Back in 2001, Nicholas Blincoe and Matt Thorne edited an anthology of short fiction, All Hail the New Puritans, which aimed at defining a new literary school. This, basically, applied the minimalist principles of the Dogme 95 film movement to prose fiction, as stated in the (controversial) manifesto that opens the collection. A few years ago, my colleague José Francisco Fernández Sánchez of the University of Almería had the brilliant idea of checking on that project to see how the anthology and the contributors had fared.
I invited myself (thanks Jose!) to contribute a chapter on Alex Garland, not only because I love The Beach but also because I find his drifting into screen writing a very significant career move, hinting at the increasing loss of weight of the novel in our times. The volume just published, The New Puritan Generation (Gylphi, 2013), deals in the end not just with Blincoe and Thorne’s quite unsuccessful bid to build a new avant-garde but with the enormous difficulties of trying to make historical and critical sense of the constant flow of writers in any particular literature.
The New Puritan Generation is, to begin with, a misnomer as there is no such thing. The original anthology acted as a meeting point for a series of young writers (Geoff Dyer was the oldest) who have had very different careers. The chapters which assess the quality of the stories collected by Blincoe and Thorne offer a quite negative view of what was achieved then (David Owen does a particularly fine demolition job of the whole endeavour). This, to begin with, shows that literary manifestos have a very dubious utility, as they seem to curtail rather than encourage creativity.
The other chapters which, like mine on Garland, assess the individual careers of writers such as Scarlett Thomas or Toby Litt, may elicit feelings of perplexity. I’m thinking that perhaps the generation of British writers born in the 1960s are not the ‘new puritans’ but the ‘mixed reviews crowd.’ Let me explain: Garland is a different case, as, basically, he has stopped writing fiction and become a full-time screen writer. Litt, in contrast, has 10 books under his belt; Scarlett Thomas has 8 under hers. I tried to read Litt’s deadkidsongs but, frankly, could not finish it and my memory of his lecture at the AEDEAN Almería conference is not particularly happy. As for Thomas, well, I’m not familiar with any of her novels –nor was I aware that I should be. Readings the chapters by my colleagues and checking the internet, I get the impression that writers of this generation are ambitious, bold enough to combine in their books a myriad ideas but not that good at generating solid novels, much less masterpieces.
I’ll try once more: the thrones occupied since the 1980s by Rushdie, Amis, Ishiguro, Kureishi, Barnes, McEwan, etc. still seem to be theirs. Despite Granta’s efforts (see my post for 23-IV-2013) to find bright young things something –a mysterious X factor– is preventing them from reaching the heights that the older colleagues reached 30 years ago.
Something I noticed is that my colleagues are more enthusiastic about Litt’s and Thomas’s novels (and other writers in the Puritan generation) than the readers. As I read their presentations of each work, I sorely missed what I can only call ‘critical judgement.’ This is more and more common: someone spends 10 pages analysing a book (or a film) in minute detail, often in very clever ways, but it’s hard for me to say whether they find the text in question ‘good’ (= worth reading and memorable). When I turn to Amazon or similar to check whether I should invest my scarce time on this book or that, the judgement readers pass turns out to be much harsher. An Amazon reader writes of Litt’s deadkidsongs that “the ideas are smart, but his execution just creates confusion and boredom.” This is exactly the impression I was getting but it’s not the kind of judgement that I see in current academic work.
So, yes, there are two lines of thought mixed here: one is that contemporary (British) writers seem to deliver all the time less than promised (hence the ‘mixed reviews generation’) and the other is that we academics are not producing criticism but analysis –I’m not sure why. The other line of thought is that as I read The New Puritan Generation I felt increasingly confused about how we have made historical sense so far of Literature. I don’t know whether in the smaller literary world of the past literary generations did exist in a more homogeneous way which is impossible to reproduce today in the overcrowded world of fiction, or whether the groupings are an invention of the critics. If the ‘new Puritans’ do not really exist, except in the title of the original collection and the new book, then, do the ‘Romantics’ or the ‘Modernists’ exist?
What is more, and this why I wanted to discuss Garland, what will happen when writers themselves realise that, like Garland’s protagonist Richard, we’ll soon have published authors lacking a literary education? It does feel like the end of an era and, somehow, it seems to me that the ‘mixed review generation’ is withdrawing into solipsism rather than address this huge issue…
Um, do have a look at The New Puritan Generation, see what you think.
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