Not too long ago, Horace Engdahl--permanent secretary of the Nobel prize jury--attacked American writers, arguing that no American had a chance of winning a Nobel in literature until we stopped drinking our own urine and marrying our siblings. (At least he'd read his Faulkner.) Many American luminaries responded in kind. Personally, I was shocked that the Swedes, who are known primarily for their cooking skills and hairy, eyeless faces, would suddenly turn on our culture, which has looked so lovingly upon them for so long.
Anyway, it took about two years, but now we have a weightier, more thoughtful response to Engdahl, in the form of a recent review essay by Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books. Parks, an internationally-based writer of British birth, reviews a few recent publications designed to redress concerns about American writing and the novel in general. He comes to a number of great conclusions that ring true, among them the fact that it's actually very difficult, if you remove place names and other cultural markers, to tell the difference between writers of any nationality.Writing about the recent publication Best European Fiction 2010, he observes a broader trend:
Each writer appeals confidently to an international liberal readership at the expense of provincial bigotry and hypocrisy . . . Across the globe, the literary frame of mind is growing more homogeneous.I doubt Parks means this as the damning statement that I hear when I read it. In any case, his review does a fantastic job of addressing both the state of contemporary European writing and the statistics that would seem to support European internationalism over American isolationism. It's worth a read.
