Meghan O' Rourke
I was struck by the degree to which American writers are looking outward—past the boundaries and borders of the contiguous states. 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 towards it.

There is an increasing sense of precision found in story collections—a locale or theme carved out, and used as a unifying factor. (I'm thinking of many collections we didn't choose—Lewis Robinson writing about small-town Maine, for example.)

What else? There is still not a lot of talk of class, though you'd expect to find more, given that the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States is greater than ever. I admired Dean Bakopoulos' novel, Please Don't Come Back from the Moon, for being an incisive and clear-headed portrait of class boundaries in America, and how real, how enduring, they are. I wish I'd read more of that, but fear there's a reason for this silence: there are still far too many talented young writers who lack financial independence and can't find ways to make their voices heard.

Edmund White
In general I felt most of the young Americans I was reading knew how to write with great skill, the effect of creative writing classes perhaps. Certainly if I compare first American novels with first French novels (which I happen to read often), I'd say that the French récit is more intimate, written with much more simplicity, but the price of that simplicity is a certain abstractness, an empty, oracular tone and a lack of visual clues for the reader. French fiction by beginners is under-visualized—a sin that creative writing teachers would never permit their students to commit.

One of the things that kept cropping up was what might be called the Peace Corps novel, written about the encounter of the young privileged American (of whatever ethnic background) with the developing world. Often the idealistic young American has his beliefs sorely tested by cynical insurgents or by poorer but more worldly foreigners. In America all class analysis is forbidden; it's as if the conflict and alienation offered in, say, the British novel by encounters with members of other, lower social classes are replaced in America by contrasts of first and third world cultures.

I was sorry not to see Benjamin Kunkel on the list of winners. Indecision, his novel about an updated Oblomov, was a delirious piece of imaginative writing. Its absence may also be considered shocking by American readers, since Indecision was the most talked about literary first novel in recent years.

Paul Yamazaki
For this reader one of the most salient features of the writers that we considered was the internationalism in themes, the formal diversity of how they told their stories and shaped their characters. These writers are both reflections and agents of change—though as a group they seem to lack that streak of mad, romantic bohemianism that wanted to shatter the corridors of Babylon.

Of the novelists who didn't make the final list, I'll be curious to see how
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum develops as a writer. Her novel, Madeleine is Sleeping, was a very strange book; reading it was like remembering a dream.