Making the cut

With its much-hyped list of the Best Young American Writers, Granta may have nudged the most neurotic subgroup in the country over the edge

By Dwight Garner

Jan 27, 1996 | When it comes to backstabbing, blood oaths and sheer comic bile, American writers have nothing on the Brits. Over there, lit crit has always been more of a contact sport, and feuds seem to pop up as freshly as this morning's breakfast scones -- whether it's A.S. Byatt tattooing Martin Amis's gumline, Julie Burchill sticking a hat-pin in Camille Paglia's inflated ego, or the annual recriminations over who should have (but didn't) walk off with the Booker Prize. Viewed from this side of the Atlantic, where our idea of a well-aimed spitball is a wan and tetchy letter to the editor in the New York Times Book Review, these British free-for-alls have a winsome combination of slapstick humor and stylized bravado; they're like Benny Hill skits lashed together by Robert Rodriguez.

No single event in the '90s has caused as much hand-wringing (and pea-shooting) in the U.K. as the publication, in 1993, of Granta magazine's list of its purported 20 Best Young British Novelists. The list, which included such semi-notables as Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, and Ben Okri, as well as a batch of virtual unknowns -- Tibor Fischer, Candia McWilliam -- was deemed to be so pale and scrawny that critics began muttering (again!) about the death of the British novel.

Witness the carnage: In The Modern Review, Julie Burchill called the entire list (with the exception of Helen Simpson) "crap"; in the TLS, David Sexton intoned that "the desperation of this roster. . . is self-evident;" William Boyd blamed glossy magazines and "the lure of the byline;" the late Kingsley Amis agreed that "bright people now are doing something different;" and James Wood, holding his nose in the Guardian, wondered if the group wasn't "the kind the English novel at present deserves."

Thanks guys, replied poor Salman Rushdie, one of Granta's 1993 judges. Rushdie called the list's critics "poisonously ungenerous" and "about as supportive as a fatwa." Whether or not Granta's 1993 list deserved the gang gong it got in the literary press, it certainly looked meager compared to the magazine's 1983 list of the best British novelists under 40. As prescient as it was gimmicky, Granta's debut list neatly skimmed the era's killer elite, from Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Julian Barnes and William Boyd to Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. Unless you want to count Buchi Emecheta, there's hardly been an unblooming bulb in the bunch.

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