UNFORTUNATELY the girl with the all American smile, who extends her hand to me in friendly greeting, is not the one I have come to interview but her travelling companion. Teen author Jenn Crowell, America's latest publishing phenomenon, sits at the other side of the tea table (if the half foetal slouch on the bucket chair can be so described), clearly wishing she was anywhere but in this London hotel faced with this bore of a journalist. Anyone who feared literary praecox had done for her adolescence need not worry - her surly manner was only too reminscent of my own 18 year old at home.
Jenn Crowell is what in the old bays would have been called precocious. She has been writing novels since she was seven years old. "I've always written. It's something that's always been with me. I don't think not writing was ever an option for me. It was automatic like breathing. I think I always gravitated towards modern farms of fiction and the novel form, though I didn't quite realise it as a form at that age.
Questions are answered like staccato bursts from a machine gun. A rapid succession of words followed by silence. Unmodulated. That portion of her face, riot hidden by a curtain of blonde hair, is in shadow from a black hat. Forget eye contact. I surmise there is something wrong with her sight.
In these days of celebrity publishing, a 17 year old college kid from small town Pennsylvania, who writes of love and bereavement in the voice of a year old, ex-pat widow living in a London which the author had only visited in her imagination, had to be a winner. And make no mistake, Necessary Madness is quite good in its way . . . for a kid. Except that no one seems to see it like that. Believe the hype and you'd think Jenn Crowell, now aged 19 was another Sylvia Plath or Francoise Sagan.
I decide to tell her what I think that the much vaunted Englishness of the novel, far from "capturing its ambience and atmosphere so perfectly" (publicity blurb), jars like a Brechtian alienation device, its false notes of description and dialogue denying me immersion in the emotional heart of the novel.
She cocks her head vaguely in my direction. This is not what Jenn Crowell is used to hearing. "I have never really been told that it detracts."
Why didn't she take the old advice, I ask, and write about something some where she knew? After all, the book isn't about London it's not even about ex-pats. It's about grief. About a dysfunctional family. It could happen anywhere. "I've always been a bit of an Anglophile. I've always been interested in transcending my own culture. It's not so much out of a disdain for American culture but I just think we can learn from others and others are really fascinating. And I think that the danger in writing about your own culture is that you become very self absorbed.
"I felt very confident that I had done meticulous research. But I didn't and still don't claim to know everything there is to know. Because I can't. I haven't lived here. But in terms of the details I chose to work with, I think that I got it right."
So what was her research?
"Sue Townsend (The Diaries Of Adrian Mole), guide books and things for geographical areas. And some sitcom viewing. A lot of Ab Fab actually which you have to take in context. I realise that all of Britain is not like that. It was really more to get the speech cadence and the quirks of the language."
Whereas Ab Fab's Edwina and Pats end all their sentences with darling or sweetie Jenn Crowell opts for the less quirky "love". Other British sitcoms she has watched Are You Being Served, Fawlty Towers and The Young Ones.
TEN years ago a brother died. Within a year so did her grandfather, though she refuses to add further information through the simple expedient of ignoring my questions. Was writing about death a cathartic exercise? "No. I can see correlations in retrospect but in terms of during the writing of the novel it was not a cathartic need, a cathartic drive from my own personal experience.
If she wasn't using her own memory of these events, was she using her parents' reactions? "No." Necessary Madness, she says, is simply "a rumination on grief and on the sweeping loneliness that affects everyday life and how it changes family dynamics.
When writing about things that are too close she says. "I find my narrators disintegrate into soliscsism and navel gazing that I don't find particularly good fiction."
The authors she admires are "contemporary women writers". She does not have much patience with dead white men. She was 14 years old when she read Margaret Atwood's The Handmaids, Tale. It opened me completely in a way that literary fiction really hadn't done before and it showed me that you could incorporate powerful, lyrical, emotionally tuned language that you find in poetry into fiction, and you can tell an essentially very disturbing dark and melancholy tale and do it with such beauty that it becomes beautiful."
The focuses of the publicity on her age irritates her, though she acknowledges it as a necessary evil. "I think any author wants their book to be judged on its own merits and I can rest assured knowing that initially it was, that neither my agent nor my editor knew my age when they read the manuscript. However there is no escaping that it is an undeniable publicity advantage and everyone, myself included, wanted exposure for the book. This may be a sad fact but I would not be getting the exposure I'm getting right now if it were not for my age. So it's kind of a tricky situation.'
Her family, though supportive, has not been involved. Her mother only got round to reading the book two months ago. The "mentor" who started the ball rolling by sending the book to an agent was her professor at Goucher College, Baltimore.
a $500 000 two book deal (the next one - is set in Iceland) is not to be snifled at. And there is no doubt that Crowell's writing has potential. But it's a talent that should, be nurtured rather than exposed at this vulnerable stage. It, is perhaps too much, to expect publishers to be that altruistic but her professor should have known better.
