Why Today's American Literary Fiction Sucks

This year the Pulitzer committee has decided not to award a Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the literary award often given the most acclaim and attention by the learned intelligentsia in the country (second to the Nobel, of course, which hasn't fallen into American letters in almost 2 decades and of which there is little hope of an American victory anytime soon). The committee is claiming they just couldn't get a majority. And this is the 11th time this has occurred in the 95 years or so since it was founded as the Pulitzer Prize in Novels (changed to Pulitzer in fiction in 1948 so it could include short story collections). And there have been a few controversies over time, like when the president of Colombia decided FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS was offensive and the book couldn't get the award or when Thomas Pynchon's GRAVITY'S RAINBOW won the Pulitzer fiction judges and then was quickly rejected by the rest of the board who accused the fiction judges of claiming it had to be good since nobody could understand it.

The finalists were "Train Dreams" by Denis Johnson, "Swamplandia!" by Karen Russell and "The Pale King" by David Foster Wallace. Their descriptions are as such (per the Pulitzer website):

• Train Dreams by Denis Johnson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): A novella about a day laborer in the old American West, bearing witness to terrors and glories with compassionate, heartbreaking calm.
• Swamplandia! by Karen Russell (Alfred A. Knopf): An adventure tale about an eccentric family adrift in its failing alligator-wrestling theme park, told by a 13-year-old heroine wise beyond her years.
• The Pale King, by the late David Foster Wallace: A posthumously completed novel, animated by grand ambition, that explores boredom and bureaucracy in the American workplace.

 The three novels show in their subject matter that the Pulitzer judges are looking for something new, something quirky, some fresh take on American life as the Pulitzer in fiction for the most part is supposed to be about an exciting new vision in Americana. And the judges claim they just couldn't agree on one but I have to wonder if the biggest problem is that they might be hamstrung by a simple fact, that right now America doesn't know what its voice is but what it has been for the past few decades is just pathetic.

Before you jump up and start haranguing me, yelling "No, I think Michael Chabon is just dreamy" or "What about INFINITE JEST" let me explain. There are some great works out there and certainly America will always be a force in fiction. But we practically invented post-modernism and ever since then we've mostly rested on our laurels, to the point that literary fiction is, at best, simply the reverse negative to post-modernism and at worst this "post-post-modernism" some people are claiming because, well, there's nothing else to call a fiction tradition that has seemingly no identity.

Last year I set out to read a good chunk of Pulitzer and Nobel prize-winners. For the most part I found myself enthralled with all the Nobel winners. I read a few Americans who I already love, Hemingway and Faulkner and Steinbeck. And I also discovered J.M. Coetzee whose novel DISGRACE is a brilliant meditation on displacement in a place in the middle of a clawback of white rights as Africa reclaims itself from its colonizers. And Jose Saramago's amazing comic parable about death and life, DEATH WITH INTERRUPTIONS. And Derek Walcott's Caribbean epic poem OMEROS and Albert Camus' THE REBEL and so on and so forth, all these brilliant works tapping into issues of humanity and history and great lofty importance with international concern. But as for the Pulitzer Winners - ehhh...

As hard as it is for me to put down Cormac McCarthy, THE ROAD was nothing too special - just a simple story of a man and his son walking for nothing, having nothing, and ending up nowhere. It's as if the book is so simple it tricked people into thinking there's more to it than the nuts and bolts of walking down the road. BLOOD MERIDIAN and the Border Trilogy are much better but herein lies another shortcoming - like the Academy Awards, you get the feeling the Pulitzer gets awarded to people for inferior books to the ones which should have won but were skipped over for one reason or another. While the Nobel is for a body of work, at times the Pulitzer seems to be an award for a snub or a one-off and the difference between a great writer and a one hit wonder often comes down to how lasting and profound a great writer's work is.

