One of the important discoveries you make as a judge in a literary competition comes close to the end: the discovery that you may have been spending your time too scrupulously. You have stayed awake in specially chosen uncomfortable chairs to read several dozen novels. You've tried not to skip. You've made notes. None of this can be called hard work. If writing a novel registers 100 on the scale of mental labour and anguish, then reading a novel, even a novel that you may not otherwise have wanted to read, must come in at about .0001. Still, you have taken pains, you have wanted to be fair. You remembered those words of Richard Ford—'Writing even a bad book is hard enough'—and jotted down some thoughts on the theme, the narration, the metaphors that did or didn't work. And then, arguing mildly enough with your fellow judges at the time of judgement, you hear one of them (or perhaps yourself) saying: 'I don't know. Maybe I read it at the wrong time of day. I guess I just didn't like it enough.'

It's worth thinking about this for a moment. Every country in the world with a serious publishing industry has literary prizes. The prizes are important, and in ways other than, say, military medals. Certainly, they reward the valour of the years spent alone with the empty sheets of paper and an immobile cursor on the word processor, the heroism demanded by a twenty-city author tour. But their sheen also reflects the commercial possibilities of the future. Prizes sell books. A prize, or even the citation for a prize, can double, triple, quadruple a publisher's print run. Royalties increase, there may be an author profile in Vogue, a man in a fine suit may take the winner to his high office window and say some suitably ironic equivalent of: 'Tonight, my friend, this city belongs to you.' And all this, in every country and with every prize, hangs from a thread: a judge enjoying a book, having read it at the right time of day.

Absurd. Yet I can't think of a better way to do it. Fiction has many purposes and ambitions, but none of them will be brought off unless, in one way or another, the experience of reading it is enjoyable. The word began to be heard a lot in the final judgement of Granta's Best of Young American Novelists campaign. After the arguments about the author's originality, the gap between his or her intention and achievement, Robert Stone or Tobias Wolff would say quietly: 'Well, I enjoyed it a lot,' or 'Yes, I take that point, but it was a very likeable book.' I remember these words partly because of where they were spoken—the library of the Lotos Club in Manhattan underneath a portrait of Andrew Carnegie, a Scotsman born to the Calvinist idea of the novel as a sinful frivolity—and also because it was a shock to hear them. Too many nights spent in an upright chair; fifty-two works of fiction read in a couple of months; it is easy in these circumstances to mislay enjoyment in the pursuit of duty.

Stone, Wolff and Granta's fourth national judge, Anne Tyler, are of course fine American writers of fiction. I am not an American and I have never written a novel (negatives which I like to think have a positive side when it comes to judging young American novelists—they should mean an absence of all the friendships, rivalries and jealousies that get in the way of judicial disinterest). But there we were, Stone, Wolff and I, gathered at the Lotos club on a snowy day in February and discussing our decisions on the phone with Anne Tyler, who was unable to leave her home in Baltimore. The reason for the meeting, if one goes back far enough, was a now-defunct body called the British Book Marketing Council which in 1983 launched the first Best of Young British Novelists campaign, a (then) original stunt whereby the Book Marketing Council appointed judges to choose twenty writers whose new writing was then published in a special issue of Granta. It worked well, and the exercise was repeated under Granta's aegis in 1993. Young writers were honoured, books got sold, readers were introduced to writers they might otherwise have ignored. More important, from Granta's point of view, the issues containing their work gave a snapshot of new kinds of writing that were emerging, some from writers who have become Britain's literary establishment. But prescience here is not really the point. We were not, after all, quite so prescient about other names (there is a cruel fascination in the retrospective glance at the lists—whatever became of X, why did Y not prosper?—as there will be some day with this one). What mattered, I believe, was what the selection said about the state of young British fiction at a particular moment: what its most promising practitioners were up to in the business of holding a lamp to our lives, and what they were doing in their next books rather than those already published and noticed (or neglected).

