Tayari Jones' Novel Oprah's Book Club Pick + Elizabeth Alexander To Lead Mellon Foundation

A million congratulations to my Rutgers-Newark colleague Tayari Jones, on the publication of her new, fourth novel, An American Marriage, now out from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill! Tayari's novel has been receiving rapturous reviews (Entertainment Weekly, LA Review of Books, New York Times Book Review, SFGate, and USA Today, to name a few) since its appearance, as well as praise from readers on Amazon, Goodreads, and elsewhere. To add to the excellent news, Oprah Winfrey selected An American Marriage as her newest Oprah's Book Club pick, which she announced on CBS Morning News yesterday morning.

Tayari on CBS, as Oprah announces
her book as its newest Book Club selection

Oprah has said of the book, "I have to tell you, it is intriguing. It's a love story that also has a huge layer of suspense. And it's also so current and so really now that I could not put it down and I've already passed it on to lots of my friends and so I know – certainly believe – that you're gonna love it." On her website, Tayari, a writer of numerous gifts, offers a summation of An American Marriage:

Newlyweds, Celestial and Roy, are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive and she is artist on the brink of an exciting career. They are settling into the routine of their life together, when they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unm oored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

I have had the pleasure of hearing Tayari describe the book as she was writing it over the last few years, and have now purchased my copy and intend to dive into it very soon! I also expect the praise to continue and prizes to shower this book too. CONGRATULATIONS AGAIN, TAYARI!

You can purchase a copy of An American Marriage here!

***

Elizabeth Alexander

Yesterday brought more good news: poet, scholar, critic, and generally extraordinary person Elizabeth Alexander has been named the next head of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation! Elizabeth will assume the Mellon presidency in March 2018, replacing Earl Lewis, who has served since 2013. Currently she is the Wu Tsun Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, and had served as Director of Creativity and Freed Expression at the Ford Foundation. Before this, she was the Frederick Iseman Professor and had previously held the post of Thomas Donnelley Professor and chaired the African American Studies Department at Yale University, where she taught for 15 years. At the Ford Foundation, Elizabeth "co-designed the Art for Justice Fund, a $100 million fund seeded by philanthropist Agnes Gund to transform the criminal justice system and all of its inequities through art and advocacy."

At Mellon, Elizabeth will preside over a foundation that has long been dedicated to work in the humanities and culture, particularly the liberal arts, from supporting scholarship to scholarly publication to the training and development of future educators, as well as considerable work in the museum world. It will be fascinating to see how her interests, as someone who has long promoted equality, social justice and civic participation in the arts and humanities intersects with Mellon's current agenda, and how she as its leader will guide and develop its focus. Inside Philanthropy offers five to consider in terms of Elizabeth's new tenure. Key will be defending not just the humanities, but universities and higher education in general, from those on the right and, to a different degree, from some critics on the far left. As Elizabeth notes, "The value of free expression, of arts and culture, is not something that’s always shouted from the rooftops, right now."

Elizabeth is one of the major American poets, serving as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, as well as on the boards of the Pulitzer Prize and the African Poetry Book Fund. She also is a prolific author and critic. In 2009, she was President Barack Obama's first inaugural poet, her poem captured in the volume Praise Song for the Day. Her 2015 memoir The Light of the World, a powerful tribute to her late husband Ficre Ghebreyesus, which was a 2016 finalis for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is also the author of six books of poetry, including The Venus Hottentot, Body of Life, Antebellum Dream Book, American Sublime, and Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems. She also has penned two collections of critical prose, The Black Interior and Power and Possibilities: Essays, Reviews and Interviews, as well as a book for children, with Marilyn Nelson, entitled Miss Crandall's School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color.

Congratulations to Mellon for making this superlative choice, and CONGRATULATIONS, ELIZABETH!

Have MFA Programs Changed Contemporary American Novels (& Can Computers Provide Answers)?

