Leonard? I don't know about that. He was a lot more
interesting when he was writing westerns. I try my best not
to be a genre snob, but, really, when you put guys like
Elmore Leonard and Donnie Westlake next to other
English-language winners of the past--Kipling, Yeats, Eliot,
Faulkner, Steinbeck, Eugene O'Neill, to name a few--the genre
guys, to my ear, compare quite unfavorably (although I am
willing to concede that if Bernard Shaw deserves a Nobel,
then anyone does). They're great writers...not that great
though.
If I had to pick any crime-ish or genre-ish writer today who
deserves to win, or at least to be nominated, it'd be James
Ellroy (in English) or Mario Vargas Llosa (in not
English).
I don't necessarily chalk this up to a fundamental unfitness
of crime and/or genre fiction, just symptomatic of a general
decline of English letters in the last two or three decades.
American literature pretty much sucks these days. I haven't
discovered a new American writer I've been really excited
about in ten years (when I simultaneously happened upon
Cormac McCarthy and James Ellroy). But, then again, if
Leonard or Ellroy don't deserve to win a Nobel, who in
America really does? I think the Nobel committee's picks of
the last twenty years have been pretty iffy (Jose Saramago,
Wislawa Szymborska, Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott are all
highly questionable; while Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nadine
Gordimer, William Golding and that retard Saul Bellow are
just, to my mind, outrageous). So maybe anyone's fair game
these days.
A great book to read on this score is B.R. Myers's "A
Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness
in American Literary Prose." I usually hate literary
polemics, but Myers has got a lot of really smart things to
say about the way American letters have been going; he
doesn't blame an increasingly illiterate populace, but a
mutual back-scratching conspiracy of bad authors and snobby
critics. Myers bashes a number of critically adored writers
that unequivocally deserve to be bashed. Unfortunately, one
of those writers happens to be my beloved Cormac McCarthy,
but Myers makes some very good points about him, taking him
to task for his most egregious excesses of windbaggy,
overheated prose. The offenses seem even worse when he
compares them to passages of unpretentious concision and
clarity from Zane Grey.
also re: Cormac McCarthy. I'm surprised no one's mentioned
his "Outer Dark." It's my favorite one of his. Powerful
stuff.
David Moran
Mario Taboada wrote:
> <<PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER's book editor is
demanding a Nobel
> for Leonard.>>
>
> I've wondered the same thing many times. The US
could put a
> great lineup for the Nobel with, say, Bradbury,
Leonard,
> Westlake and Cormac McCarthy --I did not say Updike
or
> Oates. Crime and SF writers have been for decades
among the
> most interesting US writers. Not a great secret,
except to
> The Establishment. I do not equate The Establishment
with
> academics. In my experience, academics read a lot of
crime
> fiction. At least, that's what I see in their
home
> libraries.
>
> Best,
>
> MrT
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