Dementia

" asked Smith in 2003.

It would be easy to reach for 9/11 as the cause, or our more general awakening to environmental apocalypse - or, more trivially, literature often being prompted by other literature, the earlier success of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones.

All I know is that we read many books infused by loss and a feeling that present things would not go on for ever, written by people whose age put them at a distance from their own mortality.

Reading them reminded me of the boom in spiritualism and Ouija boards that followed the first world war, or Powell and Pressburger's eerie film A Matter of Life and Death, which tried to console the bereaved of the second.They also gave the impression of America as a very uncertain country.

This may be what it has recently become, but fiction doesn't always catch up with reality so quickly.

The condition of just being an American, especially when not in America, produced an interesting anxiety in several writers.

Just as America is no longer so confident, American writing is no longer so snugly self-contained, as other judges were quick to notice.Meghan O'Rourke wrote: "I was struck by the degree to which American writers are looking outward .

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there's a sense now that to be an American fiction writer is to deal with America in the world - and the world in America.

If in the past American fiction dealt with the rest of the globe by trying hard to assimilate it, today it deals with it by going outward ...

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