‘What we all really want is for America to be what it once was,’ said Margaret Atwood at a recent writers’ event organised by the New York Times. She was discussing America’s present and immediate future with Martin Amis and E.L. Doctorow. They each wrote a piece for the New York Times Sunday Review on the subject, and each concluded that America, both as an idea and an entity, has been shaken by divisive and disconnected politics, an overbearing and undemocratic judiciary, a profoundly illiberal response to terrorism, the moral bankruptcy caused by corporate greed, and ingrained racial tensions. America is no longer a beacon of freedom and prosperity; as Edgar Doctorow put it, ‘America has become unexceptional’.
That this debate even took place is symptomatic of the acute crisis of confidence that appears to be gripping liberal democracies. It also suggests that the West still looks to America for strength and salvation — Amis and Atwood were invited precisely because they are not American, and both appealed to America to rediscover its verve.
Strangely, these revered novelists did not consider whether this decline has been adequately described in contemporary fiction. Rather, they talked about the novel in general. Amis made the most telling point. ‘The pace of history has picked up’ and the novel has reflected that. It has had to because ‘people are more impatient’ these days, even writers. Consequently, ‘the novel is a much sharper object than it was… 30 or 40 years ago’. Rumours of the novel’s death have been greatly exaggerated.
Conversation turned to Mark Twain himself, and the characteristics of American fiction. Amis reiterated his view that the American novel is similar in ambition to the great works of English Victorian literature, which reflects America’s place at the centre of the world. The speakers touched on the future of the American novel but did not speculate how America’s decline might affect the form of American fiction. Would the limitless horizons of Bellow, Updike and Dreiser narrow in line with America’s shortened gaze?
As so often at these events, the panel shot the breeze over the canon of Great American Writers. Atwood spoke of her childhood reading of Twain and Edgar Allen Poe, and then went on to jest that Moby Dick was ‘all about oil’. But the evening was stolen by Doctorow:
‘It’s impossible to imagine our literature without Poe, which is extraordinary because he was a very bad writer. He’s our greatest bad writer… I was named after Edgar Allen Poe. It was my father’s idea. He had a philosophical side, my father, and he liked a lot of bad writers. I remember saying to my mother: “Do you know that you named me after an alcoholic, drug-addict, depressive, with strong necrophilic tendencies?” She said, “Edgar, that’s not funny.”’
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