More Thinking on William Saroyan 7-12-2021

 As I typed up my notes on William Saroyan, I thought of Junot Diaz (his novels The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and This is How You Lose Her are in my past now and my notes in your future). Diaz struck me as an immigrant's writer with one foot in the US of A and the other in the Dominican Republic.  This division creates a dramatic tension as he exposes his Dominicans to American life and culture. Saroyan revels in his Armenian roots and in being an American. Neither Saroyan nor Diaz could be confused with Booth Tarkington. 

I'm also thinking Amy Tan does the same thing in The Joy Luck Club (another novel read in prison and whose notes are not here with me), albeit in a quieter vein.

Come to think of it Jack Kerouac is also an immigrant's child. Although nothing in On the Road refers to Canada.

I may call down a barrage on myself by including Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer into this discussion. I think that novel's greatness is great enough to bear it (and I will have words about it later.).  Yet the writer is an immigrant with the same ties between America and his homeland.

 I know many other immigrant writers exist - plenty whose names I do not know - but let me clear I do not mean just those writers living in America born in another country. Saul Bellow was born in Canada but like Kerouac I do not know of him writing about the tension of being an immigrant. Zadie Smith lives in New York but I know of nothing she has written as an immigrant.

Do these immigrant writers write as exuberantly about America as Saroyan and Diaz? An exuberance lacking in the Make America Great Again crowd.

And since I have and will make much about being from the Midwest, from a place that is in some ways detached from America and in others all too American, these immigrant writers give me inspiration. They provoke me about how I think about my America.

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