Let's go to the 2001 winner, EMPIRE FALLS. Smalltown man too afraid to leave his shitty situation spends most of the time driving around wining to himself about his failings but at the same time is simply too much of a pussy to do anything. Or AMERICAN PASTORAL by Phillip Roth about a high school athlete who goes on to live the American Dream but he doesn't pay attention to anything happening around him and his daughter goes crazy because he's so damn boring. Or MIDDLESEX, a beautiful novel but nothing really happens, the plot serving as little more than an excuse to talk about the history of Greek-Americans with the catchy tune of hermaphrodites to keep one from falling into complete boredom. And so on into hyped books like Franzen's FREEDOM, a novel full of disgustingly boring people which steals any and all of its interesting elements from McInerney's BRIGHTNESS FALLS and Tolstoy's ANNA KARENINA.

I read excerpts from Shteyngart's SUPER SAD TRUE LOVE STORY and there it was again - this nagging, sad, neutered American literary voice. Given to incessant navel gazing (where a person just thinks and overthinks and rethinks about himself without getting anywhere; something people seem to think is "literature" when it's little more than simple-minded self-indulgence and an inability to commit to any great revelation or belief), a worship of the weak anti-hero (almost the anti-Hemingway, whose characters were so brave and bold and strong in spite of their weaknesses, often these current heroes are weak and pathetic in spite of the strenghts they used to have), reverence for old-time baseball (give it up, people, baseball's over) and nostalgia for white suburban high school athletic stars.

The point I'm trying to get at is that American literature is in a little bit of a rut. There are some great books out there, absolutely, but most of the attention and demand and, therefore, innovation go to super market thrillers or YA novels. From literature, people for some reason seem to be happy with the staid, slow self-centered thing, a result of the last few generations trying to come to terms with the fact that they're much bigger cowards than the great American writers of the early 20th century and much less cool than the hip post-modernists of the 60's and early 70's.

So perhaps this is a good omen. I love Foster Wallace. And have heard a lot of good things about SWAMPLANDIA. But perhaps this inability to come to an agreement is a sign that the tides are finally turning. There were 3 such indecisions (and thus no award) in the 70's, as the postmodernists segued into this clipped-ball prose of whatever the fuck they want to call this scene that came after and has just held on (possibly starting with Roth's PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, about a little Jewish bitch given to excessive masturbation), like a booger that won't let go of the bottom of a desk. One indecision occurred in '64 as postmodernism took over the traditional modernist and romantic inclinations of American literature. 2 in the 50's, one of which occurred between Hemingway and Faulkner awards because, let's face it, who the fuck could compare to those two? Even Steinbeck had petered out by then.

So perhaps this is a good thing. A changing of the guards. Maybe, and God let this be true, American literature is tired of being a sexless, emotionless, weak little bitch, constantly whining about how things are so tough and it's not their fault that they just couldn't be as cool or tough as the others because in the end they don't want to be tough anyway and it's not their fault that they're so damn boring and why do I have to be so bound up emotionally and afraid of action or inaction or seeming stupid or seeming tough and overthinking because that's what I do and I just want to go birdwatching ...

Fucking annoying. We need fiction again with tough men and women, fighting the losing battle valiantly, preferably with a lot of booze to steel the nerves like authors Steven John, Cormac McCarthy (especially earlier on), and Richard Wirick specialize in.

Maybe American literature will finally begin to say something that changes the country and makes the rest of the world take notice. Other than the anti-dictatorship/anti-capitalist message of HUNGER GAMES, of course. Maybe again the Pulitzer prize will be awarded to a book that will be great not only in America but throughout the world, that I could proudly put alongside all the international authors I'm rapidly falling for. And maybe then those of us struggling to be literary writers will again have a goal towards which we could truly be proud of trudging.

It's up to you to demand better literature and not be bamboozled by the rot that's been presenting itself as American lit for the last few decades. The world needs a new Hemingway, goddammit. Though Steven John, with his THREE A.M., certainly is another good step in the right direction and a good way for you to start us moving in this direction.

- Ryan