Why Simenon Isn't Popular in the U.S.

The Guardian has a blog post today about Georges Simenon, praising the roman durs and speculating on his popularity:

This relentlessly downbeat canon (the one exception among his straight novels was The Little Saint, which was very loosely based on the life of Marc Chagall) may be one reason why Simenon’s work has never been wildly celebrated in the US, where, coincidentally, he lived for several years and, some critics argue, was at the very apex of his powers as writer. Or perhaps it was the fact that Americans typically like their novels fat, and Simenon’s rarely broke the 200-page mark. Or maybe it had to do with the often wooden translations of his work, remedied to a small extent recently by new versions brought out by the New York Review of Books.

But my own take is that this popularity deficit has to do more with the pronounced American trait not to look too deeply within and to flinch at what we find there.