America: the divided land

Jennifer Egan [pictured]

Gritty underworld glamour is a key strain in American fiction, and I’ve chosen one such moment from Billy Bathgate by E.L. Doctorow.
Billy is the 15-year-old protégée of Dutch Schultz, a notorious gangster whose power is on the wane. There comes a moment where Schultz can’t 
re-enter New York because he’ll be arrested, so Billy feels he has usurped his boss because he has access to the city that Schultz doesn’t have:

“To tell the truth I loved this time, I sensed my time was coming, and it had to do with the autumn, the city in its final serious turn toward the winter, the light was different, brilliant, hard, it tensed the air, burnished the top of the Number Six double-decker bus with a cold brilliant light, I made a stately ride in anticipation of death, crowds welled at the corners under the bronze streetlamps with the little Mercuries, police whistles blew, horns blew, the tall bus lurched from gear to gear, flags flew from the stores and hotels, and it was all for me, my triumphal procession, I reveled in the city he couldn’t enter, for a minute or two it was mine to do with what I would.”

Glamour is usually seen at a distance, as something that exists apart from ourselves; with a personalised experience of it one sees oneself as an outsider, entering into a kind of otherness. Self-reinvention is peculiarly American – it goes back to our root identity, our national psyche; therefore so is the gritty oppositional figure, the lonely and glamorous outlaw who refuses to be controlled.

Jennifer Egan’s Black Box is out now as an ebook, published by Corsair




Michael Chabon

The Long Goodbye is Raymond Chandler’s most personal novel, in which detective Philip Marlowe fully emerges as a completely rounded character. He forms a strong attachment to down-and-out Terry, and it’s the betrayal of that friendship that is the moment of grit that I’ve chosen. At all costs Marlowe stands up to be loyal to his friend – even through horrific interrogation – and then he discovers that Terry has very casually betrayed him to save his own skin.

It’s the last great formulation of the Hemingway-esque idea of what it means to be an American man, which goes right back to Teddy Roosevelt. There’s a powerful, sentimental, almost romantic bond between these two guys – especially as Marlowe is coming from a completely solitary position. Those principles of having your friend’s back in an unselfconscious, natural, chivalrous way; that was dying out when this book was published – even the title, The Long Goodbye, alludes to this fading, glamorous image of American masculinity. That ideal has been lost.

Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue is out now, published by Fourth Estate


Ed Wood

While there is great (but never untarnished) glamour in American novels from The Age of Innocence to The Great Gatsby and last year’s Rules of Civility, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West is a novel for anyone who has wondered what Hollywood would be like for the poor working man. Written in 1939 and set during the Depression, it follows Tod Hackett, who works on the fringes of Tinseltown as a set painter. He falls for would-be star Faye, who in turn is playing on the good will of a sad sack called Homer Simpson (yes, really), an uneducated but well-meaning man whose home becomes the centre for an illegal cock-fighting ring run by various Hollywood losers. It does not end well.

In this emotionally and physically violent novel, West exposes Hollywood as a nightmare in which the famous are commodities and the wannabes are less than nothing, merely copies of an image. The final scene, of a riot at a movie theatre, expresses so much about today’s yearning to possess celebrity that it’s almost painful. West died aged just 37, in a car crash on the way to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s funeral.

Ed Wood is author of 100 Must-Read American Novels, out now, published by A&C Black



Karen Rose

American grit comes in two forms: the down and dirty realities of hard lives, and the determination required to make it in that environment. When I started this piece, I thought about hard-drinking detectives, but although gritty, they don’t best represent America. What does is the grit demonstrated by everyday people who persevere despite hardships. These are the characters I love to write, that I’m privileged to know – normal people who rise to whatever challenge they meet and accomplish extraordinary things. I found them in A Gentle Rain by Deborah Smith. Set in central Florida, it provides insight into the state’s horse ranches rather than the beaches and theme parks for which the state is better known.

A rancher, Ben, is older brother and carer of Joey, an adult with Down’s syndrome. All of Ben’s ranch hands have cognitive disabilities and are given the opportunity to earn a living with dignity. After her parents’ deaths, heiress Kara learns she was adopted. A librarian who speaks six languages, she’s stunned to find her biological parents are now Ben’s hired hands, both cognitively challenged. Kara takes a job at the ranch to get to know them, but also learns about grit. No one on the ranch has had an easy life, yet they persevere – not because they’re noble, but because survival is what people do. They work hard, love and look out for each other. They represent the best of America – and any other country.

Karen Rose’s Did You Miss Me? is out on 8 November, published by Headline

Lindsey Faye

The protagonist of Steve Martin’s novella Shopgirl is a gravely lonesome girl named Mirabelle who is paid very little by Neiman’s glove department to sell “things that nobody buys anymore” to glamorous Los Angeles elites. An art lover and endearing eccentric, Mirabelle is plagued by the particular isolation of living in poverty while surrounded by affluent locals who are equally unable to communicate their desires.

After beginning a conflicted affair with distant millionaire Ray, Mirabelle receives as a gift from him the very commodities she is paid so little to sell: satin gloves by Christian Dior. In a haunting scene, she stands before him wearing nothing but the gloves and then caresses him. After they have made love, Ray’s bare hand captures her waist, an act which is “compromised by a lack of final and ultimate tenderness”, although despite this taint, “the five fingers that pull her toward him are received into her heart like a psalm.”
Neither Ray nor Mirabelle comprehend that she gives away a piece of herself to a man who doesn’t love her every time they are intimate. And this scene with the gloves illustrates a peculiarly capitalist – and thus American – type of solitude.

Lindsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham is out now, published by Headline Review



Eowyn Ivey

In the opening scene of Dead Man’s Walk by Larry McMurtry, a naked woman walks up from the Rio Grande holding a giant snapping turtle by the tail. The woman is prostitute Matilda Jane Roberts – fearless and formidable.

Nearby, a group of Texas rangers watch Matilda approach and speculate about her plans for the turtle. One of the men is indebted to her for her services, and worries the turtle will be used to coerce payment from him. When she nears them, she throws the snapping turtle in their direction. The only man who maintains his calm is the major in charge of the rangers: “Good morning, Miss Roberts, is that your new pet?” the major asks, to which Matilda replies. “Nope, that’s breakfast – turtle beats bacon.”

These are the kind of scenes that make Larry McMurtry one of my favourite novelists. His characters are men and women struggling in a gruelling landscape, again and again bravely facing their own deaths. They are tough. And yet beneath their gruff exteriors are more tender emotions – loneliness, passion, fear and, perhaps most importantly, humour.
That is grit.

Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child is out now, published by Headline Review



C. Joseph Greaves



At the outset of Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses – the first part of his epic Border Trilogy – 16-year-old John Grady Cole attends his grandfather’s wake and then, in the scenes that follow, bids farewell to his dying father. “The floorboards creaked under his boots. In his black suit he stood in the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase. Along the cold hallway behind him hung the portraits of forbears only dimly known to him, all framed in glass and dimly lit above the narrow wainscotting. He looked down at the guttered candlestub.”

For me, McCarthy is America’s greatest living author, his prose dense and evocative, his scope and ambition as broad as the western horizon. In these scenes McCarthy establishes all we will come to love about John Grady – his humility, his stubborn morality and his fierce independence. In a sprawling, operatic novel that serves both as a paean and an elegy to a simpler, pre-modern America, McCarthy uses the proxy landscape of northern Mexico – and John Grady’s rite of passage through it – to capture the essence of the American West.

C. Joseph Greaves’ Hard Twisted is out now, published by Bloomsbury



Attica Locke



Though I can’t say for certain if there’s any truth to the rumour that Truman Capote once summarily dismissed America’s fawning reaction to To Kill a Mockingbird as “a lot of fuss over a children’s book”, I do take issue with the idea of this description as an insult. I read the book as a child, and it had a profound effect on my thinking – it opened my eyes to class conflicts that are often obscured by America’s ongoing obsession with race.

I certainly grew up in a house that drew (often necessary) distinctions between the experiences of blacks and whites, but when I read Harper Lee’s book, it was immediately apparent to me that I actually had more in common with Scout than I did with Tom Robinson’s children. My father was, like Scout’s, a lawyer and well educated. Both of my parents were born into middle-class, landowning families. Therefore some of the rural, white poverty in Lee’s novel came as a shock. One of the scenes I recall most vividly is Scout having to explain to her teacher that little Walter Cunningham didn’t forget his lunch on the first day of school; he simply didn’t have any. Everyone in Maycomb, Alabama, save for the newly arrived teacher, knows that the Cunninghams, like so many others in town, have nothing. Lee’s book is a reminder that poverty knows no colour.

Attica Locke’s The Cutting Season is out now, published by Serpent’s Tail



Liza Klaussman

F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated Tender is the Night to his friends Sara and Gerald Murphy, an American expatriate couple who were at the centre of a literary and artistic community in the 1920s. Unfortunately, the Murphys were none too pleased by Fitzgerald’s implication that the beautiful and doomed fictional couple, the Divers, were based on them. Still, while much has been written about the Murphys, nothing has encapsulated their particular glamour, their unique allure, quite like one of Fitzgerald’s scenes, set  during a moonlit dinner party:
“There were fireflies riding on the dark air and a dog baying on some low and far-away ledge of the cliff. The table seemed to have risen a little toward the sky like a mechanical dancing platform, giving the people around it a sense of being alone with each other in the dark universe, nourished by its only food, warmed by its only lights. And... the two Divers began suddenly to warm and glow and expand, as if to make up to their guests, already so subtly assured of their importance, so flattered with politeness, for anything they might still miss from that country well left behind.”

The fireflies, the table lifting, the glow – for me, this scene is not only the epitome of glamour in its general form, but is also a perfect description of some elusive type of magnetism, one that can only be achieved through the written word. And what written words they were.

Liza Klaussmann’s Tigers in Red Weather is out now, published by Picador



Justin Cronin
 
[pictured]

Russell Banks has written any number of fine, hard-edged accounts of American life at the economic and social margins, but none more affecting than his masterful 1989 novel Affliction. Wade Whitehouse, a hapless part-time lawman and well-digger in a fading rural town in New Hampshire, is that quintessentially American figure: the former star athlete gone to seed. He’s pathetic in the proper sense of the word, a man of decent intentions who can get nothing right.

Like the defunct town in which he lives, 
Wade is all past and no future, and Affliction, 
while ostensibly a crime thriller, reads more like a ticking bomb of unfocused blue-collar rage, 
a dark hymn to a world left for dead in the modern economy. What tips the novel into true greatness, though, is a scene near to the end in which Wade turns all his anger on himself. With a pair of pliers, he removes his own rotten tooth, his fury and frustration transmuted into a kind of mythical grace. He reinvents himself, however briefly, as the toughest man who ever lived, capable of pulling out his own pain by the root. If that’s not true American grit, by God, I don’t know what is.  

Justin Cronin’s The Twelve is out now, published by Orion