Sorry; I can’t read McCarthy for more than a page or two before I must throw the book across the room with a convulsive shudder. He’s fourth-rate faux Faulkner; a mediocre writer who’s read WAAAY to much Joyce for his own good. His stuff reminds me of Flannery O’Connor’s juvenilia, which even she ridiculed (trees grayflying past the train window). Blecch. Self-consciously twangy pseudoJoyce. Even Proulx is ten times better, and she’s not all that great.
re: the OP
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next American will (and should) be Roth or DeLillo. Pynchon’s ‘harder,’ yes, but not nearly as interesting or good, in my highly subjective opinion. And, as someone else pointed out, he hasn’t followed Gravity’s Rainbow with anything especially impressive.
Roth has a large body of high quality, truly impressive novels, beautifully written, powerful themes, and they tend to stay in the mind. Like fine wine, he seems to keep getting better with age, too.
DeLillo, in contrast, seemed to need a few (several) novels to get warmed up, but he has some truly amazing ones to his credit now, including ‘white noise’, which is on everyone’s college syllabus and is the funniest novel I’ve ever read, also the best depiction of the multi-fragmented postmodern american family; ‘the names’, which, if you liked ‘white noise,’ offers an amazing contrast in style and subject and shows off his breadth; and ‘Underworld,’ which most people haven’t read (because it’s so long, I suppose) but which is really his magnum opus and quite deserved the national book award over Fraser’s ‘Cold Mountain.’ If you like Tarantino’s mixed up, out of sequence movies, then you might really like the time structure in ‘underworld’, which is written backwards. I don’t see DeLillo’s ‘style’ as going out of favor, as someone suggested, but I was a bit disappointed with the novella that followed ‘underworld’.
I’m pulling for DeLillo to win it but predict that Roth eventually will, whenever they get around to the next American. -
most deserving never to win?–Fitzgerald, DeLillo, Roth
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least deserving winners: Pearl ‘dreck’ Buck.
I disagree with the critics (above) of Hemingway. The common problem with reading him now is that virtually everyone imitated his style for so long that we can’t appreciate what he had created and how original and powerful his writing was. Maybe ‘old man and the sea’ is a bit boring, but I can’t imagine not being affected powerfully by ‘farewell to arms’ or ‘the sun also rises’, unless the reader doesn’t know how to recognize all of the understatement and irony that are wrapped up in every line.
Even if Pynchon has been in decline for thirty years, the man did write Gravity’s Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, which is more than can be said for Pearl Buck, Boris Pasternak or William Golding.
(Although I’m sure Golding wrote memorable works other than Lord of the Flies, thirty years passed between that book and his Nobel, so I think Pynchon still has a chance. That is, unless he’s been dead for years and hasn’t bothered to inform anyone.)
I’ll pop back into the thread to stick up for Mason and Dixon, a great Pynchon novel that came after Gravity’s Rainbow.
Jello: Yes, of course Lord of the Flies is Golding’s best-known book, but read The Inheritors, Pincher Martin, The Spire and Rites of Passage, then pass an opinion on him.
( On rereading: That sounds more aggressive than I meant it to be. It is not intended as an attack on you, but simply as a defence of a writer I enjoy very much).
Svenska Akademin do not, have not and will not[U/] give the Nobel Prize for Literature posthumously.
Ain’t gonna happen, at least not in our lifetimes.
Jabba, Samuel Clemens reputation rests on quite a bit more then The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Innocents Abroad, just to name a few are all regarded as classics.
As for Hemingway not being deserving, in his case it was more of a lifetime achievement award, but you could say that about almost all of the winners.
Hemingway invented a new way to write fiction which spawned a legion of mostly horrible imitators.
Can anyone name a past Nobel Winner for Literature who wrote anything of significance after they were awarded the Prize?
I sure can’t think of anybody.
Mr. Evil Breakfast: We’ll just have to disagree on that. Of course, he wrote a lot of books. But without Huckleberry Finn he wouldn’t be appearing in this thread.
Are there actually people who consider Gravity’s Rainbow to be Nobel worthy? This surprises me quite a lot.
Only someone who hasn’t read much more than HF could say such a thing. Have you read The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson or The Mysterious Stranger? Don’t read them just to defend your words here; read them because you’re a human being.
I’ve read Tom Sawyer. Connecticut Yankee and Pudd’nhead Wilson, as well as Huck Finn, though I must confess ignorance of The Mysterious Stranger. I agree Pudd’nhead Wilson is very good, but there’s a difference between being good and being great, and that’s the difference between Pudd’nhead Wilson and Huckleberry Finn.
Well, A, plenty of Nobellers can claim no more than one “great” book, though I insist Twain’s not one. And B, if you’ve read PW as an adult, and don’t find it great, then we’re just two very different people.
The Mysterious Stranger is shortish, available online, and arguably darkest thing Twain ever wrote. IIRC, it was published posthumously.
I reread LotF this summer, enjoyed it immensely, and considered reading something else I could find by him, but was under the impression (thanks to a literature teacher or two) that Lord of the Flies was by far his best work. I really only used him as a comparison to Pynchon because of the 30-year gap between his most well-known novel and his Nobel. I definitely will find my way to more Golding in the future, and didn’t mean to imply that he was a one-hit wonder, just that he was inferior to Pynchon, which (in my book) is by no means an insult.
Mason and Dixon I purchased last month but haven’t gone around to actually starting it yet.
Individual books are not “Nobel worthy”. The prize is a career prize, and usually given late in a career, one reason why the authors don’t go on to many major works.
