The Land of the Not-So-Well Written

"I'm constantly surprised when I open novels by living American writers," Richard Pevear says via telephone from his home in Paris. "They're all written in very simple, first-person, declarative style. To my ear, they have no style at all. They just put down their words on paper."

Before all of you aspiring writers take too much offence at this statment, note who Richard Pevear is. With his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, he has produced the most definative, literary, and well written translations of the great Russian novels in English. For what it is worth I think he is right. Sure this American style was new in 1919 with In Our Time, & Big Two Hearted River could be one of the best American short stories, arguably better than Hills Like white Elephants. But come on boys! Its 2005! We are further from Hemingway, in time, than he was from Irving, we are further in time from Salinger than Salinger was from Adams, and Further from cummings than cummings was from Bryant. Yet they still haunt us in every thing we, as a people, write. This is not good. German literature did not exist before Werther because the Luther Bible was omni influential, Soviet literature was likwise non-existant because they all had to be like Gorky and write about "real" life. Well where to go? It is easy to complain about Vidal, DeLillo, and Dan Brown, but actualy doing something about? That takes a Goethe or a Pushkin. Where is America's national poet?