American Literature - Words Without Borders - NYTimes.com

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By LIESL SCHILLINGER

It’s been a capricious month 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 Müller for works most people haven’t read. Then last Wednesday came the announcement of this year’s finalists for our own National Book Awards. Three of the five candidates in the fiction category were not born in this country; 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 that followed, it seems natural to ask: was Mr. Engdahl wrong?

To refine the question: how can our 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. 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 National Book 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 (with detours to Paris, and, tangentially, the United States), evokes Guy de Maupassant or, a more recent author, the Indian-American Manil Suri, who wrote “The Death of Vishnu.” Who, reading Maupassant, thinks, “Oh, there’s a Frenchman for you?” Who, reading “The Death of Vishnu,” thinks: “I can’t relate. I’ve never slept on a Bombay stairwell?” One of Mr. Mueenuddin’s characters, a wealthy Pakistani, tells her husband, who fantasizes that if he had been born in America, he wouldn’t be “weighed down by history,” that he’s wrong. “Just because an American runs away, to Kansas or Wyoming, doesn’t mean that he succeeds in escaping whatever it is he left behind,” she says. “Like all of us, he carries it with him.” 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 I-94.

These writers, in expressing their associations and wide-ranging stomping grounds, show readers “what the world is.” By the same token, this year’s native nominees make their purely American experience sharable. The rookie, Bonnie Jo Campbell, grew up in rural Michigan. She writes about her home state in an arrestingly insightful debut story collection called “American Salvage.” The veteran author Jayne Anne Phillips was born in West Virginia and now lives in New Jersey. She sets her fourth novel, “Lark and Termite,” in the 1950s, resting her sensitive, knowing gaze on two children in West Virginia and a father lost to the Korean War.

And yet ... not all fiction rises to this level; not all American fiction, and not all foreign fictions. A year has given the sting of Horace Engdahl’s slap in the face time to cool. It’s true that the work of some writers does not thrive when it’s plucked from its surrounding soil. Any open-minded critic who regularly receives offerings of 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. Many French readers have a passion for short, self-serious, faux-philosophical novels that stupefy American sensibilities. Many German and Northern European contemporary novels zestfully catalogue bleak, pessimistic realities that strike an American audience as profoundly depressing. Middle Eastern fiction at the current moment lacks a Jane Austen who could win over an American female readership. By the same token, why should anyone be surprised if the Middle East couldn’t care less about the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and its divine secrets; or if the Germans don’t share our obsession with the Vietnam War (just as we tire of their revisitations of World War II); or if the French don’t care for the meditative descriptions in the tomes of American short stories that emerge from M.F.A. programs from Iowa to the Atlantic Ocean. 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 Nov. 18, only one of the five authors that the National Book Awards selected will get the laurels. Will it be the Dubliner turned New Yorker? The Ugandan-British Yank? The Pakistani-American? The Michigander? The West Virginian? Whoever it is, he or she will be a writer who expands the versatile adjective “American,” enriching the world’s understanding of itself.

Liesl Schillinger is a literary critic and translator.