Ranta
One wonders about the fiction in Granta. In truth, the more I read this rather well-heeled production masquerading as a Little Magazine, the more I am convinced that anytime they publish something bad, it is a direct result of their editorial mandate and judgment, while every time they publish something good it is a fluke, a happy accident which, presumably, goes entirely unnoticed by their entire staff, slipping through the cracks to be noticed only by those few anachronistic readers (like myself) who still believe the fiction that Granta is one of the venerable Little Magazines.
Even the good stuff is terrifying formulaic, falling into only two categories that I have discerned. The first, and the most common, is what I call the Hyde Park Mid-Life Crisis Travel Narrative, in which chatty monologues progress rapidly from internal to interminable, during a course of a lengthy car trip or domestic errand. In increasingly hysterical vernacular paragraphs interspersed with homey, homely dialogue, middle-aged men or women bemoan the suburban London traffic, the decline of society, and the loss of independence accompanied by raising children. Then someone dies, or a child does something endearing, and on the car trip home, over a latte, the monologue grows calm again, and the story ends, having taken us precisely no where.
Slightly more readable, although ultimately even more frustrating, is the only other formula in use: the Mildly Edgy Experimental Story. This takes the form of either a monologue with no paragraphs in heavy dialect, a series of letters addressing the actual author by his real name, but nevertheless clearly invented, or an endless stream of unattributed dialogue using French style punctuation (dashes instead of 'inverted commas,' as the editorial staff would say). Although these stories usually contain a fair amount of insight or at the very least linguistic felicity, they are marred by the fact that they invariably progress forward for an arbitrary number of words, whereupon they stop abruptly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Occasionally one notes in the back of the volume "that this story is taken from a novel in progress," but I have always assumed that this phrase is merely a euphemism for "this is the entirety of a 'novel in progress,' which, if it ever is finished, will probably not bear anything more than a passing resemblance to this promising snippet"; but even more frightening are the occasions when no such notice appears. Was there a printing error? Did a compositor get lazy and fall asleep (which might explain the em-dashes: easier to type in most page layout programs than quotation marks) mid-sentence?
No: this is the state of the art. This is what is meant by The Magazine of New Writing. One almost longs for the early days of Granta, when it was still The Granta, and it contained, according to Ian Jack's haughty and misguided editorial introduction in the current number, "Light verse of topical interest...often pastiching Kipling or the W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan [why? why does Jack feel the need to identify Gilbert?--COS], interspersed with Rowing Notes or Motley Notes or mightily arch accounts of student debates and university controversies." Is there anyone who would not prefer Rowing Notes to, say, the first several pages of Martin Amis's impossibly pretentious and yet revoltingly commercial screenplay, as yet unproduced, of Northanger Abbey?
Even the good stuff is terrifying formulaic, falling into only two categories that I have discerned. The first, and the most common, is what I call the Hyde Park Mid-Life Crisis Travel Narrative, in which chatty monologues progress rapidly from internal to interminable, during a course of a lengthy car trip or domestic errand. In increasingly hysterical vernacular paragraphs interspersed with homey, homely dialogue, middle-aged men or women bemoan the suburban London traffic, the decline of society, and the loss of independence accompanied by raising children. Then someone dies, or a child does something endearing, and on the car trip home, over a latte, the monologue grows calm again, and the story ends, having taken us precisely no where.
Slightly more readable, although ultimately even more frustrating, is the only other formula in use: the Mildly Edgy Experimental Story. This takes the form of either a monologue with no paragraphs in heavy dialect, a series of letters addressing the actual author by his real name, but nevertheless clearly invented, or an endless stream of unattributed dialogue using French style punctuation (dashes instead of 'inverted commas,' as the editorial staff would say). Although these stories usually contain a fair amount of insight or at the very least linguistic felicity, they are marred by the fact that they invariably progress forward for an arbitrary number of words, whereupon they stop abruptly, sometimes in the middle of a sentence. Occasionally one notes in the back of the volume "that this story is taken from a novel in progress," but I have always assumed that this phrase is merely a euphemism for "this is the entirety of a 'novel in progress,' which, if it ever is finished, will probably not bear anything more than a passing resemblance to this promising snippet"; but even more frightening are the occasions when no such notice appears. Was there a printing error? Did a compositor get lazy and fall asleep (which might explain the em-dashes: easier to type in most page layout programs than quotation marks) mid-sentence?
No: this is the state of the art. This is what is meant by The Magazine of New Writing. One almost longs for the early days of Granta, when it was still The Granta, and it contained, according to Ian Jack's haughty and misguided editorial introduction in the current number, "Light verse of topical interest...often pastiching Kipling or the W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan [why? why does Jack feel the need to identify Gilbert?--COS], interspersed with Rowing Notes or Motley Notes or mightily arch accounts of student debates and university controversies." Is there anyone who would not prefer Rowing Notes to, say, the first several pages of Martin Amis's impossibly pretentious and yet revoltingly commercial screenplay, as yet unproduced, of Northanger Abbey?