By: Alex Sorondo / Staff Writer
The four Americans with the best odds to win the Nobel Prize in Literature this year were Cormac McCarthy, 78 years old; Joyce Carol Oates, 73; Philip Roth, 78; and Thomas Pynchon, 74 —all of them novelists, all of them producing good work in the twilight of their career and all of them household names, once upon a time. Retaining a niche eminence within their field, and among the handful of Americans who still read for pleasure, our greatest novelists reside now on the furthest fringes of American culture, where they will likely remain for as long as the form persists.
As a reader and aspiring writer, I get pretty bummed on a regular basis not only by the cultural obscurity of even our best-selling novelists, and the consequent vacuum of casual conversation on the subject, but the popular insistence that the novel is dead, killed by DVDs, the Internet and James Cameron—mediums of what Harold Bloom, critic and professor at Yale University, called, “the tyranny of the visual.”
It is as saddening as it is frustrating to hear people say so casually, and sometimes even with pride, that they don’t read leisurely, that they are not only uninterested in fiction, but have an act of disinterest.
I find by now that I am not acquainted with many such people, but when I do hang out with them and the passing comment is made about “Jersey Shore,” —the contemporary intellectual’s punching bag—or sports or some new song, anything of popular interest that I know nothing about and which, consequently, excludes me from conversation, I get a little bristly.
I start to think that my interests are superior, that sports, “Jersey Shore” and night clubs are the places where deep thought goes to die and that these people who pass their time in anything but books are wasting it.
I get petty, smug and horrible.
Jumping back: none of the Americans won. The Nobel Prize in Literature went to Tomas Transtromer, a Swedish poet. Admittedly, I have yet to read any of his work, in spite of my conviction that he does not deserve it, not as much as McCarthy, Pynchon, Roth or Oates.
I have some American friends who say the same, who read pretty much the same stuff I do, lead a similar life, lament similar cultural shortcomings and who are all just as baffled. “How could the Americans lose? This is impossible,” and so on.
But then it occurred to me: American novelists, culturally obscure here, tend to be rather big names abroad—not rock stars, but perhaps an equivalent for the Nobel laureates who make the decision.
Just as I might rebel against reading Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight Saga by reading Roth, the Nobel committee may rebel from American literary stardom by promoting Transtromer, who might not necessarily deserve the award more than the American nominees.
In the same way, Roth might not necessarily deserve my attention more than Meyer, and reality television may deserve the attention of the public more so than whatever my friends or myself deem good fiction.
I do not think it was necessarily the Nobel that we grumpy bibliophiles wanted for our beloved and neglected American writers, or the cancellation of “Jersey Shore,” or the abolishment of vampire romances.
We just want some recognition. We want from our peers and from award committees the feeling we have been chasing in novels all along: the sense that we are not alone.
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