Keep the Man Booker Prize British

I am nothing if not patriotic. Like most Americans, I am convinced that mine is the freest, most beautiful country on earth. But I cannot pretend to be happy that two of us have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

When it was announced earlier this year that novels written by Americans — in fact, all novels written in English and published in Britain — would now be eligible for the award, I dismissed the news as a harmless gimmick. Now I am not so sure. Behind the fair-play, hands-across-the-border niceness of the committee’s gesture, I sense something else: masochism. The best evidence of this is a piece that ran last week in — where else? — the Guardian in which a panel named 15 American novels that ought to have won the Booker in their respective years of publication. Here we are only a few weeks into the plus-Americans Booker season, with the announcement of the winner nearly a month away, and already more than a dozen of Britain’s literary bigwigs are prepared to cede the award’s entire history to foreigners, as if Her Majesty’s subjects have only ever been up to facing the transatlantic competition on off-years.