Would the same idea work in the United States? It deserved to, because America is a much bigger country with a much bigger publishing business, and it is both more important and more difficult to know what is going on because so much of it goes on. But these facts about the size and spread of American publishing meant that the old British method couldn't be applied. Under Bill Buford, my predecessor at Granta, the submissions and the judging had been informal and private. Publishers were consulted, novels invited, a list was agreed without much fuss. Even if, with ruthlessly corrupt and metropolitan behaviour, this had been possible in America, it didn't seem desirable, so a four-stage process was invented. Stage One: nominations were invited from all kinds of people whose business was books—librarians, booksellers, publishers, agents, authors. The only rule was that the author had to be a US citizen under forty who had published at least one novel or short-story collection by 31 May l995. Several hundred titles were submitted, which were then divided according to where the author lived into five American regions and sent to the five regional judging panels, each comprising three novelists of distinction. Stage Two: each of the regional judging panels was asked to produce a shortlist. Stage Three: the combined shortlist of fifty-two writers was published, and their books sent to the national judges. Stage Four: we meet and select the twenty finalists.

Around the time of Stage Three in these tiresome (and unBritishly transparent) mechanics, a few unencouraging voices began to be heard in the American press. The campaign was purely a commercial gimmick; it was polluting the literary novel with the cult of celebrity; it was trying to create a new brat pack; it had picked the wrong writers. Quite so, I thought. Every good writer since Dickens—himself well known to go unknown among his readers disguised in a false beard—has cultivated obscurity and the desire to possess no more than a few coins kept in a sock. Celebrity? Tsk tsk, that we pour a little light on to workers struggling in that darkened workshop, the literary novel.

But they were right about the writers. The judges got them wrong, as judges tend to do. Where, for example, was Nicholson Baker? It seemed insane and perverse to me that the judges in his region (the West) had rejected a writer of such striking and wise originality. Robert Stone and Tobias Wolff felt the same, and we wondered for a time if we might not override previous decisions and call in one or two glaring omissions. Like David Foster Wallace, said Stone. Like Richard Powers, said Wolff. But then, how about Donna Tartt? A murmur of agreement. Or William T. Vollmann? Further nods and murmurs. We decided to let the shortlist stay as it was; emendations would need to be wholesale, which would snub the hard work of the fifteen regional judges, turn our exercise into a celebration of the previously celebrated and leave us accused of falling for the hype. In other words, we would have picked another bunch of wrong writers.

All four of us had probably about ten favourites in common. Thereafter it was a question of arguing merits and trading names. All four of us had our disappointments. For myself, I was particularly sorry to lose Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen and Louis Edwards; heartened to have argued Kaye Gibbons on to the list; disheartened to have another judge successfully argue her off it again.

There were no bad books among the fifty-two, even though there was sometimes unanimity among us in disliking one or two. When I was reading them, I often hoped to come across a book so plainly awful that I could toss it down after three pages and move on to the next. But that happened only once, and after fifty pages rather than three.

What did these books and writers tell us? The most complete and various answer to that is to read the next three hundred pages, but it's tempting to generalize, and I yield to the temptation. As an outsider to the United States, and as someone who has read much more recent English fiction than American, I was struck by the kindness and humanity of most of these authors; their concern to be domestic and geographically specific—regional if you will; their anxiety to write open and spare prose. A lot of new British fiction is altogether wilder and stranger—less interested in clarity, less competent at storytelling. In America, the influence of creative-writing schools and an older generation of writers—Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff—is obvious. In most of these books, you know from an early stage who you are among and where—and also when, because a new development is a rather English enthusiasm for local history. The when is usually earlier in this century rather than a more distant past, and small-town or rural: a sort of Norman Rockwellization of the novel seems to be going on, though sometimes, in the hands of writers such as David Guterson or Kaye Gibbons, it is beautifully done. Another new development over the past ten years says more about the American present and future. It comes from writers who are not white and often the children of relatively recent migrants—from India, China, Korea and the Caribbean. It may be that there should be more of them in this issue, not out of political rectitude but because they have lived differently and perhaps have more to say.

All this, to me in England, was refreshing. Apart from their other virtues, these writers showed me places and subjects I hadn't seen before. Idaho, North Carolina (frequently), the state of Washington (ditto), on to fishing boats and into orange orchards. In that sense, they had didactic qualities; no bad thing—see what the carefully constructed details of the legal or political professions have done for the popular novel. But the more books I read, the more I began to pick quarrels with them. I longed sometimes to read an embellished sentence. I tired of a couple of categories: the semi-memoir 'coming-of-age narrative' and the family in crisis, 'the family apocalypse'. Where was the satire, the exuberance? Where—perhaps the largest absence—was the novel that took on America full in its political and social face in Wall Street, Washington or South Central LA? Most of our writers seemed in private retreat from that public arena.

