language.
But is American fiction still so much better than British writing? When I lived for some months in Providence, Rhode Island in the 1990s it was surprising to a fan of American literature to see novels by the likes of Martin Amis out-hyping homegrown fiction. The other startling thing was the diversity of newer American writing. Writers I discovered in those months included such cyberpunks as William Gibson (yeah, I know, Canadian). They were good stuff – but where was the swagger of the Roth generation?
That is even more true now. McSweeney's magazine epitomises a generation of good writers, but where's that tang of greatness that so much American literature of the 20th century gave off? Actually, the answer is that no one wants to claim that crown. Novelists are happy to rub shoulders with cartoonists and conceptual artists. Here comes everybody.
The literary scene today seems more broken up, various and relaxed, and that suits British writing which frankly – speaking of the past 50 years – has less of a classic tradition to live up to. Surely, if the novel in English has a master now at the peak of his powers, it is Ian McEwan. And if it has a young genius, it is David Mitchell, in the eerily beautiful pages of whose masterpiece, Cloud Atlas, you will find something quite new and liberating. Here in this book is a future for the novel. But maybe there is no American Mitchell right now.
