Leading commentator says era of great novelists such as Twain and Hemingway has passed
by: Vanessa Thorpe
Book pundits in the United States are being urged to line up on one side or other this summer: Is the American novel finally dead or not? The row began when the controversial critic Lee Siegel wrote a piece for the New York Observer declaring that the American public no longer talk about novels and that this creative form, once so full of fire, has lost its spark for ever.
"For about a million reasons," Siegel claimed, "fiction has now become a museum-piece genre most of whose practitioners are more like cripplingly self-conscious curators or theoreticians than writers. For better or for worse, the greatest storytellers of our time are the non-fiction writers."
As the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction, awarded on Thursday in London, recognised the importance of the new book by American journalist Barbara Demick, Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea, the debate Siegel has re-started raged on in books pages and on literary websites. Will American fiction ever compete again with non-fiction for contemporary relevance, critics in both camps are asking.
Siegel's assault on America's novelists was prompted by the publication of the New Yorker's annual "20 Under 40" list of new writers, but it has exposed a bitterness at the heart of the world of books.
Railing against "the New Yorker's self-promoting, vulgar list" of favoured newcomers, Siegel smears the whole literary pack as being damagingly self-referential and led by the nose by publicists. Calling for new talent and new genres, he laments the fact that nobody bothered to question the "20 Under 40" selection.
The British critic James Wood, now perhaps the leading voice in literary journalism in America, is at the centre of the row. For Siegel, the prominence and fame of Wood – who writes for the New York Times – sums up the current crisis in fiction.
"May the gods bless my former New Republic colleague, and may he keep reviewing novels for another hundred years, but the very emergence of Mr Wood signals the decline of fiction, his driving passion," Siegel claims, going on to argue that the death of an artistic form is evident when the analysis of it has become so top-heavy.
But the literati have hit back. They argue Siegel is using his contentious thesis to get at a rival publication and a rival critic. A riposte published in the Los Angeles Times first pointed out that other journals had criticised the New Yorker's selection of writers and then took on Siegel's theory, point by point. Another response to Siegel carried online in the Huffington Post last week went so far as to suggest it is not the American novel we should mourn, but the American literary scene.
Critics like Siegel, it urges, "have refused to even open the curtains in their ivory towers to see the wonderful, burgeoning literary world that has sprung up around them. They are dismissive of book blogs, of genre fiction, of pretty much anything that, say, wouldn't be covered in the New Yorker".
Declaring the death of the novel is now almost as much of a literary tradition as the novel itself. American writers, proud of their canon – from Mark Twain, Herman Melville and Ernest Hemingway, to John Steinbeck, Joseph Heller and Saul Bellow – are, alternately, eager to kill off the genre and exasperated by their long wait for the next big writer.
Back in 2003, a column by renowned critic Harold Bloom decried the National Book Foundation's decision to give Stephen King an award for a "Distinguished Contribution to American Letters". Attacking JK Rowling in the same article, Bloom suggested that good literature could never be as popular as King's horror stories and Rowling's Harry Potter books. Andrew Marr, writing in this newspaper in 2001, also declared the British novel dead.
For the author Geoff Dyer, speaking this weekend, the problem now lies much more in the flawed category of literary fiction. "I don't have the patience to read novels these days unless the author has either jettisoned most of the stuff that is considered essential to novel-writing or is a complete and absolute master, like Alan Hollinghurst, say," he said.
"So-called literary fiction seems a particular degraded category in the UK these days, often devoid of any and all things literary in so far as the word suggests some kind of value judgment." But the publisher Jamie Byng, head of Canongate, said Siegel's reasoning was "preposterous", adding: "There is important, challenging thought-provoking fiction out there, just as there is non-fiction. I just don't buy any broad-brushstroke statement like 'fiction is dead'."
It could be that Siegel simply hoped to shake novelists up. The critic Frank Kermode once said the novel was a form that revived itself periodically. "The special fate of the novel, considered as a genre, is to be always dying; and the main reason for this is that the most intelligent novelists and readers are always conscious of the gap, consisting of absurdity, that grows between the world as it seems to be and the world proposed in novels," Kermode wrote. As a result, writers, from Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne to JD Salinger, plan to write an anti-novel and then end up, Kermode said, pointing "the way to a new novel, a new convention".
FIVE GREAT AMERICAN TALES
Moby-Dick
Herman Melville, 1851
A tale of man in crisis: a great white whale is pursued by the obsessed Captain Ahab.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain, 1885
The story of Huck and his fellow river voyager and outsider Tom Sawyer has become central to the US psyche.
The Great Gatsby
F Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
The magnetic attraction between Daisy Buchanan and doomed lover Jay Gatsby makes this the key American novel.
The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck, 1939
Seminal socialist saga of the Great Depression tells of migrant sharecroppers crossing the Dust Bowl to California.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Ernest Hemingway, 1940
Spanish civil war romance in which young American volunteer Robert Jordan is sent to blow up a bridge in Franco territory.
from: Guardian
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