Some novels from Flavorwire's 50 Most Anticipated Books of 2016

Have MFA programs--or the training student writers receive in them--changed the American novel, and more broadly, US fiction? Some scholars, like Mark McGurl, in his authoritative study The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, have persuasively suggested that MFA programs have, and in decisive and evaluatively positive ways. McGurl even establishes a typology of "program fiction" that includes "technomodernism," "high cultural pluralism," and "lower-middle-class modernism," all of which he believes not only define contemporary American fiction but represent qualitative achievements in the genre. (McGurl was no interloper in fiction criticism either; he had previously explored early 20th century American novelists' ambivalent relationships to the fiction as an art and as a form of popular entertainment in his 2001 study The Novel Art.)

Other critics like D. G. Myers, who historicizes creative writing programs in The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, take a more mixed view, criticizing contemporary American fiction's lack of historical awareness and arguing that's needed is more reconciliation between the artists (writers) and critics (literary scholars). Still other critics, like Eric Bennett, author of Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War, point out the role of the US government, and in particular, the CIA, in shaping MFA fiction from an ideological standpoint as well as a formal one. Bennett's study notes how CIA funding influenced the University of Iowa's Writing Workshop director Paul Engle to "flatten out" the political ferment that had characterized so much American fiction from the late 19th and early 20th centuries into what we now associate with a standard American style, emphasizing precision of language, careful characterization, and a focus on "the personal, the concrete and the individual." How often, in fact, is this stylistic point of origin discussed in any MFA workshops anywhere?

And that's not all. Chad Harbach's edited volume MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction, points to the tensions between academe, scattered throughout the country and across the globe, and the publishing industry, which is commercially focused and headquartered in New York. In Harbach's volume, several different essays note the tensions between approaches to writing that have elevated very different sets of writers along the New York-MFA axis. (When I shared the book with my graduate students a few years ago, though, they were not particularly interested in this conflict, and most appeared to have placed their cards on the side of the MFA world.) I hesitate to call her view representative, but I would venture that among American critics Elif Batuman's perspective, that MFA programs have had a demonstrable effect on US fiction, probably widespread.

But have they? Or rather, saying they have, what are those effects and can they be detected analytically, through variables discernible using big data research? Given the rise of theoretical trends like distant reading and computational-driven analysis of texts, this would seem to be an intriguing approach. In a recent online edition of the Atlantic, in "How Has the MFA Changed the Contemporary Novel?" Richard Jean So, a scholar of Asian American literature at the University of Chicago, and Andrew Piper, a scholar at McMaster University, did decide to crunch some of the numbers, and what they found is...that novels produced by writers who've graduated from MFA programs and those who haven't are more similar than different. Whether the variables are diction, theme, syntax, or racial or gender difference among protagonists, despite some distinctions MFA-trained and non-MFA trained American novelists are essentially writing the same sorts of books.

To quote So and Piper, their methodology involved selecting the following sets of novels for study:

We collected a sample of 200 novels written by graduates of MFA programs from over 20 leading programs (including Columbia, University of Texas at Austin, Iowa, and others) that have been published in the last 15 years. (This sample includes authors like Rick Moody, Alix Ohlin, and Ben Lerner.) For the sake of comparison, we also collected a similarly sized group of novels published over the same time period by authors who haven’t earned an MFA degree (including writers like Donna Tartt, Miranda July, and Akhil Sharma). To make these two groups as comparable as possible, we only gathered novels by non-MFA writers that were reviewed in The New York Times, which we took as a mark of literary excellence. Using a variety of tools from the field of computational text analysis, we studied how similar authors were across a range of literary aspects, including diction, style, theme, setting, and even how writers use characters.

