No Nobel Prizes for American Writers: They're Too Parochial

Sorry, John Updike. Don't get your hopes up, Joyce Carol Oates. And Philip Roth, what were you thinking? It's been 15 long years since an American author was honored with a Nobel prize for literature. Judging by the low opinion the head of the award jury holds of American writing, it is not going to happen this year.

Yesterday, the literary world on this side of the Atlantic reacted with bemusement and anger to an extraordinary tirade against American writing by Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury.

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world ... not the United States," he told the Associated Press. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialog of literature ...That ignorance is restraining."

The black-and-white views guaranteed Engdahl a wide audience for his confident dismissal of an industry that published more than 50,000 works of fiction last year. Unsurprisingly, his remarks elicited a variety of strong responses from members of America's writing community. Few of them could be described as abject or crushed.

Harold Augenbraum, who oversees the National Book Awards, told AP he was thinking of sending Engdahl a reading list. "Such a comment makes me think that Engdahl has read little American literature outside the mainstream and has a narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age," he said.

Michael Dirda, the Pulitzer prize-winning critic at the Washington Post's Book World, conceded that Americans do overwhelmingly read works in English rather than translation. But he added: "My general reaction is that he is just betraying an insular attitude towards a very diverse country."

The New Yorker's David Remnick accused the Nobel committee of being eternally incapable of recognising good writing when it saw it. "You would think that the permanent secretary of an academy that pretends to wisdom but has historically overlooked Proust, Joyce and Nabokov, to name just a few non-Nobelists, would spare us the categorical lectures," he told AP.

Stunt

Robert Kimball, editor of The New Criterion, registered Engdahl's comments with a degree of detachment. He noted that other Nobel committees are due to announce their prizes next week, in medicine, peace and economics, and that Engdahl may have been trying to generate some publicity.

"It reminds me a little bit of the Apollo space program that Uganda instituted under the rule of Idi Amin, where they had rockets and so on, except that they were made out of balsa wood," he said. "It strikes me as a kind of publicity stunt for a prize that in recent years has demonstrated its fatuousness and political complexion with one political laureate after the next punctuated now and then by a VS Naipaul just to lend a patina of credibility."

The US literary community has long had an ambivalent attitude towards the Nobel prize - not helped by the long drought. The last American to win a prize for literature was Toni Morrison in 1993. In the years since then, Europeans have been recognized nine times, including Britain's Doris Lessing.

The Nobel committee has also had a patchy reputation for recognizing genius. Although the reputations of such US winners as TS Eliot and Ernest Hemingway have survived, other laureates such as Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck have fallen in popular regard.

Oates and Roth have been mentioned for years as worthy candidates, without getting the nod. Updike presumably decided he never had a shot anyway when he created his character Bech and made fun of the prize.

It could be also that American writers, or anyone writing in English, may not need the recognition to achieve lasting fame, although the $1.3m (£650,000) award and gold medal would be nice.

"The Nobel has the great glamor. It also has the burden of being a kind of kiss of death. Many writers think it crowns your life effort and nothing that you do afterwards is as good," said Dirda. "It is a mixed blessing. But your name is in the history books."