American values
But it is no longer time to laugh about it when each camp, sure of its common sense, refuses to confront other points of view. Before his election, Trump went to war against “the radical left” who use “public education to present perverse sexual, racial and political material to our youth.” It is now in America that public authorities will judge whether a book offends an “American value”. They may soon have to obey the injunctions of their government. Under Biden, seventeen Republican states have attempted to circumvent the 1st Amendment which guarantees freedom of expression. So far, they have only obtained partial victories in court. But after January 20, we can fear the establishment of federal censorship and therefore the designation, to use sinister historical terms, of a “national literature” in opposition to a “degenerate art”.
L’obsession Trump
Sam Shepard is a myth. In The Making of Heroes, he played the pilot who broke the sound barrier, but he lived as a cowboy far from Hollywood, for a long time with Jessica Lange, to raise his stallions. Novelist, screenwriter of the Paris-Texas Palme d'Or, laden with prizes for his theater, he died seven months after the first inauguration of Donald Trump. Charcot's illness forced him to dictate The Spy in Me to Patti Smith, lover and then friend of fifty years. On the last page of the latter book, he remembers a conversation with his sons. What were they talking about? “From Trump, from the country in complete impasse […]the habit.” This shows that Trumpism was an obsession for Sheppard, and undoubtedly for the vast majority of authors we read on this side of the Atlantic. We ignore the others, just as we do not see these ultra-conservative or proselytizing Christian films that millions of Americans applaud by calling them “family friendly”.
Voices from the deep country
On the other side, few people. Brett Easton Ellis was certainly angry against the “wokist” censors in his essay White, but he wrote American Psycho, the most atrociously bloody work against stock market capitalism, and from Less Than Zero to Shards, the Decline of the Empire WASP. Perhaps James Ellroy who revolutionized the thriller with The Black Dahlia. During the promotion of Enchanteurs here, he refused to talk about a presidential election that was very close at the time. A rabid reactionary, he did not want to justify himself in the face of political but also literary history. The American noir novel was in fact born as a denunciation. The pioneers Hammett, Chandler, McCoy depicted corruption, inequalities, injustice. Sixty years later, Don Winslow achieved global success with books documenting the truths of the war on drugs (Cartel). Today, he is stopping his work as a novelist to take action against Trump and his lies.
Others take over, moving away from the metropolises to talk about a “deep country” that we ignore. Among these revelations, David Joy tells of a rural America losing its bearings, anxious to maintain its last privilege: the supremacy of the white race (This link between us, The two faces of the world). Joy writes about Appalachia, the home of the vociferous Vice President JD Vance. It’s also a place that sums up the last decade.
When only anger remains
Twelve years after their first trip, Jean-Luc Bertini and Alexandre Thiltges returned to the USA for America – Writers in Majesty (see box). The two French people noted the disappointment of non-white communities after an Obama presidency which changed nothing and the rage of impoverished whites who understood that their children will not have a better life. Particularly shocked by the poverty of the “devastated towns of Appalachia”, they wonder how their inhabitants could “feel represented by a New York billionaire […] who felt nothing but deep contempt for their misery”. The late Russell Banks (Beautiful Tomorrows) had his answer: anger. A feeling that leads to irrational decisions, “like voting for the person opposite to your interests”.
Antidotes to Goncourt
Anger is the title of a noir novel by the remarkable SA Cosby who writes about his African-American community in the South. Enough to make his characters people who are always under threat, whether they are a sheriff or a black ex-con associated with a White Trash to avenge their homosexual sons. The path of the thriller is also taken by the prodigy Colson Whitehead (Harlem Shuffle) for a trilogy which will show how a community withdrawn into itself, sometimes condemned to criminality, began to claim its place and its rights. But Whitehead became famous above all by winning two Pulitzer Prizes in quick succession. In an interview, he explains that the first duty of a US writer is to entertain. American literature does indeed tell stories and they are based on the observation of society.
This broadens readers' horizons, literally and figuratively, and explains its appeal to a French-speaking public surrounded by navel-gazing novels. The list of recent Pulitzers shows much more commitment than the Goncourts to which they are compared: Beloved, anti-racist firebrand by Nobel winner Toni Morrison or He Who Watches by Louise Erdrich, its Native American counterpart, the explicit Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides , The World Tree by Richard Powers on the fight for nature, Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, two books on slavery and its consequences or, in 2023, this talking tie between They Call Me Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver which evokes the opioid crisis and Trust by Hernan Diaz on the triumphs of finance.
An America drunk on its superlatives
Like John Steinbeck recounting the Great Depression in 1939 in The Grapes of Wrath, these writers in search of the “great American novel”, the one that would stir up people, their time and their land, pay more attention to lives than to ideas. They talk about wide open spaces and big cities, but above all, they talk about anger, hidden or shared. Almost by definition, their great American novels are lucidly anti-American books. It might do some good for an America that is drunk on superlatives, but they are unlikely to touch the heart of the country.
Follow the guides
To better understand the writers cited and many others, we will trust Bruno Corty from Le Figaro littéraire, who is passionate enough, as required by the Lovers' Dictionary, to only take his crates of US books with him when moving. Among the entries completing our article, “FBI” tells us that Edgar Hoover, to differentiate “good American novelist and good American”, had the great Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck and Dos Passos spied on and sometimes persecuted. Without forgetting his article on a “new journalism” revealing the other side of the American dream, by David Grann (The American note on the murders of Osage Indians) or Ted Conover (in immersion among Mexican migrants or those left behind). Colorado account in Where the Land Is Worthless).
Published in 2016 after five years of traveling across America, the first volume was titled Writers on the Loose and placed under the patronage of Jim Harrison. A few years later, the American landscape has changed and it is more a question of commitment with the very involved Russell Banks (who died in 2023) as godfather. Jean-Luc Bertini (the photographer) and Alexandre Thiltges (the academic) took up the formula of in-depth interviews augmented by magnificent photos of 32 authors and their environments. This time they explore a distraught Deep South (Lauren Groff, Ron Rash, Tom Cooper) and an East Coast disconnected from this reality (in particular Jay McInerney, much less Siri Hustvedt or Joyce Carol Oates).
