ESSAY LIESL SCHILLINGER


It’s been a capricious period for awards. First there were the Nobels, with the peace prize going to President Obama for work as yet undone and the literature prize to Herta Muller for works most people haven’t read. Then in mid-October came the announcement of this year’s finalists for the National Book Awards in the United States. Three of the five candidates in the fiction category were not born in America; two of those three live abroad.

Last fall Horace Engdahl, then the spokesman for the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel literature prize, criticized American fiction for being “too isolated, too insular.” In light of the controversy , it seems natural to ask: was Mr. Engdahl wrong?

To refine the question: how can American literary tastes be “isolated” and “insular” when they can be assimilated and imitated so successfully? And what does it mean to write an “American” book, if you don’t need an American address to do it?

The judges of the National Book Awards tacitly suggest a heartening response: the American idea not only translates, it disregards national boundaries. To qualify for the award, a writer must have American citizenship but can carry other passports, too. The Irish author Colum McCann, one of the finalists, was born in Dublin but makes his home in New York. For the epigraph to his novel, “Let the Great World Spin,” a kaleidoscope of New York City lives set in the 1970s but doubling as a 9/11 allegory, Mr. McCann chose two sentences from one of last year’s contenders “The Lazarus Project”: “All the lives we could live, all the people we will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is what the world is.”

This borderless vision belongs, of course, to that book’s author, Aleksandar Hemon, who was born in Sarajevo in 1964, came to this country in 1992 as a tourist and stayed here after war broke out in Bosnia. In 2004 he won a MacArthur Fellowship, a so-called genius grant that bestows $500,000 on the recipients. His worldview rejects the connection between passport and pen.

That’s a liberating thought to keep in mind while considering the other candidates for this year’s award in fiction. Marcel Theroux, who was born in Kampala, Uganda, and now lives in London, has produced a post-apocalyptic fable called “Far North,” written in an American idiom but set in Siberia. Its net effect recalls Yevgeny Zamyatin’s “We,” Jack London’s “White Fang” and “The Road” by Cormac McCarthy, frosted with the snowy brutality of “McCabe and Mrs. Miller.” Ultimately, though, such comparisons can’t serve, because Mr. Theroux, a son of the American writer Paul Theroux, yokes his style to his own intent.

Another candidate for the prize, Daniyal Mueenuddin, who grew up in Pakistan and Wisconsin, lives in the southern Punjab but is spending a year in London. His enthralling collection, “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” a series of interconnected stories set mostly in Pakistan , evokes Guy de Maupassant.

Mr. Mueenuddin transcends place; he’s as American as he wants to be, even if most of his stories take place in the region served by Pakistan’s M-2 motorway and not Wisconsin’s interstate highway.

Any open-minded critic who regularly receives new books or translations from Europe, the Middle East or Asia knows the bitter experience of opening a book by an unknown foreign author with anticipation, only to cast it away in irritation or boredom, finding it impossible to engage with a novel that was esteemed in a distant land.

And it’s also true that there are limitations to how much a reader can appreciate cultural preoccupations that differ too greatly from the reader’s own. Not every taste travels. But that doesn’t rob it of its intrinsic value, or of its appeal to the land that produced it.

On November 18, only one of the five authors that the National Book Awards selected will get the laurels. Whoever it is, he or she will be a writer who expands the versatile adjective “American,” enriching the world’s understanding of itself.

BRIAN DETTMER, MODERN PROGRESS, ALTERED BOOK, IMAGE COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND MITO GALLERY, BARCELONA