*reviews

Granta’s Chicago Issue

Or: Literature as Tourism

By Jon Baskin

 

The London-based Granta “magazine of new writing” has devoted its 108th issue to the city of Chicago. The special issue, whose release was celebrated with a week of local events in September, promises a tour of Chicago during its “cultural moment,” in the words of its editor, John Freeman. Freeman has claimed the issue will be successful if it gives its readers a feel for “exactly what the city is like,” although it should also succeed as a “work of art.” The question of whether literature with the same aspirations as tourism could qualify as art is not asked by Granta’s Chicago issue, although it is answered by it.

The reader hoping to gain insight into Chicago will be disappointed by Granta’s special issue; more disappointing still will be her insight into the condition of the contemporary narrative arts. There are 20 articles in the Granta Chicago issue, most involving some combination of narrative and reportage, although one comprises primarily photographs and a few short works are classified with headings such as: “Winter” and “The View from the South Side, 1970.” Each story has its own title page, but Granta offers no category headings. Surprisingly, this becomes a problem. The articles are so casually constructed and “realistic” that readers will find themselves unable to determine whether many of them are fiction, journalism, or memoir. Aleksander Hemon’s opening piece about the narrator’s discovery of a multi-ethnic soccer game on the west side may well be a story, or it may be memoir—it is impossible to tell. The same can be said for Thom Jones’s short account of a teenager working in a General Mills cereal plant. Ditto for Bei Dao’s story about the Zhou brothers, two Chinese artists living in Bridgeport, as well as Tony D’Souza’s “Mr. Harris,” which describes a suburban boy’s run-in with a black man from the West Side.

One gets the impression from Granta that contemporary narrative art can be delivered only in a generic, digestible formula made up of two parts memoir and one part short story. From the memoir Granta’s contributors borrow a colloquial style and an earnest, first-person voice: “I came to this fine country from Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzogovina, in the winter of 1992” (Hemon); “When I first came to America in the autumn of 1988, I met the Zhou brothers in Chicago” (Dao); “Once when I was sixteen I went down to the North Avenue Beach to hook up with two West Side Hispanic girls I’d met at a rave” (D’Souza). From the twentieth-century short story they borrow a structure: the beginning in medias res, the end an epiphany set off by flourishes of vague or portentous language: “Then it was just me and the big cool dark and no wind near at all, as still, as small and safe and warm as the place where I laid as a small sick child” (Nelson Algren); “So this, gentlemen, is what this little narrative is about… the moment arising from the chaos of the game, when all your teammates occupy the ideal position on the field; the moment when the universe seems to be arranged by a meaningful will that is not yours” (Hemon).

The blurring of genres reflects Granta’s underlying assumption that its readers will follow only a certain kind of story told by a certain kind of narrator. A nascent sentimentalism hangs over the whole collection, which eschews complex language, themes and emotions. In place of challenging ideas or feelings, Granta’s authors substitute liberal platitudes regarding tolerance and cross-cultural understanding. As will be discernible from even the brief quotations above, the primary subject of Granta’s Chicago issue is ethnicity; its primary ambition, diversity.