To restate the premise here, So and Piper looked at several different variables to see if there were distinct differences between the novels produced by MFA-trained writers and those by writers who weren't. They assessed the texts' diction, and it turns out that the computer was successful only 67% of the time (or roughly 2/3rds) in identifying which was which. There were certain words ("lakes, counters," etc.) and names ("Ruth, Pete, Bobby, Charlotte," etc.) that appeared more frequently in the MFA-trained writers' works, but otherwise there was little difference. The same proved true for style (which for So and Piper seemed more to define syntax than overall prose style); for characterization; or for thematics. Additionally, their study showed no distinction with regard to these factors when writers wrote about race or gender, and in the cases of both sets of authors, a majority (61% for MFA-trained writers, 65% for non-MFA-trained) wrote novels with male protagonists. So where, So and Piper wonder, is that MFA influence and, ultimately they ask, is MFA training economically worth it? (Here I should note that Rutgers-Newark's MFA in creative writing program is now fully funded.)

I find So's and Piper's research illuminating, but it also raises a number of questions, beginning with their selected control groups. Do they ever ask themselves whether the choice of The New York Times as the critical benchmark might not account for the similarities in books they would encounter? Do they consider and identify other publications whose critical perspective might perhaps not be linked to or influenced by a particular normative ideological and aesthetic consensus about American literature in the ways the Times is? Though they appear to be advancing an argument about distinctions between works produced out of differing educational experiences, they also suggest a qualitative standard--"as a mark of literary excellence"--that might prove less useful than examining a broader array of texts falling into each category.

Beyond diction and syntax, are there other overall prose stylistic similarities among the MFA-trained writers' books vs. the non-MFA-trained writers' books? Vladimir Propp reminded us that there are fixed number of plots, but in terms of stories, are there commonalities among the works within the two groups that distinguish them from the other group in identifiable distinctive ways? What about structure? What about tone, and how might one create a computation tool to measure that, or can it be evaluated only through more conventional reading approaches? In addition, though So and Piper focus on literary fiction, one pressing question I have, based on my experience teaching in MFA programs, is how frequently MFA fiction writers diverge from conventional realism for other genres and modes such as speculative fiction, fantasy, mystery, and so on? What might account for the reasons why and frequency they do so? So and Piper also do not address any impact publishers might have on the books surveyed. To put it in question form, what effects might the publishing industry (agents, editors, publishers, etc.) have on the sorts of books appearing in the market, whether by MFA graduates or not?

One conclusion of So's and Piper's that I do agree with is that the literary landscape as a whole--and here Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault might take ghostly bows--might be shaping works of fiction more so than individual programs or the MFA program experience as a whole. The larger literary ecology and economy set writers'--and readers'--expectations of what's possible, and must be taken into account. I'd also suggest the authors consider specific aspects of MFA program training. Are there more short story collections since the rise of MFA programs, especially because so many students in these programs are writing shorter fiction instead of novels, which are harder to workshop. Do certain literary influence appear more frequently, perhaps based on the writers appearing on MFA fiction workshop syllabi? How frequently do non-US models appear in MFA-shaped vs. non-MFA-shaped novels? And are there any other identifiable formal qualities marking MFA-shaped work vs. non-MFA-shaped texts?

On the whole I take McGurl's, Myers', Bennett's, and Harbach's arguments as convincing, as they are not merely anecdotal to me but I've witnessed them up close, but I do think So and Piper are onto something, particularly in terms of pointing out how at the margins MFA (and now PhD in fiction and creative writing) might mainly be a financial risk rather than an aesthetic and economic aid. I do think, though, that more research of this nature would strengthen their argument. This reads like a one-off, but given how important computational methods are these days, it very well could be part of a larger project. It also makes me wonder, is anyone attempting something along these lines for poetry? MFA poetics vs. non-MFA poetics: I think the differences are probably more evident than with fiction. (But what about MFA vs. PhD poetics...hmm. There's a study to be pursued!)

Another Great Gatsby + Egan's Twitterature Experiment

Some people have too much money handy. What am I talking about? Baz Luhrman's initial trailer for his version of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

Watching this, I have one question, whose answers I already know (A: "Because he can; because the producers imagine dollars flowing in based on the name, stars, style; because Hollywood is intellectually bankrupt and seems to have forgotten that there are countless novels written since The Great Gatsby that might make interesting films; because etc."). Why?



