Fwd: [fictionmags] National Book Award judge's comments

[Paul Di Filippo]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: "Mark R. Kelly/Locus Online" <mark at locusmag.com>
> Date: November 27, 2006 8:48:41 PM EST
> To: <fictionmags at yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [fictionmags] National Book Award judge's comments
> Reply-To: fictionmags at yahoogroups.com
>
> From the LA Times --
> http://www.calendarlive.com/books/bookreview/cl-bk- 
> wiggins26nov26,0,2207756.
> story?coll=cl-bookreview - by Marianne Wiggins.
>
>
>
> Notable comments-Pynchon's AGAINST THE DAY missed the deadline;
> Danielewski's ONLY REVOLUTIONS was a finalist only because of one  
> judge.
>
>
>
> Picking a winner
>
> By Marianne Wiggins
> Marianne Wiggins is a professor of English at USC. She was nominated  
> for a
> National Book Award in 2003 and served as a fiction judge for this  
> year's
> prize.
>
> November 26, 2006
>
> THE winners of the National Book Awards were announced this month - did
> anyone notice?
>
> Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, Tony, Golden Globe: award shows deemed worthy of  
> TV.
> But what about the poor relation at the table - books? Anybody want to  
> watch
> a three-hour black-tie dinner of 700 people at the Marriott Marquis  
> near
> Times Square honoring the best writers the nation has to offer in the
> categories of children's books, nonfiction, poetry and novels? No?
>
> Imagine my surprise when I first moved to England and turned on the  
> tube one
> evening to discover a live broadcast of the Man Booker Prize, Britain's
> leading book awards. There must have been people in pubs grabbing  
> remotes.
> But this was the nation that televises darts and a weekly program  
> called
> "One Man and His Dog," a show about Welsh border collies herding, well,
> sheep. After the hit movie "Babe," people in the United States started  
> to
> understand this kind of herding. Far more than they understand the  
> business
> of books.
>
> How many hardcover copies do you think Philip Roth or Cormac McCarthy  
> sell?
> 100,000? Think again. A first novelist's average advance? Less than  
> what a
> TV writer takes home in a month. Prizes have a significant effect on a
> writer's earnings - even when they don't come with cash attached - so  
> any
> discussion of book awards is also a discussion of how writers of  
> serious
> fiction manage to survive.
>
> Three major literary prizes dominate our national scene, the largest  
> and
> rarest being the Nobel, which is not really indigenous but inclusive  
> of a
> hefty number of Americans, nonetheless. I gave my creative writing  
> students
> at USC a list of years that Americans had won a Nobel in the 20th  
> century
> and asked them to name the Nobel laureate for the corresponding year -
> winners included Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene
> O'Neill, William Faulkner and John Steinbeck. They drew a collective  
> blank.
>
> For the year 1978, I gave them the clues, "Emigrated from Poland,  
> wrote in
> Yiddish, lived on the Upper West Side in New York City." They guessed  
> Shel
> Silverstein. (It was Isaac Bashevis Singer.) When this year's Nobel  
> laureate
> was announced, I offered extra points for anyone who could name the  
> winner.
> One intrepid soul ventured that it was someone from "Poland or Turkey  
> or
> someplace like that." (It was Orhan Pamuk. Not from Poland. From that
> country that shares a name with the bird we eat at Thanksgiving.)
>
> The Nobel brings with it buckets of money, whereas for the Pulitzer,  
> all the
> winner gets is a certificate, dinner and a $10,000 honorarium that's a  
> drop
> in the bucket compared with the Nobel's million-dollar-plus cash  
> prize. When
> I was a finalist, I got a letter, two sentences long, on Columbia  
> University
> stationery (no certificate, no dinner), but on every subsequent novel I
> write, my publishers can print "Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize" under  
> my
> name on the cover. And guess what? This sells books (if only a couple).
>
> The National Book Award is regarded by many as the mother of the  
> homegrown
> prizes. Nominees in four categories are chosen by panels of their peers
> (novelists judge novelists), cash is awarded, and the nominated books  
> get
> nifty silver decals, which sell more books.