Pynchon by any measure is a fine and serious writer and his career certainly merits as much lifetime consideration as anyone in the U.S. But he’s a wiseass cynic and Nobels don’t go to wiseass cynics.
Yadda yadda. Thanks; I know how the Nobel is awarded. nonetheless, it’s clear that many authors are awarded on the strength of a single book. I can certainly pick up this Steinbeck or that Morrison, whatever, and say, “There other work is greater; this is not a Nobel-worthy book” and you’d know exactly what I mean.
My point above is that Gravity’s Rainbow seems to be the title Pynchon apologists are most likely to trot out to defend the notion that he deserves a Nobel. I was just saying that if that’s his greatest work, it doesn’t strike me as on a par with the works of most of the other Nobel writers I’ve read. In that sense, it is not, IMHO, a Nobel worthy book.
But to address the end of your post, that “Nobels don’t go to wiseass cynics,” it doesn’t sound like you’ve read anything by Knut Hamsun, Halldor Laxness, or–the most cynical of the great wiseass writers–Par Lagerkvist.
If you enjoy “Nobel worthy” wiseass cynicism and you have not yet read those authors, you have a treat coming.
Start with Lagerkvist’s The Dwarf, the greatest masterpiece of wiseass cynicism I have ever read.
lissener: You are one of the Cafe Society posters whose posts I most enjoy, even when I disagree with you ( which is admittedly quite often ;)). I have my next few reads scheduled, but when I’ve finished them I shall read A Mysterious Stranger and reread Pudd’nhead Wilson in your honour.
Out of the American winners alone, O’Neill wrote “The Iceman Cometh” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” after winning his Nobel.
Camus’s plays and short stories weren’t published until after he won the Nobel in 1957.
Garcia Marquez has published a number of books since he won 21 years ago, including Chronicle of a Death Foretold, one of my favorites by him.
Thank you for the suggestions. I haven’t read them and if as described, they are my style of authors.
So I’ll qualify my statement: Nobels don’t go to American wiseass cynics.
(Which is what I meant all along, this being a thread on American laureates. And since your three are winners from 1920, 1951, and 1955, there wouldn’t seem to be any living wiseasses the committee goes for. Maybe wiseassery has changed over the years.)
And I reiterate that Nobels are for a body of work. Looking over the list of American winners, how many can be said to be known for only one major book? Morrison and possibly Steinbeck. Even in these two instances their partisans surely could make a case for a body of high quality work rather than a one-timer.
This raises an interesting question. Are Americans treated differently by the committee or do they have to have a different style/body/quantity of works to be taken seriously than those of other countries? I’m not well-read enough in Nobel literature to have any answer to this question, but some of the comments made in this thread seem to indicate this.
I’m kicking Toni Morrison to the top of my list for least deserving. And as much as it shames me to say it, poor Pearl Buck gets to be #2 on the list – I really do enjoy her writing, but I am aware that the Nobel is not awarded based upon my personal enjoyment (as of yet, anyway 
) and that her work simply isn’t quite up to Nobel standards.
I’m a little stumped as to American authors who might be future front runners – personally, I’ve been backing Cees Nooteboom for the past couple of years, so I haven’t been particularly focused on Americans.
The smart money is probably on Philip Roth to be the next American to win. He’s certainly got the span, and enough substance that career acheivement can be demonstrated. I think he’s lacking anything truly “better than first-rate,” but this is only my opinion of who I think will win, not who should win. If we added Roth to the current list of American winners, I would place him about 1/2 down the list in terms of quality.
A dark horse candidate – Kurt Vonnegut. I think this would have been rather more likely had he remained absurdly wicked and not become so sullenly whiny in the past few years (I’m speaking of his writing, although from what I can glean from interviews it might help his personality as well). I can imagine a scenario when the Nobel folks might wish to appear to be moving away from the current perception of selecting non-western, bleeding heart liberal types (I say that as a bleeding heart liberal myself, btw, but I think it undermines the award). He’s certainly politcal, and there’s enough of an “O, the humanity!” element to appease those who look for that in a Nobel winner. He’s popular enough to have a “the voice of the common man” appeal, but also intellectual enough to keep the credibility high. Again, this is a long shot, he’ll probably have kicked off a few years before the Nobel starts thinking of him as high-brow enough to be considered.
For Americans who deserved to win but didn’t, I can appreciate the case made for O’Connor. I would also put forward Edith Wharton, although her career probably peaked a little too early for serious Nobel consideration so I wouldn’t exactly say she was was robbed. Also, if they’re handing out Nobels to writers like Sinclair Lewis, I would think Willa Cather could hold her own.
Czeslaw Milosz is a Polish poet. From the link:
Rainbowthief said:
I disagree with at least the Heaney part of this statement (I don’t know the work of the others well enough to have an opinion). Heaney deserved the prize for his body of work. Whether politics played a part in his selection is moot. He is arguably the finest poet of the English language from the 2nd half of the 20th century.
I hope you start a thread when you have; I read Mysterious Stranger last night, and have started designing a book of it to give for Christimas (it’s in the public domain). I’m thinking of reading PW again, but I’m halfway through Lady Chatterley’s Lover. THis is shocking to me because I’ve tried to read Lawrence dozens of times and have never made it all the way through; I guess I finally got old enough or something, because I can’t put it down. I expect I’ll spend the next few weeks on Lawrence, but then I may take a Twain trip. He was my favorite writer through adolescence, and I read everty word he’d ever written by the time I was 20, but have read on Mysterious Stranger again since then.