Earth to Stockholm ...(Harold Pinter, Nobel Literary Prize)

Quoth Harold Pinter: "I have no idea why they gave me the award." The award, of course, was the Nobel Prize for ... well, supposedly for literature. In the case of Harold Pinter, however, literature had nothing do with the prize. How could it? By our reckoning, Pinter has done nothing notable in that direction since The Caretaker 0959). Even at his early best (The Birthday Party, say, or The Dumb Waiter, both 1957), Pinter's was always a small and highly derivative literary gift--more of a handout, really. Indeed, we would suggest that his talent was not so much literary as histrionic, one of literature's degeneracies. What Pinter dispensed was a certain tone--an atmospherics of menace, borrowed largely from Samuel Beckett. It's chief effect, when you first encountered it, was to make semi-articulate dissatisfaction seem like existential profundity.

Alas, it wasn't long before the illusion of profundity evaporated, leaving only semi-articulate dissatisfaction. Hence Mark Steyn's unsurpassable definition of the "Pinteresque": "a pause followed by a non-sequitur." Another name for "Pinteresque" is "theater of the absurd." It tells us a lot that the phrase was--is it still?--taken as a compliment, an expression of praise, as if the absurd were something to be proud of. Pinter injected a certain senility into language and counted on a credulous public to mistake catalepsy for depth. It paid off. It paid off so well that Pinter's admirers often sound a lot like the master. Witness the Swedish academy's citation, which told us that the seventy-five-year-old playwright "uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression's closed rooms." Would anyone care to parse that paean to opacity? We'd suggest starting with the word "prattle."

"I have no idea why they gave me the award." We can help, Harold! Remember your speech before the House of Commons in October 2002? That was the one in which you suggested that Tony Blair was a "deluded idiot" and that "Mr. Bush and his gang ... are determined, quite simply, to control the world and the world's resources. And they don't give a damn how many people they murder on the way."

Or consider your remarks on being granted an honorary degree at Turin University later that year. The terrorist attack on New York in September 2001, you said, was "predictable and inevitable. It was an act of retaliation ...