The question was: ''Is it necessary that an author who wishes his readers to weep should first weep himself?'' Now that is fairly good. Authors usually go ape when you prod at the soft centre of their sensibilities. Like the best daft questions - ''Daddy, where do babies come from?'' - this one relied on a kind of metaphysical cheek. Ever so gently, with a bothersome charm, it slings one's eye to the heart of the matter. Mark Twain replied with a stentorian ''Yes!'' And Robert Louis Stevenson, who got wind of the query in Saranac Lake, sent off a letter. ''I am deeply moved and weep like Billy,'' he wrote, ''but the result when I have done with my tearful scribing, and read it by the cold light of tomorrow, seems pretty weak. I have wept over piles of my own scenes as I wrote them; yet I cannot conceive the public weeping over any . . . '' Poor Louis, with his drooping moustache, would weep at the drop of a comma, and Mr Twain, with his sure memory of Mississippi mud and laughter, would drop tear after tear into his river of words. The American and the Scot met soon after. (Twain had admired Kidnapped; Stevenson adored Huckleberry Finn, and read it four times.) They sat for an hour on a bench in Washington Square. I fancy they discussed what you could do in a novel. What you could say. What unsay. And something of that concern has come down to us. In this century the American novel has cast a long and perplexing shadow over British fiction. Manly tears and American big rivers could be seen to swell the oily backwaters of the English novel, and in their large, political, plain-speakingness, those same waters might be seen to have irrigated the fictive soils of the Irish, the Scottish. The Atlantic roar - Moby Dick, Gravity's Rainbow - has broken smartly on Scotland's west coast, and been absorbed inland with ease. The English make much of it too. But where a Scottish novelist, such as Duncan McLean who appears in this special issue, can see the open-hearted good in Texan swing, and like James Kelman fairly revel in the sparse melody of the American southern voice, their contemporaries in England can seem overwhelmed, breathless, dispirited, when confronted with American voices, and big, fat, American novels. Norman Mailer, never shy of an unslender volume himself, has just given us The Time of Our Time (Little Brown, #25), a veritable doorstep of a book, one which tries to wrap a whole republic in its covers, and a whole ego. Once upon a time, Mailer had something to say to British readers. Maybe he still has. But he also had something to say to British writers. ''Has not the time come for the British writer to face the disagreeable notion that, compared to us in America, he has been slack, fought his battles with too little, and surrendered too often to those peculiar betrayals which are worked in the name of good taste, caution, and the public trust?'' Well maybe. But you don't want to go too far on that. Before the fight for William Burroughs and Henry Miller there was the problem of D H Lawrence. And Messrs Stevenson and Twain, on their park bench, may have admitted the possibility of learning something from one another. No literary culture can be unidirectional: Melville, and Hawthorne, and Henry James learned much from Flaubert, George Eliot, and Scott; and the American novel has always been interested in Europe, in being there, or not being there. ''America is my country,'' said Gertrude Stein, ''but Paris is my home.'' Last year I asked Mailer what he thought of Iris Murdoch. ''She's the novelist I'd most like to have been,'' he said. ''I wished I'd written A Severed Head.'' I think he excepted Murdoch from his put-down of British writers, not because she's not British (she's actually Irish), but because she's a philosopher, and her novels are risky. And he had a point there. Who could deny that America is the place where the business of Modernism is now mainly being carried on? Last year saw the publication of Underworld by Don DeLillo, a serious (and seriously complex) song of the American Cold War years; and Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon, a massive, elliptical journey into American history and imagination. These are books which take the subject of America itself. Nothing came out in England last year which had any similar power or dimension. We had a novel about a girl, Bridget Jones's Diary. Or About a Boy. We had novels so interested in reassurance, so prosaic and timid, so historically inert, they could not be seen to be part of any novelistic tradition at all, only as an offshoot of some panting magazine culture, some deleterious riff from the centre of English banality. There was American and Irish and Scottish banality too - but nothing so empty as those feature-written novels, busted with their own nonsense. There is something about America. It gives itself to large gestures. From Fenimore Cooper and Walt Whitman to Rick Moody and Robert Pinsky, it was never going to be the sort of culture where boring men were content to boast about their ordinariness, or if they did it was going to be Herzog, and not The Little Book of Calm. The virtue of America is that it respects its extremes: it may produce some of the worst best-selling, self-help dross in the whole of the known universe, but when it decides to publish literature it does so, and it calls it that, and it can find an audience for it, and know the difference. America gets all the stick going for enjoying its own superficialities. But at least it takes an interest in what junk means. Britain just laughs at them for being so vacuous, and then buys it all up for Channel 4. Britain's critical culture is so lame at present: full of rubbish and rave; you can sometimes feel there's a conspiracy of lazy tripe-mongers; a critical condition in critical condition: Britain (and France) are among the easiest places for bad books to be called good. That is true now. You see it week after week on the book pages: miserable guff as ''masterpiece''. I would say the literary culture in Britain now is the least robust it has been this century. People laugh at America, unthinkingly. But it was in America, not here, that a strange and large book like Underworld could go to number one. It's in America, not here, that someone like Oprah Winfrey could hoist Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon on to the bestseller list, just by discussing it on her show, saying: ''This is an important book. Read it.'' Imagine Vanessa Feltz discussing Julian Barnes's new novel, England, England, on her very English show. Barnes's novel, a bright disquisition on islandness, is about a tycoon's attempt to turn the Isle of Wight into a mini-England. It's the sort of book which could trouble the typical, heritage-loving Anglophile. But you won't hear it discussed in that way. You won't hear the book discussed as if it actually mattered to the way people live their lives here.

