Brits can't hack it - official!

[Paul Nightingale]

>From an interview with Kazuo Ishiguro, conducted in April 1990, in Allan
Vorda ed (1993) Face to Face: Interviews with Contemporary Novelists, Rice
University Press (20-21)

AV: What about contemporary American writers such as Pynchon, Gass, and
Barth? 

KI: These are all people that I should say that we don't really read in
England. Pynchon is read . . . well, I don't know . . . he is bought.
Usually the only book of his that anyone has read is The Crying of Lot 49,
because it's short. A lot of people possess Gravity's Rainbow and V., but I
know very few people who have gotten over onethird of the way through. It
remains to be seen if people will finish Vineland in England, but people are
buying him. Pynchon may very well be a very important writer, but I've only
read The Crying of Lot 49, so I'm not in a position to say. From what I've
read, it is a little too overintellectualized for me. I suppose one of these
days I should tackle his big novels. 

AV: I can't think of one writer in America who gets more critical attention
than Pynchon. 

KI: Perhaps he is a great writer, or it could be because there will always
be a certain kind of writer who is good for academics. 

AV: Can you name one thing that separates American literature from British
literature? 

KI: One feature of your literary scene here that we don't have in Britain
and generally in Europe is the creative writing industry. I think that is
one of the enormous differences in the two literary cultures. It's probably
true to say, and I've heard it often said, that you can't find a single
American writer today of any significance who hasn't in some way been
directly touched by the creative writing world, either as teacher or
student. Even someone who kept away from it is going to be affected by it
indirectly, because so much of the criticism and so much of the opinions of
his fellow writers are going to be touched by it. I think this is something
that would certainly make me nervous if I were living in a literary culture
where the role of the universities and faculties who taught creative writing
began to have that sort of dominant influence. 

I'm not actually suggesting that the Thomas Pynchon phenomenon is something
closely related to this, because I'm not in a position to comment on him.
All I would say is that I would want to assess quite carefully what the role
of the creative writing faculties actually is within the whole literary
culture because, whether you like it or not, American literature is going a
certain direction because of this and I would want to determine if the
influence were benign or whether it was actually leading us up a garden
path.