Picking up on a bunch of disparate points:
1: Mother London is probably the best novel I've read in several years. I completely reevaluated Moorcock after this one. I had been a huge Moorcock fan back then - Elric, Hawkmoon, Corum, Dancers At the End Of Time, Oswald Bastable, the lot. Latterly, having ploughed through Burroughs and Ballard, I only rated the Jerry Cornelius stuff and it took a general infatuation with Iain Sinclair to bring me, by way of a review of King Of The City, back to Moorcock with Mother London. There's a breadth and warmth to it that is matched by nothing else I've read recently. Jonathan Coe writes characters you care about as much but he still feels light (which might be garden variety unwillingness to take him seriously because he's funny but...)
2: It was the first part of Atonement that I really liked - I thought it was brilliantly constructed, but then that might be an aspect of the writing school training that you are deriding. It's interesting that of his generation it's McEwan, the allegedly transgressive one, who's taking the slamming rather than Barnes or Amis. Maybe his reputation gave you to expect something more radical?
3: Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike blatantly have a focus every bit as narrow as their UK counterparts. The Great American Novel in part rests on the notion that the life of any individual can be emblematic of the nation as a whole, even if in practice you're writing very specifically about growing up jewish in New Jersey or adultery among New England academics. When an English writer does the same it's considered a microscopic dissection of middle class mores.
4: All I've read of David Peace was in the Granta best writers of the '00s issue so I may be generalising a bit, but he is no more a crime writer than Ballard is a science fiction writer. Both write fiction that falls outside the narrow boundaries of literary fiction, a categorisation constructed to satisfy the commercial needs of publishers and recognised largely by the size of page the book is printed on. Neither subscribes to the rules of genre - maybe the reason they get lumped in with genre fiction is that they tend to be weak on character, subordinating it to concept, much as genre fiction deploys stock characters in the service of plot?
5: English fiction is stacked against (US) American fiction because those are the primary sources of literature written in english as a first language. I sometimes read books because they are written by Irish writers - I doubt I would the same inclination if I was English to read English writers. Familiarity with English writers is assumed, familiarity with Irish writers is not (okay, this might be more convincing if I was from Australia or South Africa...I guess most people have heard of Joyce, Beckett, Yeats etc.)
