For some of us, though, there is the attraction, in a rhetorically stunted time, of a celebration–any celebration–of literature that makes news not out of authorial behavior but of endeavor. For, whatever biases may surely be at work in the sanctum sanctorum of the Swedish see, some sort of serious conversation is taking place there about who will be cast in the fleeting but meaningful role as Writer of the Moment.
Who should win? I don’t care. If pressed, my preference would be that it go to no one I’ve ever heard of and whose work, upon my reading it, engages, moves, teaches, surprises. Short of this, from my chauvinistic point of view, there could be no better time for an American to win–the sort of American writer, for example, whose writing betrays a humility about our national soul that all this season’s Gosh Darn Greatest Country Ever!!!!!!™ rhetoric does not.