A sentence in a Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch, illustrated to me the difference between American writers and English writers. Hornby writes of a note (a quote from The Hustler by Walter Tevis) he stuck to his wall to inspire him when he was a struggling writer:
At one point (oh God oh God oh God) I typed these words out on a piece of paper and pinned it above my desk:
“That’s what the whole goddamned thing is: you got to commit yourself to the life you picked. And you picked it – most people don’t even do that. You’re smart and you’re young and you’ve got, like I said before, talent.”
The ‘oh God oh God oh God’, is Hornby’s way of distancing himself from what he did. How foolish he was! How naive! But of course Dear Reader, he knows better now. As do you. How clever. How British. British writers are far too ‘aware’ – aware of how their writing will come across to the Guardian critic, to the reader or to their Dear Old Mum. This perpetual state of punch pulling is grating and ultimately, results in watered down memoirs and saccharine fiction. A prime example of this is the bizarrely popular Geoff Dyer, whose book, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, becomes almost unreadable it’s so ‘knowing’.
If the English do something stupid, it’s in an ironic way – like traveling around Ireland with a fridge, or saying yes to everything. There are very few stark, honest works by modern British writers that skip the irony and the navel gazing and just tell us what the hell happened. Martin Amis aside, this leaves us with the Americans. They do stupid things too, usually involving women, drink, drugs, or all three. Yet they don’t apologise to the reader for their actions. And this leads to stunning work.
John Fante, Charles Bukowski, Frederick Exley and more recently, Patrick DeWitt, have balls. Great big hairy balls that allow them to expose their own failings in razor sharp prose, not caring how stupid or lethal their actions make them seem. Virtually all my fiction purchases these days are from American writers (and the odd Russian) for that reason alone.
