I'm in the States right now and, partly coincidentally, Americans are featuring heavily in my current reading matter. Before I came, it was the someway neglected 1930s novelist John Fante (an influence on the poet and boozer Charles Bukowski), and his Arturo Bandini quartet of novels, particularly, There's a swing and a sweetness to the prose of Fante's fictional alter ego, and a vulnerability and alertness to this wannabe-writer immigrants' son as he lands in Los Angeles. There are memorable stream-of-consciousness passages as there are also in Trinidadian-British immigrant's Sam Selvon's novels, and its sequel, , which I am, to my shame, finally reading in full. Selvon never got the props* handed to his compatriot and fellow arrival V. S. Naipaul, but there's a humanity and inventiveness in his work below a seemingly 'naive' exterior. Perhaps this year, the 50th anniversary of his pioneering debut, will see new light shine on him.
I say, 'in full', but one of the more pleasant aspects of Selvon's novels is their brevity. I'm all about short right now. I do think a lot of novels could be shorter. Many suffer from a bagginess, or lack urgency or freshness in their way of telling; seem too hidebound for a cine- and pop music-literate age. I'm using a bunch of 'short-writing' techniques in my novel-in-progress and, with that on the boil, have been reading a number of vignette-minded writers: some of the short stories of American William Morris, Cuban Guile Infante Cabrera's , a novel by Ray Loriga called , and poet Gwendolyn Brooks' sole fictional foray, the very fine . All are skilled at deploying fragments to tell you what you need to know about a character and his situation without supplying the full, orthodox-rendered background. There's often a poet's conciseness, a poet's feel for texture, to their prose and, not surprisingly, poets have been among my reading too. I'm enjoying a collection by the Jamaican/American poet and academic Mark McMorris, , his third. Mark belongs to a new generation - nothing as tight as 'school' - of black experimentalists who are writing work that is only very loosely narrative-bound, and he shares with many of the writers I mention above a certain distinctive stance towards the topic, the matter at hand. is to a large degree about conquest/exploration and Eros, and the interchangeability of those two discourses and numbers amongst its standouts. Plenty of felicitous verbal mishandlings, a la Kamau Braithwaite, here.
That's about it, in terms of creative writing. I've also been hitting a fair amount of anthropology-related non-fiction, on the back of an essay I'm putting together about the British Museum and its Africa collections, but that's another post-colonial story ...
Novelist Diran Adebayo is the British Council USA's 2006 UK Writer-in-Residence at Georgetown University, Washington DC.
* 'props ' = 'acclaim'
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