SOURCE: "History and the 'Here and Now': The Novels of Graham Swift," in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 35, No. 1, Spring, 1989, pp. 74-88.

In the following essay, Janik, an American educator and critic, discusses the relationship between history and the present in Swift's first three novels.

The publication of three novels within a period of four years marked the debut of Graham Swift, who has already established himself as a major novelist and may prove to be the most outstanding English novelist of the final quarter of the twentieth century. The Sweet-Shop Owner (1980) and Shuttlecock (1981) both received highly favorable reviews; Waterland was chosen as the best English novel of 1983 by the Guardian and was short-listed for that year's Booker Prize. In his novels and in the short stories collected in Learning to Swim (1982) Swift has begun to establish for an unpromising swath of South London the kind of fictional superreality...