***  

Jennifer Egan, who received the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, has decided to share the beginning of her new novel, Black Box, via Twitter, as a series of Tweets via The New Yorker's feed @NYerFiction. She began doing so on Thursday night, and the first section is up on the magazine's site, as "Black Box." More than anything it reads to me less like Egan's other prose fiction that I've read--and she does write in a variety of voices, as A Visit from the Goon Squad exemplified--than a poetic experiment, the enforced concision of the 140 character pushing her towards a condensation whose result is aphorism, or something akin to it.  Think G. C. Lichtenberg, or E. M. Cioran. Were she wrapping these nuggets in ampler verbiage, I'd even cite the Walter Benjamin of One Way Street.

Take the opening lines:

People rarely look the way you expect them
to, even when you’ve seen pictures.

The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important.

If you’re having trouble perceiving and
projecting, focus on projecting.

Unlike a prior experimenter in this microserialist format, Rick Moody, who in the late fall of 2009 tweeted a 153-tweet story, over 3 days, entitled "Some Contemporary Characters" for Electric Literature, she isn't allowing the sentences to run past the 140-character (Twitter's) limit, which is to say, to enjamb them. Or is the verb for sentences flowing past their technologically-enforced boundary "superlineate"? I asked on Twitter earlier whether "Twitterature" itself was a word (I imagine it is), and whether this text by Egan might not be a noteworthy contribution to it.

Japan has an entire fictional genre born of text messages; others, beyond Moody, like John Wray, have written stories and novels on Twitter; and our most recent inaugural poet, Elizabeth Alexander, like many predecessors, conceived of using the platform as a means for poetry.  Its asseverative quality seems especially apt for that oldest of literary forms. If Egan plans to proceed stylistically like this, I find it hard to believe she'll sustain this beyond a chapter or two. But she's as talented a writer as you'll find out there, so she probably has a larger design up her sleeve. I will certainly read the final version.

Nobel Prize for Lit or American Fictionistas Need Not Apply

Tonight, at the end of my graduate fiction class, as we were circulating next week's stories and concluding a very brief discussion of Gloria Naylor's "Mattie Michael," from The Women of Brewster Place, one of the students mentioned that on Thursday, the Swedish Academy will award the Nobel Prize in Literature. (The prizes in physiology or medicine, i.e., biomedical research, and physics, have been awarded already, the former to someone who unfortunately had passed away between the award decision and the announcement. Tomorrow the chemistry prize winners will be named. On Friday the Peace Prize will be promulgated, and Monday will bring a new economics winner or winners.)  Usually the grad students don't mention the Nobel Prize in Literature until after the fact, but this student and several others were excited about the pending notice, and one mentioned that it was unlikely that an American fiction writer would honored, which reminded me of this Salon article, "Why American Novelists Don't Deserve the Nobel Prize," by Alexander Nazaryan, that Reggie H. forwarded to me yesterday (or was it today? It's all a blur!).

Before I address the article, let me say that I hope a POET or someone who primarily writes poetry wins the prize this year. There are many extraordinary poets living and writing these days, many outstanding ones doing so within the Euro-American orbit, and many outside it. One such worthy, Adunis (Ali Ahmad Said Asbar) (1930-, born in Syria), was supposed to visit the university a few weeks ago but was too ill to join us; in his place came another such worthy, Raúl Zurita (1950-, from Chile), about whom I have posted several times.  Although I have zero influence with the Swedish Academy (although reading their guidelines, I realize that given my academic post, I can write a letter nominating someone, not that anyone affiliated with that institution will read it, but...), I sincerely hope and will send positive vibes that they spread the love around genrewise and honor a poet. Or someone who writes what's now commonly called creative nonfiction but which I guess might also be labeled imaginative, non-journlistic, non-scholarly prose. There are lots of fine examples of that genre too. And there are always the playwrights.

