America “Too Ignorant” for Great Literature

While scanning the headlines in Google this morning I came across this from the Tages-Anzeiger in Zurich: "Sind Amerikaner zu dumm für grosse Literatur?"  The piece was based on a comment by Horace Engdahl of the Nobel Prize committee in Stockholm:

Speaking generally about American literature, however, he said U.S.
writers are "too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,"
dragging down the quality of their work.

"The U.S. is too
isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really
participate in the big dialogue of literature," Engdahl said. "That
ignorance is restraining."

I cannot really judge if this is the case.  I read mostly German literature, and when I do read fiction in English it tends to be UK or Irish writers.  Are there any contemporary American novelists of the caliber of Ian McEwen? Are there any who write as beautifully as Sebastian Barry?  If there are, how would we know? Americans stopped reading books long ago.

One thing Engdahl said is definitely true: "They don’t translate enough."  As the blog Three Percent points out: only 3% of all books published in the US are works in translation. And Katy, a professional translator in Berlin who also loves German books, writes that it is something of a miracle when a great piece of fiction by a relatively unknown writer is published in English translation.  For every Daniel Kehlmann there are far too many Charlotte Roches.