Folio Prize comment: The University of Reading's Dr David Brauner says English authors need to take more risks to win the big prizes
Release Date 06 March 2014
Dr David Brauner is author of Contemporary American Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Philip Roth (Manchester University Press, 2007), co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Philip Roth Studies and an expert in the field of contemporary fiction who has published widely on the post-war novel in the UK and the US.
Below he discusses the runners and riders for the inaugural Folio Prize, why US authors are a class apart and the lack of risk-taking which is hurting English authors when it comes to winning the big prizes.
Jane Gardam vs North America
"The list of nominees for this weekend's inaugural Folio Prize tells a familiar story...and sadly so do authors from these shores. Herein lies the problem. There is a large gulf in ambition that exists between most contemporary American and British fiction, a gulf that is confirmed in the short-list for the Prize, which includes five American writers and a Canadian."
"England's hopes rest with Jane Gardam. Her novel, Last Friends, while well written and entertaining, stands out for all the wrong reasons. It is the third in a trilogy that deals - as ever with British fiction - with class. Sadly its North American rivals are a class apart.
"When pitted against a virtuouso novel-in-verse, a Joycean stream-of-consciousness second-person narrative, and a panoramic exploration of the relationship between post-war art and politics, Gardam's book seems a little staid, a little static - stolid rather than ground-breaking.
"The fact that Last Friends is the only English novel, and probably the least adventurous book on the short-list is an indication of the larger malaise that afflicts English fiction: a failure of nerve, an absence of verve.
"The lack of English authors on the list is even more striking when you consider this has not been a vintage year for American fiction. And yet George Saunders' collection of stories, Tenth of December, my own personal favourite on the Folio short-list, is streets ahead of most English fiction published in the last twelve months."
Stop the moaning, sit-up and take notice
"When the sponsors of the Man Booker Prize opened the competition to any fiction written in English and published in the UK, there was a predictable, parochial chorus of disapproval from English critics.
"Rather than lamenting and resigning themselves to their fate, English novelists might do well to ask themselves why the works of American - and Indian, Irish and for that matter Scottish - authors are so much more exciting than that penned by most of their English peers.
"It's no coincidence that the best English novelists in recent decades, from Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro to Zadie Smith and Monica Ali, have been those with a multicultural perspective. Ask Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Julian Barnes who their literary heroes are and they will point not to their English predecessors, such as Kingsley Amis, Angus Wilson and Anthony Powell, who are already fading fast from view - but to the great post-war American novelists: Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and John Updike."
Risk and reward
"The Folio short-list may confirm some English novelists' worst fears - that they are unlikely to get a look-in from now on at the Booker.
"However, instead of bemoaning their bad luck in having to face competition from US authors, English novelists need to take a leaf out of their books and take greater risks in their fiction. If they don't, they will only have themselves to blame if the major prizes continue to elude them."
Folio Prize runners and riders
"The press is talking up the chances of A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride which won the Goldmsmiths Prize. However I think either George Saunders' Tenth of December or Rachel Kushner's The Flame Throwers will win, with Red Doc by Anne Carson the dark horse."