Updike, McEwan, Pynchon and the Nobel

[Mark Kohut]

I, too, have been taken by all the tributes to Updike, overdone in speaking kindly of the recent dead
or genuinely felt.

Roth's was thoughtful in 'placing' him----"like Hawthorne"----NOT like Melville. Not like Nobelist Bellow.

McEwan's surprised me, yes, in calling Updike the greatest novelist writing in English when he died and,
in not mentioning Pynchon---with whom he was said to be "friendly"--who supposedly lent OBA a copy
of "the Heavenly City of the 18th Century Philosophers (I would presume while he was still writing M &D).

I suspect--and hope--that McEwan has told TRP what he thinks of his fiction, esp. his later fiction. Whatever BUT...,
I suspect our good-hearted Beloved Author signed that latter re the attack on McEwan's supposed plaigerism, out
of principle-- and friendship. (We don't know very much about OBA's life, of course, but hasn't it struck his steady 
readers how he seems to stick with "old friends"....from college, from praised earlier work?)

McEwan reveals himself as writer deeply in his words about Updike. Vote, if you want. I vote for overrated in
writing about our world NOW. 

Re: the Nobel. I have only specualtion and opinion to argue that TRP will never get it---because the Committee
has wanted much earlier to give it to him

 BUT:

1) The Nobel Committee never wants a JP Sartre situation again: A prize and no one to show up and claim it with
a Nobel address--in fact to diss it.  They 'screen' nominees, it is reported, asking if they will show up to accept the Prize IF---which is one way the short list is accumulated via leaks. If TRP has been asked, what do you think the answer has been?

2) We all know his lifelong refusal to accept---to believe in, it seems---any Literary prizes. Why would he change?
I would also argue, not surprisingly at all, that this refusal is part of his whole vision of a man in his world doing his work.

It has flashed thru my mind that giving the Nobel to Ms. Jellinek, a translator of "Gravity's Rainbow", was the closest the Swedish academy could come to giving it to OBA, the kind of writer they love.[see LeClezio, Grass, Fo, others]

P.S. I think that knowing that TRP would not accept was behind Engdahl's--Swedish Academy's Secretary---recent remarks about the narrowness of American writers----TRP is the immediate, biggest, exception to that---and if he were
still on a shortlist, Engdahl would never have made that statement.