Later I wrote to my fellow judges to ask them what they made of our selection and this new generation of novelists, to compare my impressions with theirs. Anne Tyler said that she had found 'lots of energy and vitality and more variety than I had expected'. She was interested to see how often 'a quality of reckless self-wastefulness and/or self-endangerment' was manifested by the characters. She couldn't remember that being so prevalent before. 'And I do love the fact,' she wrote, 'that in so many of these books the American experience is a hyphenated one—Chinese-American, Caribbean-American, etc.'

Stone and Wolff wrote at greater length and had many points in common, but because Stone touched on something which may be the nub of the argument about new American fiction, I shall quote him more fully. In my letter I'd praised the number of 'well-constructed, humane and sympathetic books'—Wolff's phrase was 'well-behaved'—while wondering about the lack of 'deranged ambition'. Stone replied:

I think the selections reflect a number of things which have taken place in American writing over the past twenty or thirty years. The principal one is probably the resurgence of realism that, during the late sixties, seemed to overcome the postmodernist experiments of writers like John Barth, John Hawkes, Albert Guerard, the Barthelmes etc. This was in large part political.

The resurgent realism was a kind of 'social realism'. It reflected a penitential tone that goes back a very long way in American literature and surfaces periodically, the educated American's alternative to religious revivalism. It also spoke for a vaguely leftist insistence on seriousness, a revulsion for pretentiousness (in the American definition), and that dislike of 'elitism' which often seems so fatuous when viewed from abroad but which burns with a fanatical flame here, embodying much deep, unspoken fear and hatred.

There is an almost obsessive pursuit of 'authenticity', and a narodnik romance with land and ordinary people. I grew up in Manhattan, and it never occurred to me that this was a place to write about. 'Authenticity', I was sure, resided just about anywhere else… The 'real' America was ever elusive and unavailable yet holy. The young writers of today are suburbanites—simply because the class that produces writers tends to reside in the suburbs. More often than not, they have grown up in the identical suburbs of several different cities. The European-descended writers could be described as post-ethnic and post-regional, in other words beyond the forces that informed much American writing in the past. Aware of this deprivation, they write in pursuit of it.

Much American writing today is self-conscious and defensive, ironic but impelled to conceal its irony. In the right hands this can produce a satisfying subtlety and restraint; it can also be boring. The individual here is notoriously celebrated, and also notoriously suppressed. In a way, some of these modest writers are vastly ambitious. They're looking for Truth, no less, in which they rather believe.

The thing about exuberance, satire and deranged ambition is that they resist consensus. We were after all a committee of many writers, with less of a common literary culture than exists in many countries. Our geography may not allow for the individual hatreds and jealousies that thrive in the literary circles of more homogeneous countries (though we do our best) yet some of us nurture considerable scorn for the literary pretensions of writers who subscribe to different modes than our own. The selections are finally a compromise, and in such a process the 'well-constructed, humane and sympathetic' book has the best shot.

In case anybody is counting by race or gender, the fifty-two shortlisted writers included one Native American, six African-Americans, two Chinese-Americans, one Haitian-American, one Cuban-American, one Jamaican-American, one Korean-American and one Indian-American. There were twenty-five women and twenty-seven men. The final twenty include one Native American, one African-American, one Chinese-American, one Haitian-American. There are seven women to thirteen men. The national judges were three white men and one white woman, unless, of course, you bring into that sum a fifth appointed judge, Henry Louis ('Skip') Gates, Jr, the professor of African-American studies at the University of Harvard. Professor Gates, unfortunately, could not be traced by phone or fax during the judging, and has spoken to no judge since.

I leave the last word to Tobias Wolff, who wrote:

It seems to me that we could make up another issue of Granta entirely of writers who aren't in this one, and lose nothing in quality. The idea of choosing twenty writers to represent a generation makes some sense in your country, but in ours, immense as it is, and teeming with young writers, such a process mainly exposes the biases of the judges, my own included.

Which isn't to say that our list is not a fine one. It is. And on it you will find many writers of eccentric and even visionary gifts… We read a great number of good books, and drew attention to some of them, and gave occasion for aficionados to celebrate their own neglected favorites by ridiculing our list. I'm proud of the unsatisfactory, incomplete job we did, and hope that its incompleteness, by stimulating outrage and disbelief, will awaken others to the wonderful range and vitality of the writers now coming into the fullness of their powers.

—Ian Jack, 1996