Where Have you Gone Toni Morrison???

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."
-Horace Engdahl, Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy

"Fuck that. it goes like this, the terrorists hate our freedom and the Swedish hate our books."
-My friend, drunk, at a bar. American


It was announced yesterday that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio had won the Nobel Prize for literature, in the the process adding more fuel to an already overheated debate that will go on until the day comes when once again an American wins the coveted prize. The thinking behind the idea that the people who pick out the winner of the Nobel prize are biased against the U.S. of A. is backed up by the fact that the last Yankee to do so was Toni Morrison in 1993 for being a writer "who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."

Ah-Ha! Those Swedes want American reality!
With a group of names including Roth, Updike and Pynchon a bunch of us are left to scratch out heads and ask "what the hell about neurotic Jews, middle class lives or books by a person hardly anybody has ever seen comes off as insular or hard to translate???" No really. Think hard about that. It seems to me that maybe in a way, without being too brutal, the traditionally neutral country of Sweden has given us a subtle hint as to what the rest of the world thinks of our (lack of?) intellectual state. But what about all the brilliant non-Americans who were also snubbed for the award? Is it also safe to assume that since Tolstoy and Nabokov were never considered worthy of the award that the Swedes have a bias against Russians as well?

Whatever the case, is there a possibility that Engdahl is right? It goes without saying that Pynchon spending almost an entire career ducking from the public view aids the claim that America and it's writers are both insular and isolated. As for Updike, he has had his career up's and down's. Do the Nobel people take that into account?

The greatest hope for the American most likely to bring the award over would have to be Philip Roth. With a body of work going back into the 1950's no other artist has done more to highlight the American Jewish experience (other than Woody Allen). In the last decade, Roth has been beyond consistent, churning out a book a year including two in his somewhat auto-biographical Zuckerman series, The Human Stain in 2000 and Exit Ghosts in 2007, the latter being one of his most revered works to date.

It was in 2004 that Roth published the book that could best surmise the position of the people who give the Nobel Prize out, The Plot Against America. In the 400 page book, Roth's imagination runs wild in a fictional account of America circa 1940. The country wants to remain in it's neutral state following the devastation of World War 1, deciding to elect aviation hero (and real life Nazi sympathizer) Charles Lindberg as President. What follows is a chilling account of racism gone wild across the country. The idiots are in charge and the idiots that voted them in will do as they please.
How does that not translate well or work in the "big dialogue of literature?" Roth in one book made a statement that could speak of what could have been and what was going on within his country at the time of the books release.

For Mr. Engdahl and the rest of his cohorts, this year we can let it slip, but next year if you do indeed have a top five list (nobody expected this years winner to take home the prize) we should hope you acknowledge Mr. Roth and put him somewhere at the top of it.

And frankly speaking as an American, who wants our reality anyway?