Now, back to Nazaryan's article. He notes that no American since Toni Morrison in 1993 has won the Nobel Prize in literature, and goes on to say American fiction writers don't deserve the honor because, qua former Swedish Academy permanent secretary Horace Engdahl, they/we are "too isolated, too insular," they/we don't look outside the borders of the US, they're/we're narcissistic, etc. Nazaryan slams Harold Pinter for his still valid Nobel Award ceremony speech (I mean, does anyone thinking clearly doubt that the US's invasion of Iraq was anything but illegal and criminal?), but then goes on cite the Ladbrokes tip on winners (Thomas Pynchon is in first place), after which he reduces all of contemporary American fiction writers to a tidy, ugly category, the "Great Male Narcissists," drawn from a David Foster Wallace essay. (Yes, him--what is the force field this writer has over so many literary journalists?) Que up trashing MFA programs. Cite a TS Eliot essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (you know, "dissociation of personality," etc.)  Then Nazaryan makes the outrageous claim that Jhumpa Lahiri is a South Asian female "Great Male Narcissist." (Mr. Nazaryan, please just read "The Third and Final Continent" if you need to be abused of this notion.) Anyone who doesn't fit into this formula is of course ignored. You can read the rest and gag.

Anyways, this got me to thinking: have the recent Nobel Laureates in Literature all the antithesis of "isolated," and "insular"? Do they not write about the "self," "themselves"? Do they write about life outside their native countries or societies? Let's look. The last 10 Nobel Laureates in Literature, going backwards, have been 2010: Mario Vargas Llosa (primarily fiction, Peru); 2009: Herta Müller (fiction, Germany/Romania); 2008: J-M. G. LeClézio (fiction, France); 2007: Doris Lessing (fiction and imaginative prose, UK); 2006: Orhan Pamuk (fiction, Turkey); 2005: Harold Pinter (drama, UK); 2004: Elfriede Jelinek (fiction and drama, Austria); 2003: J. M. Coetzee (fiction, South Africa); 2002: Imre Kértesz (fiction, Hungary); 2001: V. S. Naipaul (fiction and imaginative prose, Trinidad & Tobago/UK).  That is a very male, fiction-weighted, Europe-heavy list, ahem.

Now, I can say authoritatively that every single one of these authors initially wrote first and foremost about life in their native countries.  In the cases of Vargas Llosa, Müller, Pamuk, Jelinek, and Kértesz, they have tended to write about almost nothing else, though Pamuk's and Kértesz's works are historically inflected in very interesting ways, and Vargas Llosa's novels moved from to personal to grander, broader social and political themes, with some of the more recent books set outside Peru, such as The Feast of the Goat, which treats the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo. Jelinek's works are extremely insular (and unreadable). Müller writes about emotional, psychological, social, and political isolation and insularity (quite beautifully). Pinter's works, while ostensibly set in the UK, could take place in many different places, but a central theme for many of them social and psychological isolation, and, especially in the later works, play on and with selfhood and its discontents--but, as I said, are not geographically bounded, for the most part. Lessing's realist works, while geographically situated, turn primarily on themes and tropes more so than place. Coetzee wrote primarily about South Africa (how could he not?), but his later works range widely in many senses; geographically, from Russia (The Master of Petersburg) to a fictional island and the UK (Foe), to the US and Australia (Diary of a Very Bad Year).  His masterpiece Elizabeth Costello is set in a range of places, including Heaven, or something like that realm. Intellectually they range as widely. LeClézio's work, after his first few books, seems set all over the place, but having skimmed a few of his novels, I'm not sure I buy any of them; they strike me as exercises in exoticism. But I haven't finished a single one, so I could be very wrong. Naipaul's writing ranges all over the place, but is essentially ALWAYS about V.S. Naipaul. He has no other subject, which is why after A House for Mr. Biswas and Miguel Street, two jewels, I cannot bear to read his work. I personally have no problem with any of these writers' approaches; what matters is the work they produce. Insular or outward-looking, isolated in its focus or catholic, if it's great work, it's great work.

