Cultural commentators searching online bookstores yesterday for English-language translations of books by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, literature's latest Nobel laureate, were surprised to find that the most heavily flagged item offered was a DVD of Young Einstein.
The tantalising possibility that a 68-year-old French writer praised in the official citation for "new departures, poetic adventures" might, during populist interludes, have worked on Peewee Wilson movies was soon removed. Computers had been confused by an actress called Odile Le Clezio and the fact that her novelistic namesake's impact on UK publishing seems to have peaked with a couple of long-deleted Hamish Hamilton hardbacks from the 1960s.
Inevitably, the choice of this Google-thin writer after three years of laureates who had a strong presence in English literature and cultural life - Doris Lessing, Orhan Pamuk and Harold Pinter - will revive accusations of obscurantism and pretension. And such reflexes in the Anglophone book world will be increased this year by the suspicion that the prize committee is deliberately resisting the claim of American literature, generally accepted by critics on both sides of the Atlantic as the current prose superpower. Just as Barrack Obama would be guaranteed the presidency if the decision rested with the electorates of Europe, so any Nobel literature poll taken here would have given the cheque to Philip Roth at least a decade ago and probably John Updike as well. Fuelling our incredulity, one of the usually secretive judges unwisely sounded off in an interview last week that American writing is too parochial and inward-looking.
Certainly, it seems an eccentric reading of contemporary literature that only Saul Bellow and Toni Morrison from the American canon have been honoured in the past 32 years, and that all have been overlooked since 1993. And it's impossible to deny that the decisions often have political undertones.
While the poems of Seamus Heaney and the plays of Harold Pinter are unarguably deserving of preferment, the former's Irish passport and the latter's anti-American writings usefully insulated them from the strength of anti-US feeling in European cultural circles. Le Clezio, being French, is similarly protected. Conversely, Updike's defences of the Vietnam war and Roth's refusal to politicise his novels may have harmed their chances.
But the fact that Le Clezio and Elfriede Jelinek of Austria have the prize is not entirely down to geopolitical score-settling. The key lines in yesterday's citation were that reference to "departures" and "adventures" in the French writer's work. Winners have, especially in recent years, been those who represent some kind of formal innovation: either of subject-matter - Morrison's rendition of African-American history; or structure - the mixing of the naturalistic with the abstract in Pinter's fractured dialogue or Lessing's games with memoir and science-fiction. All, at some level, are experimental writer - as, from what an English reader can discern, is Le Clezio.
In contrast, the greatest contemporary Americans operate, though at remarkable levels of poeticism and psychology, in traditional forms. By the definitions of the Nobel committee, which likes its novels to be really novel, the prize that Roth or Updike might win has already been claimed, in 1976, by Saul Bellow.
With the possible exception of Mailer, who pioneeringly blurred the lines between fiction and journalism, recent American giants - including Arthur Miller and Edward Albee - have tended to bring an innovative style to familiar structures of fiction and drama. The Nobel judges are certainly not indifferent to flags but what really gets them going is formats. No matter how remarkable the flavour of the tea, they like a new design of pot.
Mark Lawson