TW3: How to tally the literary scoreboard
Staff , Times Herald-Record
It's October, and time to predict the big winner in the great American pastime, by which I mean guessing who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/sites/recordonline/images/favicon.png
Times Herald-Record
It's October, and time to predict the big winner in the great American pastime, by which I mean guessing who will win the Nobel Prize for Literature this year.

One day, real, real soon, me and a bunch of my literature-loving pals will gather 'round the giant plasmaroid TV we all chipped in to buy just for the big announcement. We'll gobble Cheez Doodles and swill lots of absinthe on that happy day. The Prize Committee, hewing to its long-standing policy of never scheduling an official time or place for the announcement, makes this special occasion even more special for me and my compadres.

We're on tenterhooks. Or tenterjhookks, as they say on the committee. But we wouldn't have it any other way.

Maybe you've seen us hanging around your town or village. We're the guys (sorry, this really is "a guy thing"), we're the guys with the turned-around ball caps and baggy jeans and five-day beards who you see crammed in the corner of your local diner, arguing bitterly (the more bitterly the better) among ourselves about the last hundred or so Nobel winners and why they do or don't deserve to be remembered by anyone but us, since we're the only ones who do.

We're the guys who while away whole afternoons and probably spend no more than $3 on coffee explaining to each other why, for example, Orhan Pamuk (2006) is better able to capture the melancholic soul of his native city than, say, Elfriede Jelinek (2004) can conduct the musical flow of voices and countervoices that give rise to her linguistic zeal in revealing the absurdity of society's subjugating power.

You can see, no doubt, the attraction of what we do. I can sense your envious feelings from here.

You've probably overheard us at one time or another. Things can get pretty fiesty, pretty loud, when you're defending and explaining and relishing the accomplishments of such immortals as Frans Eemil Sillanpaa ('39) or Odysseus Elytis ('79) (aka Odysseus Alepoudhelis) or the great Salvatore Quasimodo ('59).

Mostly, though, we wonder why really cool guys like Elmore Leonard or John D. MacDonald never even get nominated for The Prize.

I know, I know. Any writer whose most important rule is "If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it," will be an underdog when the Prize Committee convenes. But isn't that exactly what Ernest Miller Hemingway ('54) did so well, not to mention Grazia Deledda ('26) and, even more memorably, Karl Adolph Gjellerup ('17), the immortal "Bard of Knut Rasmussen Land"?

Also, Leonard likes to leave out the parts that readers like to skip, which is precisely what Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlof ('08) was famous for.

As for the great John D. MacDonald, the man who gave the world the philosophical beach bum/knight errant Travis McGee, I know why he'll never get a nod or a nom. Here's his philosophy in a nutshell, from page 83 of "A Tan and Sandy Place":

"Up with life. Stamp out all small and large indignities. Leave everyone alone to make it without pressure. Down with hurting. Lower the standard of living. Do without plastics. Smash the servo-mechanisms. Stop grabbing. Sniff the breeze and hug the kids. Love all love. Hate all hate."

Nobel Prize Committees don't favor nutshells. Who's going to give a Nobel Prize to someone who can so succinctly say what so many other, haughtier, sillier and profoundly profound writers have been trying to say for thousands and thousands of pages and hundred of years, without ever getting much closer to the nub of things than MacDonald did?

That, as you'll hear us proclaim from the back of the diner, is a no-brainer.

Jeremiah Horrigan, who usually gets stuck with the coffee tab at these gatherings, can be reached at jhorrigan@th-record.com.