All of which is to say that the criticisms of American fiction writers are not exactly fair if you look 1) at broader spectrum of who is writing and publishing fiction in the US today and what those works address and 2) at who has received the Nobel Prize, at least in the last 10 years, though one could go further back, and whether those works defy the critiques above. I get what Nazaryan and others like Engdahl are saying, but I just think they've settled on a hobbyhorse that doesn't really capture how rich American fiction writing truly is, especially if you go beyond the biggest (mostly male) names Nazaryan cites. And as the above international list suggests, these writers all started by writing about the societies they've spent most of their time in. Some of them, in fact, effectively have written the same novel, about that same place, over and over. I don't have any problem with anyone doing that, so long as the variations are compelling. That's all that matters. But back to fiction. The Swedish Academy missed Robert Bolaño, who did range across countries and ideas, and there are other fictionists like Wilson Harris, Maryse Condé, Nuruddin Farah, A. B. Yehoshua, Shariar Mandanipour, Margaret Atwood, Javier Marías, Dubrakva Ugresic, Haruki Murakami, etc. very deserving of the prize. As for Thursday...who do you think will be honored?

End of the Year Congrats + Philip Roth Controversy + What My Students Read

I'm hurtling towards the end of the quarter, thus the absence of posts, but I will try to post more soon.  On Monday, two of my undergraduate mentees participated in the university's Undergraduate Research Symposium and acquitted themselves very well, one presenting a poster presentation on his process of appropriating, translating and adapting an alternative rock band's song lyrics into a short story, while the other one both read his own honors-worthy fiction and acted in a short Beckettian play by a fellow student. Today the departmental held its annual prizes ceremony, and a number of the students I have taught received prizes, including my honors creative writing advisee, who received the department's and creative writing's top prize for his fiction thesis. Congratulations to him and all the students on their excellent work!

***

While filing away materials for the approaching summer transition, I came across two note cards, one inexplicably torn to smithereens yet saved, in its shredded state, from different fiction classes over the last few years. As I do whenever I teach a writing workshop each I'd written down the authors that students stated they had read most recently (before the class) and enjoyed the most, and the ones they'd recently read enjoyed the least. When we discuss these choices, the students often speak passionately about both, though their distaste for their least favorite writers and texts often exceeds their enthusiasm for their favorites.

Rereading these tallies made me recall the recent reaction by the 2011 Man Booker International Prize judge Carmen Callil, an author herself and publisher of Virago Books, to the Man Booker committee's decision to award the £60,000 ($98,765) prize to American fiction writer Philip Roth. Callil, who in passionate dissent withdrew from the panel, initially and quite harshly stated her thoughts about Roth being this year's laureate, saying that

"I don't rate him as a writer at all. I made it clear that I wouldn't have put him on the longlist, so I was amazed when he stayed there. He was the only one I didn't admire – all the others were fine....Roth goes to the core of their [Cartwright and Gekoski's] beings. But he certainly doesn't go to the core of mine ... Emperor's clothes: in 20 years' time will anyone read him?"

I think the answer to that is yes, without question. As to the others that she did admire, the shortlist for the biennial award included other English-language writers such as Philip Pullman, Anne Tyler and Marilynne Robinson, and non-Anglophone writers like "Chinese authors Wang Anyi and Su Tong, the Spanish Juan Goytisolo, Italian Dacia Maraini and Lebanese Amin Maalouf," all of whom Callil thought a better choice than to honor than "yet another North American writer," as the previous winner, in 2009, was Alice Munro. Albanian writer Ismail Kadaré received the 2005 prize, followed by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe in 2007.

Callil elaborated on her position in a May 21, 2011 Guardian essay. She stated

The Man Booker International prize allows for a separate prize for translation. If applicable, the winner can choose a translator of his or her work into English to receive a prize of £15,000. Of the four awards given thus far, only one has been given to an author not writing in English, the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadaré. And now, with the choice of Roth, this money continues unused. I hope the sum is accumulating.