What is often called the Americanisation of British culture is actually the Britishisation of American cultural output. Vanessa Feltz is much worse than Oprah. The Sunday Times book pages are much worse than the New York Times Book Review. The Spectator is a load of mince next to the New Yorker. The BBC is threatening to cut Bookmark, which means there will soon be more places to watch the intelligent discussion of literary topics in America than here. At least when Oprah discusses books she will discuss them as if they made some sort of difference. Here - eye off the ball, snout in the air - the only chance Iris Murdoch has of getting on to a popular discussion programme is if she were to allow herself to be featured as a writer with Alzheimer's! The Americans might love garbage, but less thoroughly do they mistake it for art. The American novel has often shown what it has been like to be alive in America this past 40 years. Britain has not. Where are the British novelists of supermarkets, nuclear reactors, local politics, middle-class gardens, advertising frauds, new town planning, food scares, de-islanding, new religions, computer components factories? Where are the political satires? The Joycean turns through provincial cities? The breath of Birmingham? People who love Chekhov and Katherine Mansfield and Gogol and Maupassant, who grew up reading these things, now lie in wait for the latest from their offspring, Richard Ford, or Cormac McCarthy, or Alice Munro, or Claire Messud. Americans all. English fiction is sunk in critical laxity and cultural bad faith. It grows pleased with its small ambitions; its proud emptiness. The Indian novel has made it look poky. The Irish and Scottish has made it seem moribund. Having said all this, I would say, for my part, that the trouble with the English novel seems mainly political. You very seldom read an English sentence, about the land, about a face, about a turn of language and mind, a crack-up, and think: ''This is about the whole country. This is something that can stand for the nation itself.'' There is very little political energy. There are English novelists now, whose interest in popular culture, in political effects, has caused them to be called very English - Jonathan Coe, Will Self - but that is not true. It makes them American. It makes them very American. After I wrote that last sentence there was a knock at the door. It was a man in a crash helmet, holding two towers of paper, a veritable World Trade Centre of manuscript. This was the last instalment of Tom Wolfe's new novel A Man in Full. His previous novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, left you in no doubt about those carrying on the tradition established by Thackeray and Trollope. It was a political thriller, an account of the moneyed classes, a view of the Bronx, a breath of society high and low, a long look at how materialism and news entertainment had doused the Manhattan of the 1980s. The first parts of A Man in Full promise another medley of contemporary literary effects: big-time realism; satirical miniatures; Dickensian brio; a superabundance of Nineties manners and follies. It is the sort of book that has become nearly impossible to imagine in a British context. The English novel has largely become a silly conceit of minor affections, devoid of political realities, or indeed possibilities. The founding fathers (and mothers) of American writing loved Stendhal. It was he who put the matter most plainly: ''Politics in a work of literature,'' he wrote, ''is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one's attention.'' The best of the Americans make us nervous. They can give us novels that enter, with prescience, with heart, into the political system of the day, in the manner they learned from Europe's finest. They can give us a stylish novel on Bill Clinton. We will look in vain for such a book about Tony Blair. Who would write it? Jeffrey Archer? The best American writers are political in a more important way. They are open to the politics of everyday life. They can show you power in a handful of dust. And the people who taught them have forgotten how.