Ugh, déjà vu. March 2007 feels awfully familiar. Oh, there are a few cosmetic differences. I haven't been gulping Honey Bee Brandy and getting my stomach pumped every weekend. Nor have I been hoarding food dye and converting bike-pumps into water cannons for Holi.
But this disappointment, this dread-if I could only sip a mango lassi, shove my fist into a bowl of dal makahni, and fill our fridge with plague-preventing tetracycline-I would swear this was 1997, that it was my last semester at the New Delhi American Embassy School, and I'd just torn up my rejection letter from Columbia College.
I applied for graduate school this year and suffice to say, I shan't be wearing my sporty grey Columbia sweatshirt around campus for a little while. After much moping, I've decided that what killed my applications was my statement's lack of specificity. (Or was it that sub-seven hundred GRE verbal score?)
Apparently you're supposed to present a project that matches the faculty interests of the program you're applying to. And mine didn't. You see, professors want exact matches. Don't assume that just because a program has two professors studying underwater foliage, that your project on kelp forests is a shoo-in. No, you need find a professor who shares your passion for the air vesicles of the blue-tinted bladder wrack and then you're supposed to strike up an e-mail correspondence. And marry his daughter and save him from a heart attack.
I proposed a project about Granta, a Cambridge University campus magazine that got bought up by this crazed American trustafarian Bill Buford. It introduced a bunch of really famous authors like Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan... blah, blah, blah. Every so often they come out with these really controversial lists of writers. In 1983, 1993, and 2003 they released lists of the Best Young British Novelists. And in 1997 they released their American version, The Best Young American Novelists.
Anyhow, about a week before I got my rejection letter from Columbia, Granta announced their second list of The Best Young American Novelists. Now, had I really been cut out for grad school, I would have been excited for my project. I wasn't. I took one look at their list and pitched that quarto-sized piece of puke right out of the window-or at least I would have, had I not been at work and reading the list on a Web site.
Now, part of the reason I was perturbed by this list was that I wasn't on it. Not that, as anyone who has suffered through one of my stories in a writing workshop can attest to, I deserve to be. But what really bugged me about the Granta list was its specificity. Every writer on that list is an exemplar of some hoary literary cliché, or consumer-friendly identities and nothing else. Our best young novelists are simply a smorgasbord of mealy writing wadded into a couple of market-friendly trends.
Representing you quiz-kid Ivy Leaguers for example, there's cringe-inducing, "precocious," Princeton-educated Jonathan Safran Foer, whose first abomination recycled every clichéd magical realist plot device in everybody else's book. I defy anyone to identify an original metaphor or plot device in his work. And then there's his witless Oxford-educated wife, Nicole Kruass, whose work reads like grinding teeth-so life-affirming, so precious, so putrid.
Spicing up the list with a little international snazz is Rattawut Lapcharoensap, a 27-year-old Thai who writes breathless vacation stories about seducing young American tourists. Yet his stories are safe, sweet as if the author doesn't have the balls to risk ruining the precious vibe he's set up by making his narrator the same age as the grizzled Western sex-tourists who prey on young Thais. A pinch of Nabokov, a dab of Alex Garland's The Beach shaken vigorously with a little oriental spice and watered down into nothingness.
To be fair, Granta does get one thing right. Three authors, Karen Russell, Daniel Alarcón, and Gary Shteyngart claim Columbia ties. A fourth, Uzodinma Iweala, will start the College of Physicians and Surgeons in the fall. Russell I haven't read. Professor Shteyngart is easily the best writer on the list, although his titles, Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook, are much better than his writing. As for Alarcón, who fiercely defends the yucky way that he channels the voices of downtrodden Latin Americans and writes really creepy stories about women on stilts, I hate him. But he's CC '99, so I'll leave him alone.
I was profoundly disappointed by the specificity of the graduate programs to which I applied. I perceived a lack of freedom in them. I can understand the need to build off existing scholarship, but fiction, particularly young fiction, should trammel uncharted territory. None of these authors risks anything; we should go where angels fear to tread. This is dishwater.