granta best writers under forty (1980s)

Funny - there are two name on both lists. Ishiguro I know, obviously, but (at the risk of sounding hopelessly ignorant) I've never heard of Adam Mars-Jones. Is he as worthwhile as Ishiguro?

Rambler said:

I've never heard of Adam Mars-Jones. Is he as worthwhile as Ishiguro?

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He reviews novels for the Guardian as well as being an author.
In the Granta anthology of "Death" he contributes a short story called Babyclutch..it's exellent, really moving (sob,sob)
well worth a read.

but literary fiction is generally rotten to the core

Adam Mars-Jones

His first book Lantern Lectures is great. 3 semi fictional long short stories. After that I think everything (not that there is much) is very gay/aids centered.

Mars-Jones interesting on Herbert's Plat du Jour and Formalism in the LRB this week:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n24/mars01_.html

jenks said:

cmon, give us bit more than that!!!!

what stands then as worthy of attention?

is it all fiction or just literary?

i am intrigued by such a damning remark - what takes the place of literary fiction - is it non- fiction, 'chick-lit', sci-fi, pulp fiction - cmon labrat give us a few names

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judging by labrat's damning and unsubstantiated "views" on classical music - it's all bollocks! - i woudn't hold your breath on this one...

i'm shamefully out of touch with comtemp lit fiction, but its worth bearing in mind that the number of truly great authors from any given period is really very small. just think about it. it's a cliche, but time is a great sifter.

as far as some of the authors mentioned here go, i'd say that ishiguro is overrated - there was a brilliant and damning piece on him in lit journal arete a few months ago (not available online unfortunately) which hits the nail on the head by characterising his style as '-ish', i.e. moderate, restrained... fucking dull. the same actually goes for seth and rushdie, tho less so rushdie, i'd say, especially midnight's children.

but it's not all bad. i massively enjoy easton ellis (tho his new one is supposed to be utter bollocks). i'm liking joseph torra at the moment too: unpunctuated continuous prose that charts the lives of first person narrators almost entirely in terms of their real and imagined sex lives. because of the compression of the language it reads almost like prose-poetry at times. adam thirwell's politics was great too.

the litmus test for what constitutes contemporary literary fiction is it will be shortlisted for a "prize"
at the moment the literati feel that the post colonial disporia is THE subject
zadie smith
monica ali
whatever the merits of these authors i can't help feeling that they are qualifying/quantifying a Guardian sensibility re:both subject and style.
It's a cliche to point out that some of our greatest authors will never win any prizes because of their assosiation with genre fiction (Ballard/SF is the classic example) cliche maybe,but quite true.

jenks said:

what stands then as worthy of attention?

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for me at the moment the greatest writing around can easily be sampled in the two Frozen Tears anthologys Dennis Cooper, Killian Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Trinnie Dalton, Benjamin Weissman, Adam Putman, Matthew Greene and Paul Buck all contribute to the second.
available here http://www.artwords.co.uk/acatalog/Theory_Page_2.html and only a tenner...

labrat said:

the litmus test for what constitutes contemporary literary fiction is it will be shortlisted for a "prize"
at the moment the literati feel that the post colonial disporia is THE subject
zadie smith
monica ali
(you said you wanted names)
whatever the merits of these authors i can't help feeling that they are qualifying/quantifying a Guardian sensibility re:both subject and style.
It's a cliche to point out that some of our greatest authors will never win any prizes because of their assosiation with genre fiction (Ballard/SF is the classic example) cliche maybe,but quite true.

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no. "literary fiction" is, admittedly a rather vague term. but i'm intrigued that you submit yourself so obediently to the judgement of the booker panel. in publishing, "literary fiction" is a useful term to distinguish those books that will appeal to a particular sector of the market; it is not as narrow as chick lit or sci fi, but is as broad as "trade fiction", which basically encompasses all the most commercial (and the majority) of novels. "literary fiction", then, is anything a bit more demanding, a tad more 'writerly'. it is ultimately whatever the publishing houses want to market as such.

the test of what is good lit fiction is of course more complex, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what granta or booker think (john banville ffs...) so i don't see why ballard/dick not getting these prizes is a problem, or how it detracts in any way from their literary status. (sci fi, btw, has always left me cold)

as for smith and ali jumping on the post-colonial bandwagon, weeell....post-colonialism is indeed the flavour of the month (tho is now perhaps starting to wane somewhat) and, eg, said's appalling analysis of austen makes me cringe too. both these authors are no doubt tapping into this for some of their subjects, but, you know, shakespeare wrote about about topical subjects too and he's not bad....if you questioned the rather unoriginal (austen-informed) premis of white teeth - that everyone comes with a context and that our pasts are as important as our blah blah blah - then fair enought tho. for me, her style always teeters on the edge between 'distinctive' and 'immensely irritating'.

jenks said:

i wonder too if there cannot be a comparison drawn between this and owen's question regarding popism in film - are we not prepared to consider the popular in literature (that which wins the booker to use labrat's definition) as worthy of our attention - it's been done by the middle classes and thus has place in our avant garde discourse, our radar refusing to acknowledgesomething so uncool

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Was just about to ask the same question. Except I'd not consider the booker stuff to be pop - isn't it more like the 'art house' of the medium ? as opposed to the stuff which is on the bestseller lists - though I guess there's some confluence there.

Omaar said:

I'd not consider the booker stuff to be pop - isn't it more like the 'art house' of the medium ? .

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i was equating literary fiction with booker/whitbread novels as lazy shorthand BUT this definition is as good as any.
no-one writes a book to win a prize that would be stupid, the prize money in terms of time/money works out as a pittance.

literary fiction="art house"
apt.

labrat said:

literary fiction="art house"
apt.

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This might have been true back in the days of high modernism, but it's certainly not true now. The proof is that when "literary" novels are adapted for the screen, they inevitably turn out to be middle-brow movies for the middle classes, and not arthouse. Examples: McEwen's "Enduring Love", Ondaatje's "English Patient", McGrath's "Asylum" and a hundred others. "Arthouse" in the sense of ponderous, talky French movies made in the 60s and 70s seems to be pretty much extinct now. Maybe one of the things that's taken its place is movies that are clever riffs on genres, that appeal to a base need for story but also give us intellectual nourishment (A History Of Violence, Mulholland Drive etc).

Essentially 'literary fiction" is just another genre with its own tight conventions, but also with added pretensions of grandeur and universalism.

But to answer the question, I don't have much time for those Granta writers of the eighties. Ishiguru I think has produced some genuinely great things. But too many of these writers indulged in a sort of "naive postmodernism" which feels jejune and outdated now. You wince now every time Winterson or Rushdie overbearingly reminds you you're reading a story with an unreliable narator bla bla bla...

_Hugo said:

Essentially 'literary fiction" is just another genre with its own tight conventions, but also with added pretensions of grandeur and universalism.

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this is what i meant by "art house"

I love french movies from the 60s, early 70s but i wouldn't really call them art house - although that term was probably relevant for describing them then

For me art house is now a derogatory term basically meaning a section in the video store where all the literary adaptations, soft porn, film festival hits and anything european goes. Actually you can find something good in there occasionally, but mostly its just middle class trash.