American Writers

I will sing the praise of American writers. There are none on Earth like them. Americans have mastered the novel, the short story and, in short, narrative fiction. When it comes to just plain story telling, they have no equal.

English writers tell stories but, always, with the exception of the Scot, RL Stevenson, there stories are so concerned with manners and social class that the story is stulliflied. Even the great Dickens was so wrapped up in social criticism that his stories were often soap opera-ish, simple frameworks in which he made his critiques of British society. French authors are just way too cerebral and their stories suffer. Spain had one great novelist, Cervantes. In fact, he pretty much invented the novel and was brilliant but, since then,  naught. The Germans are like their French cousins, too full of angst and intellectual theory. The Russians are just too long winded and the Latin American writers are lost in a world of magical realism. The problem with that is if you can just make up anything to advance the tale, it  is simply left limp and foolish. The Japanese writers are even weirder and less comprehensible.

Americans know how to tell a tale, to spin a yarn. Twain had a lot to say in Huckleberry Finn bit never let that stand in the way of telling his wild. raucus story of a boy's adventure. Melville certainly had a lot on his mind and made extensive use of symbollism bur, when push comes to shove, Moby Dick is simply a whopper of a tale, a sea story unmatched. Hemmingway's novella, The Old Man and the Sea is a simple fish story yet, in its simplicity, it is a story of incredible bravery.

And on the list could go. Crane, Cooper, Irving, Hawthorne, the incomparable Poe and his descendent Lovecraft, King, Bradbury, Dick, Kesey, Mailer, Vonnegut, Clavell, Mitchener, Rawlings. On and on I could go, but you get my point. The most important part of a story is the story. Style, symbolism, all the rest mean nothing if the story is not compelling. If you place a lump of coal in a beutifully decorated box, it is still a lump of coal. Likewise, if you place a great pastrami sandwich in a series of steel boxes, each sealed with a combination lock that you have to figure out the combination of, then it is quite unlikely that you will pursue it. It is just too easy to go find a  deli and buy a pastrami sandwich you can just take out of the paper and enjoy.

There is one exception that I must note, a non-American who wrote perhaps the best novel I have ever read. In my next blog I will nominate him for status as an honorary American.