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Thursday, October 13, 2005
The National Book Award Open (But Primed) Thread
Also announced today, the finalists for the National Book Awards:
Fiction
E.L. Doctorow, The March
Mary Gaitskill, Veronica
Christopher Sorrentino, Trance
Renè Steinke, Holy Skirts
William T. Vollmann, Europe CentralNonfiction
Alan Burdick, Out of Eden: An Odyssey of Ecological Invasion
Leo Damrosch, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn, 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s SlavesPoetry
John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander
Frank Bidart, Star Dust: Poems
Brendan Galvin, Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005
W.S. Merwin, Migration: New and Selected Poems
Vern Rutsala, The Moment’s Equation
For the umpteenth year in a row, I’ve read none of the nominated works of fiction or poetry. (This may have something to do, by which I mean everything to do, with the price of hard-bound books.) However, I have read (and slowly begun to collate my thoughts about) Didion’s masterful The Year of Magical Thinking and I do think it deserves to win. I bet that pronouncement would have more authority if I’d read the nominees.
The one thing I will say about the nominees in fiction is that they are, by and large, historical novels. What might this mean for the future of highly-touted, gold-stamped American novels? I report, you decide.
Comments
I reviewed the Vollmann and the Hochschild books… haven’t read any of the others. I can’t imagine however, that any of the fiction on the list could be as good as Europe Central, which was the stand-out book of the year for me among the two-dozen or so new books I’ve read this year.
A friend of mine who read it considered it the easiest of Vollmann’s novels to read...which may give it a leg up on some of his other words. That said, I don’t think the Seven Dreams novels difficult to read so much as fragmented, unnaturally, by the circumstances of their publication. And the prose of The Butterfly Stories and Whores For Gloria is as breezy as the subject matter isn’t. In other words, as soon as it’s released I’ll spend another week in Vollmann’s mind, with his fists pounding on the inside of my head and me left to deal with the headache.
I’ve always wondered if he, like Didion, gets shortchanged because their fiction and nonfiction overlap in so many instances. They’re not credited for invention because they’re presumed to have lived it; nor are they credited for the power of their prose because they’re assumed to have experienced it (and are thus “romantic” writers out of touch with our “ironic” age).
The Vollmann I’ve read has a tendency to seem overwrought and precious.
Does Europe Central avoid that trap? (haven’t read it, though I might if given a good reason...)
Joel, is your review online anywhere?
Amardeep--Sadly, review was in Minneapolis Star-Tribune (my main reviewing venue, along with Rain Taxi) and is long-since disappeared into the archives.
For what it’s worth, I think Vollmann is best with restricted (for him) scope--Afghanistan Picture Show, The Atlas, Whores for Gloria worked much better for me than the Seven Dreams volumes (none of which I’ve been able to finish).
Europe Central was “easy to read” perhaps because he had better control over the material--it certainly wasn’t “dumbed down.” It’s hardly “simple:” I think it’s something like 37 intertwined stories over almost 800 pages: lots to like for the hardcore “Vollmann” fan--though done so superbly that all of Vollmann’s talents shine through: his deep moral concerns (and wide empathy), his high-tension prose (given, here, a subject that evades melodrama by it’s very nature), and his wide-ranging curiousity/intelligence.
I’d go on, but I’ve been babysitting all day (and am just now trying to put my daughter to bed).
Also… a brief thought on historical novels.
I have a number of friends/acquaintances who have published them, and have considered writing several myself at various times. I may yet. I think the attraction lies in two directions--in our strange (read: scary?) political climate, it seems a safe way to:
a) get a wider range of readers, who are fascinated, per se, and may not pick up on what your double-aims might be, while holding a (somewhat ironic?) mirror up to our present. [And it should be said, contra Santayana, that those who learn their history too well are dead to what the hell is going on in front of their very eyes.] and…
b)lend oneself to simpler set of problems. I am about half-way through the Aubrey-Maturin novels, which have been my bed-side reading for several months--and they are, if not Tolstoy, pretty damned good. One thing that strikes me about them, however, is that for all the praise bestowed upon them (much deserved) there is a kind of scrutibility to the past that there isn’t to the present--and this makes such novels an easier “success” than writing something contemporaneous to our times. Partly this is due to the explosion of “knowledge” (arm-chair epistemologists--forget it), and partly due to our universal ignorance of the past. This is important, I think, because, as Henry James put it so well, the best writing must be organic--a part of us, part of the make-up of our mind, and not a deliberate act of composition (the combinatorics alone make Go seem like checkers). So, it’s at once easier to get one’s head around the complexities of the time (and yes, at a fundamental level, the complexities of our time are of the instant, and always the same--we’ll read Walden again later) while at the same time being more resistant to the bullshit detector. Who hasn’t read a contemporary novel (or seen a Hollywood film) and griped that “that is so wrong!”? O’Brian has said that, for much of his naval details, he just made the shit up. How many among us are capable of calling him out?
Just some thoughts…
PS: Speaking of Genre moments--picked up Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees today & read it in a sitting (it’s slim). His other books have looked fascinating to me: worth going further? This one seems, well, a bit reductive (though much, much better handled than the intriguing mess of Peter Turchi’s Maps of the Imagination out last year). Part of the problem is that, I suspect, any fully-mapped literary system would look more like a mat of moss than a tree…
(This may have something to do, by which I mean everything to do, with the price of hard-bound books.)
Weren’t we discussing public libraries just a few weeks ago? I bet your local has all of the fiction and non-fiction, at least. And if it didn’t have one, and you requested it, then it would get it. And then some part of your former goal of enriching libraries would be achieved and you’d have the books.
I don’t mean to be squawky. Just to say it’s all there if we want it. Maybe you didn’t actually want to read some of the nominees?
Vollman’s Atlas read like a day journal or notes of some whoremonger businessman rather than as a novel; and that may explain its authenticity. It’s fast, journalistic prose without the sort of egoism of a Tom Wolfe, glutted with porn and violence, sort of Hunter S Thompson gonzo went to college, upgraded, with occasional Pynchonian-like arabesques (tho V-mann from his writing would seem to be a much more onery creature than ol’ Capn’ Tom), and maybe a whiff of traditional Swiftian cynicism. Vollman product is quite tasty anarchy if a bit unhealthy; not merely entertaining noir nor a sort of flashy cyberpunk pulp ala Gibson or Stephenson. Vollmann seems to be sort of non-committal, ironically a-political--not necessarily nihilist: more the writing of the educated loser who can’t fathom how everything became so fucked-up.