Re: Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize

[Tom Beshear]

Those pieces -- which show up every autumn like a flight of diseased 
swallows -- are always frustrating. Setting Pynchon aside (GR, V. and Mason 
& Dixon should be enough to merit anyone a Nobel, but he'll never win it 
because he won't turn up to accept the prize), who knows why this writer 
gets a Nobel and that one doesn't? One thing I count on: whoever Ladbrokes 
anoints in its annual oddsmaking WON'T win.

I know of one writer who fits nearly all the Nobel criteria Nazaryan, the 
Salon writer, proposes in his analysis of American authors, but he isn't 
mentioned: William T. Vollmann. These grafs pretty much sum up the case for 
works like Europe Central, Rising Up and Rising Down, and Fathers and Crows:

"Maybe it’s the same story as in politics and industry: America, once great, 
has been laid low. The difference is that great art needs no tariffs, no 
financial stimuli, no elections or military campaigns. It only requires 
courage — though a courage of a special kind — to see beyond oneself, to 
speak across both space and time via what Ralph Ellison once called “the 
lower frequencies.”

"Indeed, compare the Pulitzer-winning descriptions with these words pulled 
from the citations of recent Nobel Prize-winners: Revolt, visionary, clash, 
oppression, subjugating, outsider, barbaric, suppressed. And lastly, the one 
word that seems most elusive to our writers today, so much so that I fear we’ve 
become afraid of it: universal."



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, October 04, 2011 11:13 AM
Subject: Why American novelists don’t deserve the Nobel Prize


> http://entertainment.salon.com/2011/10/03/why_americans_don_t_win_nobel/