WHAT goes on during a deliberation is a private matter for the jurors
alone; the rest of us are privy only to the verdict. That holds true for
book awards as well as murder cases. So when the Pulitzer Prize Board announced
on Monday that there were three finalists for the fiction prize and no
winner, we were left to draw our own conclusions.
So far I’ve been able to come up with two: either the board was unable
to reach a consensus, or at the end of the day the board members decided
that none of the finalists, and none of the other books that were not
finalists, were worthy of a Pulitzer Prize.
What I am sure of is this: Most readers hearing the news will not assume
it was a deadlock. They’ll just figure it was a bum year for fiction. As a novelist and the author of an eligible book, I do not love this.
It’s fine to lose to someone, and galling to lose to no one.
Still, it is infinitely more galling to me as a reader, because there
were so many good books published this year. I put Edith Pearlman’s
“Binocular Vision: New and Selected Stories” at the top of that list,
and so did many others. She was the winner of the National Book Critics
Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award and the Story
Prize. Her collection would have stood among the best winners in the Pulitzer’s history.
My other favorite was Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams,” which did make it
onto the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. I don’t think there is a sentence in
that book that isn’t perfectly made, and its deeply American story fits
with the Pulitzer’s criteria.
On that count, the prize could rightly have gone to two other books with
important takes on the American condition: Russell Banks’s “Lost Memory
of Skin” or Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones,” the winner of the National Book Award.
It could have taken a turn for the strange and highly imaginative and
gone to another of the three finalists, Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!”
or to Kevin Wilson’s beautifully weird “The Family Fang.”
And while no one has ever won for two consecutive books, couldn’t this
have been the year? I have no doubt that Jeffrey Eugenides would have
won for “The Marriage Plot” if he hadn’t already won for “Middlesex.”
If I feel disappointment as a writer and indignation as a reader, I manage to get all the way to rage as a bookseller.
In November of last year, along with my business partner, Karen Hayes, I opened Parnassus Books
in Nashville. The brick-and-mortar bookstore, as people seem to point
out to us hourly, is not exactly a thriving business model (though we
are doing fine), and the publishing industry, especially since the
Department of Justice has decided to be Amazon’s bodyguard, is
struggling as well.
So while it’s true that the Pulitzer committee has, since its inception
in 1917, declined to award the prize on 10 previous occasions, I can’t
imagine there was ever a year we were so in need of the excitement it
creates in readers.
The winners are written up in papers and talked about on the radio, and
sometimes, at least on PBS stations, they make it onto television. This
in turn gives the buzz that is so often lacking in our industry — Did you hear about that book?
With book coverage in the media split evenly between “Fifty Shades of
Grey” and “The Hunger Games,” wouldn’t it have been something to have
people talking about “The Pale King,” David Foster Wallace’s posthumous
masterwork about a toiling tax collector (and this year’s third Pulitzer
finalist)? Wallace is not going to have another shot at a win, which
makes the fact that no one could make up their minds as to whether or
not he deserved it all the more heartbreaking.
Let me underscore the obvious here: Reading fiction is important. It is a
vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in turn makes
us more empathetic beings. Following complex story lines stretches our
brains beyond the 140 characters of sound-bite thinking, and staying
within the world of a novel gives us the ability to be quiet and alone,
two skills that are disappearing faster than the polar icecaps.
Unfortunately, the world of literature lacks the scandal, hype and
pretty dresses that draw people to the Academy Awards, which, by the
way, is not an institution devoted to choosing the best movie every year
as much as it is an institution designed to get people excited about
going to the movies. The Pulitzer Prize is our best chance as writers
and readers and booksellers to celebrate fiction. This was the year we
all lost.
