The bulk of the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman is devoted to an American writing special. Mark Greif and Heidi Julavits, editors from two of the US’s leading literary periodicals, n+1 and the Believer, examine the recent flourishing of “little magazines” across the Atlantic. “The field of US small magazines has grown in the past few years,” Greif writes – especially magazines perched at the intersection of politics and culture. “The prospects for left-wing cultural life seem more generous in 2012. Maybe that’s because the ethos that you should make art and thought, not to feel like an artist, but because you have something to say, has found an opening in history again.” Julavits is slightly more pessimistic about the prospects for long-form literary and cultural journalism: “No matter how well (or not well) something might be written, the new challenge is this: how much time a reader will read any text before his or her brain flips to another text.”
Sophie Elmhirst profiles novelist Jonathan Safran Foer. She talks to him about Judaism (“The Seder … inspires human questionining”), the novel he’s working on now (“probably the most conservative thing I’ve ever done”) and teaching creative writing (“We tend to have conversations about what kind of stories we’re telling …. Why would one do this? Is this a good thing to try?”).
In the books essay, novelist and critic Ben Marcus asks why American writers today are obsessed with apocalypse, where once they were preoccupied by the “relentless charting of … domestic territory”. “ A decade [after 9/11],” Marcus writes, “if American novelists have become less visibly interested in tackling the political complexities of our times … that other call to arms, which asks for an escalation in our narrative spectacles, seems to have been taken more seriously.” A good example of this tendency, Marcus argues, is Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road: “McCarthy, like most of his compatriots, has nothing to say. But he has a great deal to show, and the immense popularity of The Road may have something … to do with its perceived realism, its high degree of plausibility.”
In the Books Interview, Jonathan Derbyshire talks to Shalom Auslander about his novel Hope: A Tragedy, in which the protagonist discovers an elderly Anne Frank living in his attic in upstate New York: “The choice of Anne Frank was a risky one,” Auslander admits, “but the reality is that, for me, it was the symbol of man’s inhumanity to man. But the notion wasn’t ‘boy, let’s discuss the Holocaust’”. And Auslander says he wasn’t consciously emulating Philip Roth’s novel The Ghost Writer in choosing to write about Frank. “When my memoir Foreskin’s Lament came out, it was the same: ‘Oh, so you’re intentionally doing Portnoy’s Complaint?’ And in my head I was like: ‘If anything, it was Angela’s Ashes.’”
Olivia Laing reviews The Lifespan of a Fact by John D’Agata and Jim Fingal, a contribution to the debate raging in the US right now about “how fictional non-fiction is allowed to be”. Laing is sceptical about the distinction D’Agata tries to draw between journalism, which is chained to facts, and the “essay”, whose relationship to the established record is altogether looser. “[O]ne can’t help thinking how much more interesting his work would be if he paid a little attention to the world, rather than recording what he thinks it might have been intellectually impressive or poetically resonant to see.” And Jonathan Derbyshire revisits Michael Harrington’s book The Other America: Poverty in the United States on the 50th anniversary of its publication. Harrington wrote that the poor in America needed an “American Dickens” to record the “smell and texture” of their lives. “In his attempt to ‘describe the faces behind the statistics’”, Derbyshire writes, “Harrington proved himself, if not the Dickens of modern American poverty, then at least its Orwell.”
Also in the Critics: Ryan Gilbey on Oliver Hermanus’s Beauty; Rachel Cooke on Dominic Sandbrook’s documentary series about the 1970s; “Heronkind”, a poem by Julia Copus; Antonia Quirke on Christopher Frayling’s Radio 3 essay on Bram Stoker; Will Self’s Real Meals; and Hunter Davies’s The Fan.