Nobel writer puzzles American authors

The news that a little read French author has won the Nobel for Literature confirms American authors’ suspicions

Several prominent American authors reacted with curiosity to this morning's announcement that Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, a French novelist little known outside of France, has won the Nobel Prize for literature.

While M. Le Clézio is highly regarded in France, he appears less well recognized in American literary circles. Most of the authors interviewed did not even know who he was. But they did have plenty of criticism for Horace Engdahl, the award jury's top member, who claimed last week that American writers are "too isolated, too insular" to compete with Europeans.

“When a great writer is resolutely local and specific in his or her attentions—whatever the narrative strategy—the work has universal relevance.”

Stephen King was a bit less parsed with his words in response to the criticism of American authors. “Pooh!” he wrote in an email to the Daily Beast, “What about Philip Roth? He deserves it for his body of work in general. And American Pastoral in particular.

“Also concerning the insularity issue—Christ almighty, they gave a Nobel to William Faulkner whose fiction rarely poked his head out of a single rural county in Mississippi. This kind of arrogant sniffery is nothing new, of course, and not particular to European minds. Maybe they gave him the prize because nobody could spell the county in question. Although everyone remembers it starts with the letter Y. “I have no opinions on Le Clezio as I have not read his work. As for the insularity argument, the Nobel committee has no farther to look than Denis Johnson. (Tree of Smoke, Already Dead.) Or Cormac McCarthy.”

Harold Bloom, an institutional figure in literary criticism, has also not read Le Clezio. He told the Daily Beast he didn’t want to talk about the controversy.

David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker and author of Resurrection, a history of contemporary Russia, said he had never heard of Mr. Le Clezio. While the Nobel literature awards generally have a political component, he said, he could not judge this year's choice.

"He may be a wonderful writer, but I confess I've not read anything of his," Mr. Remnick said. "What I found difficult to swallow was the secretary of a committee making categorical lectures about a literary scene that he seems to know very little about."