It is July 2 1997 and a young woman and man, aged 22 and 19 respectively, are embarking on new lives thousands of miles away from their homes. The woman, a New Yorker fresh out of college, is teaching English as a foreign language to children in Bangkok. The man has travelled in the other direction — a native of Bangkok, he has moved to Ithaca, north of New York state, to study English literature.
July 2 was an ordinary Wednesday, until the Thai government devalued its currency. By the end of the day the baht had plummeted and within weeks it was worth barely half its value against the dollar.
The world came to remember that day as the start of the Asian financial crisis. But for the two people in our story the event had a more personal significance. The woman, who had been leading a modest life on a teacher’s salary paid in dollars, suddenly found herself hugely wealthy compared with her Thai hosts. The man was propelled in the other direction into instant and humiliating penury.
Today the man and the woman are among the most promising young American writers. And they both remember that Wednesday as a key experience that helped shape why and what they write.
Nell Freudenberger, the New Yorker, says the crash made her feel for the first time that she had to justify herself as a rich American among people now much poorer than herself — a cultural dislocation that has suffused her stories ever since. Rattawut Lapcharoensap says it turned him overnight from being a middle-class student to somebody without enough money to eat, while surrounded by affluent Americans. This is a tension that pulses through his work.
For such polar opposites, they have ended up in a surprisingly similar place. Both are on the list of 21 writers crowned by literary magazine Granta as the best young American novelists.
What leaps out of the list is a heavy emphasis on things foreign. The focus falls neatly into the two camps to emerge from the crisis of July 2. There are those like Freudenberger, who write about the clash of cultures when Americans go abroad, and those like Lapcharoensap, who are first-generation Americans writing about homelands left behind.
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer (30) from Brooklyn lives in Berlin. Of all the 21 names on Granta’s list, he is the best known. His Everything Is Illuminated won the Guardian First Book prize in 2002, he was hailed by Time as a wunderkind and the film rights were sold even before he had finished writing it. His second novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, was received almost as breathlessly. Yet, he says, the daily fight with the blank screen and the empty page is as hard now as when he started out.
His current battle is to divine the story for his next novel. He’s written a book’s worth of first pages, but nothing feels right. As he waits for inspiration, he is busy writing a non-fiction book about the relationship between America and the meat it eats. He is living temporarily in Berlin, on a scholarship from the American Academy, with his wife Nicole Krauss, a fellow writer who is also on the Granta list.
Safran Foer is the kind of writer who resists attempts to label his work or analyse it, saying literature must have a uselessness if it is to be art. He says Everything Is Illuminated is about the American experience, despite its east European setting. And though Extremely Loud wears September 11 on its sleeve, in his view it is much more about the most fertile ground that he has as a novelist: family. His own — he and Krauss have an infant son — gives him comfort in dark moments. “I am grateful for family. It makes artistic failure seem more bearable.”
Nell Freudenberger
Nell Freudenberger (31) from Manhattan grew up in New York and Los Angeles in a bookish family (her father is a screenwriter). Freudenberger was always interested in writing, but dismissive of the America of the 1980s — her formative decade — as source material for literature.
What unlocked her creative talents were lengthy visits in her early 20s to India and Thailand. Many of the Asian people she met embraced the American dream with more gusto than most Americans, yet were deeply critical of the US’s influence on the world, a paradox that she has played with in her writing.
Her first book, a collection of short stories called Lucky Girls, draws heavily on cultural distances between Americans abroad and their Asian hosts. Her second work, a novel, The Dissident, places a fake Chinese rebel artist in a comfortable though troubled family in LA.
The “foreignness” of the writing is deceptive: the more you read, the more classically American her themes appear — disorientation, loss, adultery, longing.
“At first I asked myself what right had I to write about India, a country that had so many of its own great writers. Only later did I realise that I wasn’t writing about India at all, but about what it is to be American.”
Rattawut Lapcharoensap
When Rattawut Lapcharoensap (28) from Brooklyn was told he was one of the Granta winners, his reaction was bemusement. He has never written a novel and, though he is a US citizen, having been born in Chicago he would not naturally describe himself as American.
In fact he would not naturally describe himself as anything. His life has been spent flitting between the US and Bangkok, from which his parents, leftist activists, temporarily fled to the US in the late 1970s. He learned English as a second language at school, but since the age of 17 has been living in New York, initially upstate and now in the city.
His personal mindset and his imaginative life as a creative writer are dominated by a sense of rootlessness. “I am neither at home nor abroad in any place I’ve ever lived. In Thailand I’m never Thai enough and here in America I’m one of a new generation coming in. That’s pretty traumatic and disorienting.”
His first book of short stories, Sightseeing, echoes with cultural loneliness. He writes in English despite it being his second language. He has tried writing in Thai, but with embarrassing results, he says. Instead he uses Americanisms to try to capture the humour and grittiness of the street talk of his Bangkok childhood — a strange cultural fusion that he pulls off to remarkable effect.
The downside is that those he holds most dear are not able to share in his literary success. His mother has started reading his book several times, but has yet to finish it. — Â