>
> This year, I was a judge. What that means is that between the  
> beginning of
> May and the middle of August, I (and my four fellow judges) read 258  
> books.
> Each. The same 258 novels. To put that in perspective, it's pertinent  
> to
> note that outside of a Bible and a phone book, many households in the  
> United
> States probably own (and read) zero works of serious fiction.
>
> Nonfiction outnumbers fiction in new titles published each year by 4  
> to 1,
> so the nonfiction judges read twice what we did - 500 submissions. One  
> judge
> remarked that she came home one day to find her children had  
> constructed a
> fort out of them. In my case, I constructed an elaborate system of  
> piles:
> read, unread, couldn't get past Page 10, crap, bloated, vomitous,
> kill-me-now and praise God.
>
> The criteria for submission was that the publisher pay $100 to the  
> National
> Book Foundation for each book submitted and then send a copy of the  
> book (or
> manuscript) to each judge. The author had to be a citizen of the United
> States. In our first conference call, we began to try to define what  
> we were
> looking for. A "national" book? A work of fiction that spoke to the
> "American" character? Judge No. 1 wanted "readability," and No. 5  
> wanted "a
> sense of discovery." I just wanted writing that would set my hair on  
> fire.
>
> To be eligible, all novels had to be published in 2006, and the list
> included books by Roth, Updike, McCarthy, Richard Ford, Stephen King,  
> Walter
> Mosley, Edward P. Jones, Mary Gordon, Dave Eggers, Charles Frazier,  
> Bobbie
> Ann Mason, Tom McGuane, Joyce Carol Oates. (Only two from her. Musta  
> been a
> slow season.)
>
> Through conference calls and e-mail, the five of us started to get a  
> sense
> of one another's tastes and personalities, and we discovered that we  
> had
> more in common than not. Peter Behrens' "The Law of Dreams" was an  
> early
> favorite, as was "The Echo Maker" by Richard Powers (my hair-on-fire
> favorite and the eventual winner) and "White Guys" by Anthony  
> Giardina. All
> of us were in favor of Roth's "Everyman," though we agreed it was not  
> his
> strongest book (except for No. 4, who called it equal to Tolstoy).  
> Judge No.
> 2 kept pressing for "The Zero" by Jess Walter. Cormac McCarthy's "The  
> Road"
> made me cry but left everyone else unmoved. Judge No. 4, an admitted  
> friend
> of Roth's, had another favorite - "Only Revolutions" by Mark  
> Danielewski,
> which none of the rest of us could fathom but he would not give up on.  
> We
> began to know that in every conference call No. 4 would speak at  
> length and
> very movingly in support of the book, and I finally said, "If  
> Danielewski
> had written the novel you're describing, he'd deserve a Nobel, but I  
> can't
> find a wormhole into that experience on the page."
>
> Nevertheless, he was persistent - a strategy that, in the end, paid  
> off.
>
> Thomas Pynchon's 1,000-page doorstop came in after deadline owing to
> last-minute rewrites, but by the first week in September, we had five  
> books
> we all more or less liked.
>
> And we were uniformly underwhelmed.
>
> There were no women on the list, and the titles themselves read like an
> anti-feminist haiku - "White Guys," "The Echo Maker," "Everyman," "The  
> Law
> of Dreams," "The Zero." After months of thinking that we had to find
> individual books we endorsed, we suddenly realized that we needed to  
> start
> thinking about a list we endorsed.
>
> Roth, who has won the award twice, was never the front runner (except  
> with
> Judge No. 4), and it seemed insulting to keep him on the list knowing  
> he
> would lose. So we dropped him and allowed No. 4 to place Danielewski  
> on the
> list instead. "White Guys" and "The Law of Dreams" we replaced with  
> "Eat the
> Document" by Dana Spiotta and "A Disorder Peculiar to the Country" by  
> Ken
> Kalfus.
>
> When this newspaper ran a front-page article with the final list, a  
> friend
> e-mailed me: "Who are these people? I don't know any of them!"
>
> Well, exactly.
>
> Wonderful, under-read writers. No longer so foreign. On the map,  
> finally.
> Like Poland or Turkey or someplace like that. .
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
>
>
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