American laureates of the Nobel Prize come close to outnumbering those from every other country combined, and this week, scientists in the United States got a few more early-morning phone calls from Stockholm. But Thursday morning's announcement that the Chinese writer Mo Yan has won the Nobel Prize in Literature extends a nearly two-decade drought for American authors – and while the winner's name was a surprise, the grumbles were not.

Nobody here ever complains that the physics or medicine juries don't know what they're doing. But Americans really don't like to lose, and when we do, you can trust us to blame the referee.

Only 11 Americans have won the literature prize since 1901. (By contrast: 11 Americans have won the economics prize in the last six years alone.) It's an ornery 11, too. Three of the American laureates – Isaac Bashevis Singer, Czesław Miłosz, and Joseph Brodsky – wrote primarily in a language other than English. Eugene O'Neill and William Faulkner remain giants of American literature, but the novels of Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck haven't endured as well. And of course, there is the standing embarrassment of Pearl S Buck, author of mawkish books about Chinese peasants. It's not as scandalous as a peace prize for Henry Kissinger, but it does rather stain the record.

Since 1994, though, the Americans have struck out every year. And as the dry spell wears on, the reactions get angrier. So far, Mo Yan has been getting a tiny bit more respect than usual, perhaps because, while Americans are as clueless about Chinese literature as any other, a Chinese winner does at least make the narrative of American decline more historically piquant.

But in 2004, American critics unleashed a fury bordering on hysteria when the prize went to Elfriede Jelinek, the groundbreaking Austrian playwright and novelist. "An unknown, undistinguished leftist fanatic," according to the Weekly Standard. "Prooftexts of a particularly virulent sort of radical feminism," as the New Republic had it.

Part of the problem, surely, is that Jelinek's most vital work has been as a dramatist; almost none of her plays has made it into English, and theater in America is even deader than publishing. But more than that, there was no room for Jelinek's intense, thorny writing in the conservative confines of the American literary establishment, where the entire history of modernism seems a thing of the unknown. Jelinek's recent play, The Merchant's Contracts, may be the most important work yet written about the financial crisis, but if she took it to an American MFA program, they'd probably tell her to work on her plotting and flesh out the characters a bit more.

The incredulity recurred with other recent winners, including JMG Le Clézio and Tomas Tranströmer. But the nadir of American literary provincialism came in 2009, when Herta Müller got the prize. "Herta who?" asked the New York Times. "Herta who?" asked the Washington Post. "Herta who?" asked Entertainment Weekly – though, at least one expects it from them, and as their resident blogger conceded,

"I am, admittedly, a myopic American who's poorly read."

It did not matter that Müller had published 20 books already, and that The Hunger Angel, her masterpiece, had just been released to universal acclaim in the German press. Nor did anyone pay attention to the bookies that year, when Müller had the shortest odds. It didn't even matter that Müller was, by the low standards of American publishing, quite widely translated. Five of her books were out in English, most reviewed widely. Her novel The Land of Green Plums had won the prestigious Dublin Impac award. Who cares? What about Philip Roth? Herta who?

The literature Nobel may not be more than the caprice of a dozen and a half old Swedes who happen to have $1.2m to dole out – but the intensity with which American authors and critics dismiss it suggests that we don't really believe that. And there's a long tradition of anti-Nobel whingeing here. Back in 1984, in a diatribe in the New York Times Book Review called "The Scandal of the Nobel Prize", George Steiner mocked the Swedes for awarding the prize to Pearl Buck (they are really never going to live that down), and he insisted that "with eminent exceptions, it is the uncrowned who are sovereign." When it came to literary discernment, the Swedish Academy deserved little respect – so little, in fact, that the most eminent critic of his generation would spend 2,700 words attacking it.

An essay like Steiner's now appears almost every year, usually with an exasperated mention of Roth, the eternal bridesmaid, whose failure to win the prize somehow delegitimizes every other laureate. (It hasn't helped matters that the one living American laureate is Toni Morrison. Defenders of Roth, such as the critic Harold Bloom, like to insist that he's "not terribly politically correct", and if Morrison got the gong and Roth didn't, Team Bloom can only think of one explanation.)

But things came to a head in 2008, when Horace Engdahl, then the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, speculated that the reason his organization didn't award American writers was that:

"The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature."

Everyone from the chiefs of America's major publishing houses to the editor of the New Yorker rose to the bait, telling Engdahl to push off back to Stockholm. Critic Adam Kirsch thundered:

"America should respond not by imploring the committee for a fairer hearing but by seceding, once and for all, from the sham that the Nobel Prize for Literature has become."

But Engdahl, impolite though he was, had a point. Only 3% of all books published in this country have been translated from a foreign language, and that includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When it comes to literature, Americans really are provincials. And you can see that provincialism in the writing that his opponents praise: formally retrograde, frequently narcissistic, and with none of the insight or rebelliousness that might make anyone beyond our shores take notice.

There are, of course, dozens of American writers in the first rank of world literature – even if I'd be much happier to see a Nobel go to Marilynne Robinson or John Ashbery than to Roth or the other usual suspects. And there are far better ways to think about literary culture than through prizes.

But there is a silver lining to our continued Nobel drought: if it reminds us of how wide the world of letters is, perhaps it will also remind us of the narrowness of our own.