Ian Jack is stepping down at Granta.

As much as I love the magazine, I’ll admit the last few issues (even the travel one) have sat mostly unopened. It’s felt muddled and boring for a couple years now.

While the new owner apparently thinks the Bill Buford era was “shockingly masculine,” there’s no arguing those were its golden days. (I’ve mooned over it before.) The book compilations of ’80s Granta (here and here) feel more immediate and visceral than the new stuff — even if their invocation of Sendero Luminoso and Timisoara peg them to the Reagan-Bush years.

That said, Ian Jack is a great writer and he’ll be missed — particularly if the article’s hints of the owner’s interest in “activist non-fiction” aimed at feminist and environmentalist causes prove correct. Jesus, one Mother Jones is enough.

There was a hint of this change in that travel issue. (How they could make that boring I’ll never guess, given that the magazine virtually invented the modern craft of travel writing.) Instead of the usual great reportage, the issue was packed with moralizing about carbon emissions.

I like a melting polar ice pack as little as the next guy, but I don’t want to read about it in a great literary magazine. I want to hear about it in art-house cinemas, from failed Democratic presidential candidates, like a normal person.

15 December 2006

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