About Roth she continued:

There are great moments in Roth's work. He is clever, harsh, comic, but his reach is narrow. Not in the Austen, Bellow or Updike sense, because they use a narrow canvas to convey the widest concepts and ideas. Roth digs brilliantly into himself, but little else is there. His self-involvement and self-regard restrict him as a novelist. And so he uses a big canvas to do small things, and yet his small things take up oceanic room. The more I read, the more tedious I found his work, the more I heard the swish of emperor's clothes.

I think she's using a mill when gentler critique would suffice, though I do agree that one can gather the subject of nearly all Roth's novels from just one.  Roth is not alone in doing this, but it is the case that again and again he covers the same ground, with considerable skill and stylistic panache.  He has, however,  even critiqued his own self-obssessiveness, in and through the Zuckerman novels. He has also ranged a bit more widely than Callil suggests, having addressed history more than once, and it's fair to say that while he is not a philosophical novelist, he has posited a personal philosophy of the world, and made clear his ideological compass. Roth is an ideological liberal.  One area where Roth is perhaps less inventive is in the form of the novel itself, though he has played skillfully with novelistic genres.  To offer a comparison, contemporary peer writers like Milan Kundera, J. M. Coetzee, or Roberto Bolaño have essentially written the same novel multiple times, yet in the case of these three, there is tremendous formal variation and daring, something that one cannot say of a great deal of Roth's work. Another way of stating it is that he puts the arts of fiction and storytelling themselves, in play, in the ways that some of the other authors in the shortlist have.  This is not to say that Roth shows no formal or generic variety; books like Operation Shylock (my favorite Roth novel) and The Plot Against America (which I have not yet read) attest to this.

As soon as I read the shortlist, the author on it I thought most deserving was Juan Goytisolo, one of the greatest living writers in the Spanish language and the author, in 1970, of a landmark book in Hispanophone, European and contemporary literature, La reivindicación del conde don Julián, known in English as Count Julian. It is the second in a trilogy of novels, under the rubric of the Álvaro Mendiola trilogy, and comprises an unrelenting attack on Spain, Spanish history and culture, its hypocrisies and traducements, its blindness at the heart of its self-regard. The speaker, ostensibly viewing the southern coast through blinds (if I recall correctly) from northern Africa, unleashes his mesmeric torrent, and sustains it for 200 or so pages. When I read it, having been astonished by its 1966 predecessor Señas de Identidad (Marks of Identity), I did not know even how to process it; how, I wondered, could someone have written the previous remarkable book and then ramped things up by several orders to write this one?

Goytisolo's oeuvre continues, and he is now in his late career, having published a number of books of poetry, essays, autobiographies, and so forth, but a few years back, in 1997, he astonished me again with a strange little novel that goes to the very heart of storytelling. I have not found a class in which to teach it, but one of these days I will. It is called La semanas del jardín (The Garden of Secrets), and, on the English-language cover of the book, Goytisolo's name is nowhere to be found. For the book takes as its central principle the very question of authorship, of orature and literature, and explores this in an inventive and refreshing fashion. I have thought for some time that Goytisolo would win the Nobel Prize, but instead it has gone to authors who I would not put in his rank: J. M. G. LeClézio, Elfriede Jelinek (I still cannot figure out this one), Herta Müller, and the most recent laureate, admitted a superb storyteller but problematic on many levels, Mario Vargas Llosa.

One of the other judges, Rick Gekoski, has now made it clear in his own Guardian essay of May 25, 2011, that because he cannot read in other languages and thus ascertain the quality of the prose in the original, all of which he conveys through a rather garbled discussion of the difficulties of translation, the authors in translation had no chance. As someone who translates from several different languages I take aspects of his commentary to heart, in that translation is always a fraught process resulting in a new work rather than a direct approximation of the original. On the other hand, he essentially ruled out all the non-English texts from the beginning. This was neither ethical nor fair, especially for someone charged with awarding an "international" book prize, especially one so lucrative. I should add that while Spanish for someone who does not speak or read the language is hardly easy, it is also not impossible, with a dictionary at one's fingertips, to at least attempt to gauge a few passages of the prose to see what the author is up to. Doing so might have given him a sense of the genius of Goytisolo's work, at least the very best of that work, in comparison with Roth's.

