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This past Wednesday night, a little novel that you've almost certainly never heard of was named the winner of the National Book Award for fiction.
It's called The News from Paraguay and it's by Lily Tuck.
As it happens, I wrote nearly all of what I'm saying to you long before the award winner was even announced, and just plugged in the names of the winning book and author at the last minute. Like everybody else who follows book publishing, I knew who the five nominated books were, and like practically everybody else who follows book publishing, I'd heard of none of them.
The obscurity of all of this year's nominated novels has caused a lot of tut-tutting and head-shaking among writers and critics and editors.
The winner, The News from Paraguay , is no doubt an exceptionally good piece of fiction. I'm eager to read it when I get a chance. And I'm not suggesting the other four nominated books weren't good, either.
But the range of literary taste they represent is awfully narrow.
It was widely and immediately noted that all five nominated authors are women, and that all live in New York City . But the really bizarre thing is that the books themselves, all five, are peas in a pod.
One is subtitled “A Novel in Stories,” another “A Ring of Stories” and others of them consist of lots of fragmentary stand-alone passages of a sentence or just a couple of paragraphs. The New York Times critic Caryn James, unlike me, read all five nominees, and wrote last week that all the books tend toward “language too woozy and poetic for its own good.” She also noted that none of the five books is “big and sprawling” or has “much of a sense of humor.” Most of them are light on plot as well. And I know you aren't supposed to judge books by their covers, but four out of five of these nominees have dust jackets featuring antique photographs of women.
Now it's ridiculous to imagine that any best-five-books list actually is a list of the year's five finest novels. There were 10,000 new American novels published in the last year, and virtually no one, National Book Award judges included, has read as many as two percent of them.
But such award rosters can be useful, by suggesting to curious and overwhelmed readers not only the excellence out there but the fantastic range of fictional styles and sensibilities and subjects and ambitions.
It's lovely when any good but under-heralded novel gets the juice of extra attention. But this year's National Book Award judges, the Times critic said, “went out of their way to nominate books that have scarcely been noticed.”
Now don't most post-graduates come to realize that obscurity does not always imply artistic virtue and celebrated doesn't necessarily equal second-rate?
It doesn't have to work this way with the National Book Awards. During the last half century the fiction winners of this same award have included Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man , Saul Bellow's Herzog and The Adventures of Augie March , John Cheever's Wapshot Chronicle , Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus , Walker Percy's The Moviegoer , Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, JR by William Gaddis, Sophie's Choice by William Styron, John Irving's The World According to Garp and Alice McDermot's Charming Billy .
Great books, every one. How just that they also happened to be award-winners.
I'm Kurt Andersen in Studio 360.
