J K Rowling is doing rather well in the US with Harry Potter. Photograph: Murdo McLeod
The transatlantic (or "special") relationship is a well-worn topic, politically speaking. Less often discussed is how the relationship plays itself out in cultural, and particularly literary, terms. Is it a case of abject poodle-ism, with English writers and artists taking the lead from politicians, and forever abasing themselves before their American counterparts? To read the statements of many of our leading novelists and critics, you might think so. Famously, Martin Amis once lamented English novelists' lack of ambition, and has consciously aped the showier style of his American idols, Bellow and Nabokov. From the way today's novelists are discussed in Britain, you'd be forgiven for thinking that literary greatness is an exclusively American category. All this, of course, explains the fuss a few years ago when it was suggested that The Man Booker prize should be opened up to America: surely our poor novelists wouldn't stand a chance against Franzen, DeLillo, Roth, Updike et al?
Clearly, however, an important dimension is missing from such discussions, and this is the fact that English novels have always done, and continue to do, pretty well in the US. We may not think much of our literary output, but Americans don't see it that way. The US bestseller lists of the last several decades have been packed with English names: Anthony Hope, Graham Greene, James Hilton in the 40s and 50s; John Fowles, Agatha Christie, Ian Fleming in the 60s; Salman Rushdie, Tolkien, John Le Carré in the 70s and 80s. In the last decade, literary fiction generally has featured less prominently in the US bestseller lists, but many commercial English writers, notably J K Rowling, have continued to make it big. In the past couple of years, moreover, a few of our more literary novelists have achieved mega-sales in the US. Last year, an American friend told me, it often seemed as if all the "serious" novels to hit the bestsellers were English: Ian McEwan's Saturday, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Zadie Smith's On Beauty.
So what's going on? Is our literary inferiority complex justified or not? In an essay in the new issue of Prospect Magazine, the young American novelist Benjamin Markovits - who partly grew up in England and now lives here - gives us a different take on the matter. He points out that while for English readers the "high voice" of the American novel can be seductive, the more modest and nuanced tones of the English novel appeal to Americans for precisely the opposite reason - because they offer the "attractions of refinement", of a "society everywhere coloured and scored by its own fine grain." Surveying the US bestseller lists of the last few decades, Markovits notes how consistently the English novels that have made it big there have conformed to a certain type: "England, as it appears in the US bestseller charts, is the country of Oxbridge and public schools." In other words, it's the traditional, elitist, class-ridden England that has proved most popular with American readers.
This is an England, of course, that has largely ceased to exist. Yet what's striking is how many English novelists still offer this same outmoded version of their country, or something close to it. Harry Potter, after all, is a deeply conventional tale of wizardry set in a public school. Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go may be about cloning - but it, too, is set in a boarding school. McEwan's Atonement, which sold 1m copies in America, is partly set in a country house (as was Ishiguro's last big-selling novel in the US, The Remains of the Day). Even in other literary forms the trend prevails: our most successful theatrical export of recent years is Alan Bennett's The History Boys, set in a boys' school. Naturally, there are exceptions: Zadie Smith breaks the mould to a certain extent, although her most recent novel, On Beauty, is a reworking of E M Forster.
There is something a bit dispiriting about all this: English writers need to get with the times more, and readers - particularly American readers - need to give them the commercial incentive for doing so. Only then, I suspect, will our novelists stop writing about - and profiting from - an England that no longer exists.