And so, Roth is the winner. His name, however, rarely if ever turns up on my students lists, affirmatively or negatively. When I have mentioned his work, they will nod with recognition at the name, but when I query, only a few of the undergrads appear to have read his work, and are not partisans either way, and perhaps half the graduates have, and may like one of his books over another, but rarely does he emerge as a top choice. I have not yet ever had a student cite Goytisolo's work either way; I have never had a student, at least in a creative writing class, who has mentioned reading Goytisolo, and on those rare occasions when I have mentioned him, no one has ever heard of him. Among the other shortlisted writers, students have mentioned several of the Anglophone ones (James Kelman, Philip Pullman, Marilynne Robinson, and Annie Tyler) but never John LeCarré, David Malouf or Rohinton Mistry, and not a single student has ever mentioned Wang Anyi, Amin Maalouf, Dacia Mariani (whom I admit I'd never heard of), or Su Tong (whom I also was unfamiliar with).

That brings me back to those notecards I found. Who are my students reading (outside my classes) and enjoying and not enjoying? Here you go, straight from their mouths to my notecards:

Class #1: Authors the students had most recently read and enjoyed:
George W. Bush (!-this student was not able to register for the class, though)
Paulo Coelho
David Eggers
Jonathan Safran Foer (2x)
E. M. Forster
Jay-Z
Barbara Kingsolver
Jon Krakauer
Nicole Krauss
Toni Morrison
Orhan Pamuk
Marilynne Robinson
David Sedaris
Robert Louis Stevenson
Kurt Vonnegut
David Foster Wallace
+The Bible

Least Favorite Author Recently Read
Emily Brontë
Dan Brown (2x)
William S. Burroughs
James Conroy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Ernest Hemingway
Zora Neale Hurston
Gary Kowalski (- I had never heard of this author before)
Erik Larson
Herman Melville
Lorrie Moore
Salman Rushdie
J. D. Salinger
Robert Louis Stevenson
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Mark Twain

Class #2: Most Favorite Recent:
Dan Brown
Roald Dahl
Jonathan Safran Foer (2x)
Nicole Krauss
Gabriel García Márquez
David Mitchell
Toni Morrison (2x)
George Orwell
David Foster Wallace

Least Favorite Recent:
Emily Brontë (2x)
Joseph Conrad
Charles Dickens
Thomas Hardy
Nathaniel Hawthorne
James Joyce
Madeleine L'Engle
William Shakespeare
George Bernard Shaw
H. G. Welles

About these lists I'll say only a few things. Roth appears on none of them, but then neither do other authors that many literary scholars and journalists frequently cite as enduringly popular, like Jane Austen and Franz Kafka. Non-Anglophone authors are rare. Pre-contemporary authors are more common on the disfavored than favored list, and I strongly suspect the students read them in English and American literature classes rather than of their own volition. (I try to make a case for all of these canonical writers and their works.) Though my classes usually consist of more women than men, more male authors' names appear on both lists. The students, male and female, tend uniformly to love Jonathan Safran Foer, an author whose fiction I do not like, and abhor Dan Brown, an author whose fiction I do not like. From both lists in my fiction workshops, in which we primarily read short stories, I only regularly assign Hemingway and Joyce, but in literature classes I have taught these two authors as well as Hurston, Morrison, Orwell, Robinson, Shakespeare, and Wallace. Finally, as much as my experience teaching literature classes has demonstrated to me that students (except poets) tend to like reading poetry in literature classes far less than fiction, creative nonfiction or plays, no poets (save Shakespeare) appear on the dislike lists, but several playwrights sit amidst the fiction and nonfiction writers. Poets, for once you are spared--or, I hate to say it, not being read as much--so I do what I can!