Un-Nobeled

The winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature will not be announced until Thursday, though the judges have a small field of worthy contenders to evaluate, and it really shouldn’t take that long. Bellow is dead and besides he had already won it, as did V.S. Naipaul. That leaves only two deserving candidates – both alive, both un-Nobeled: Geoffrey Hill and Philip Roth. In a world more just than ours, both would have copped it a long time ago and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

The Nobel, at least in literature, is a reliable gauge of high-minded mediocrity. Who didn’t get it but could have? Tolstoy, Henry James, Chekhov, Joyce, Proust, Kafka, Wallace Stevens, Nabokov and Borges, for starters. And who, instead, did get it? Tagore, Romain Rolland, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, Mikhail Sholokov, Toni Morrison, Dario Fo, Elfriede Jelinek – a shameful list, and that’s the condensed version.

To be fair, the Swedish Academy has occasionally blundered into sanity and responsibility. Yeats got it. So did Eliot, Beckett, Montale, Singer and Milosz, but the list of recipients is disproportionately awful. We don’t, after all, have forever: Roth is 73; Hill, 74. Both have undergone explosions of unrivalled creativity and self-renewal in their 60s and 70s. Here is what I wrote about Roth last May when I reviewed Everyman for the Houston Chronicle:

“In a late eruption of creativity recalling the last decade and a half of Henry James' career, Roth has accomplished what novelists one-third his age can only dream about and envy. Starting with Operation Shylock in 1993, Roth has published eight novels of unrivaled plenitude, emotional and social insight, and brilliance. From the death-haunted sex comedy of Sabbath's Theater (his greatest book) to The Plot Against America, a loving family chronicle disguised as alternative history, Roth has almost single-handedly revived our great expectations for fiction.”

Roth and Hill share a stringent vision of the world and a seeming ease at marshalling the English language, though one is a Jewish-American atheist and the other an embattled English Christian. In a short essay published four years ago in the Guardian, Hill wrote what might also stand for Roth if we change “poem” to “novel”: “An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.”

He continued: “It is to be hoped - I mean, I hope - that the poetry I have been writing since 1992 squares up to, takes the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud. I don't, even so, write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy.”

The same goes for Roth, though he would disagree, naturally.