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Srijana Mitra Das

Jaipur: On day three of the Jaipur Literature Festival, authors Martin Amis, Jay McInerney, Junot Diaz and Richard Ford entered into a lively debate over `the crisis of American fiction'. "If there is a crisis, we'd be the last to know,'' said Ford.

"We've been hearing the novel is dead since the 1950s. It seems to be going still!'' Amis remarked, "Saying the novel is dead is as old as the novel itself. Yet, American writers like Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and John Updike were haunted by the `myth of decline', following great Modernist writers like Ernest Hemmingway and John Faulkner.''

McInerney said: "By the 50s and 60s, writers like Truman Capote and Mailer began turning to non-fiction. By the 1970s, there was a crisis with Realism. By the 1980s, post-modernism or `PoMo' was the catchword. American writers began soul-searching over whether fiction was about the world, or simply a game of words, with no connection to reality.''

Discussing confusion over themes, Amis commented: "PoMo was interesting but a dead end. People became unsure about realism. Then came `magic realism' with its levitating purple donkeys!''

Junot Diaz however said: "It is the most stupendous simplification to think of the American novel in a crisis. It is not the novel's fault that we are in this hysterical moment of hyper-capitalism which doesn't even give two hours a day to read! But as long as readers are falling in love with books, there is no crisis.'' Diaz said: "The power is really in the readers. You decide whether Mailer will live beyond his moment. You are the arbiters of how writing works. That thought makes this miserable task worth it for me!''

"But it is unrealistic to say that readers aren't changing,'' interjected Amis. "There is dumbing-down and numbing-down. History seems to have speeded up. Poetry, which essentially stops the clock to explore what we feel, has few takers. Similarly, the contemplative novel has no readership.''

Diaz said: "Yes, VS Naipaul keeps pointing out that the novel is dying alongside him, how convenient! But seriously, our relationship with time is shifting. Yet, the novel lives, even proliferating in genres like science fiction.''

The session closed with McInerney saying, "Today's American novel mediates between Middlemarch and Jay Z! But new freshness and energy is being brought to it by young writers and hitherto-marginal communities.''