Pulitzer Prize...

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April 17, 2012

And the Winner Isn’t ...

By ANN PATCHETT

Nashville

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.   (bold by me.)

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.

Ann Patchett is the author, most recently, of the novel “State of Wonder” and a founder of Parnassus Books.

This article reminds me of a few statements made by Faber (the old man) in Farenheit 451. " It [ the Televisor] tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right.It seems so right.  It rushes you on so quickly to it's own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest. " You can shut them [books], say 'hold on a moment.' You play God to it...Books can be beaten down with reason."

I don't go off the Pulitzer Prize or any list for that matter on choosing what I will read next but, the written word on a page is becoming antiquated by the written word electronically and that scares me.

I love the feel of a book in hand, the smell of it, the stiff pages when new and then crinkled when read over and again.

I've mentioned this before but I am a trueist when it comes to reading. Only when away from home and have not packed a book will I read a book on my ipad or phone, (which reading on the phone is miserable but works if having withdrawls like on a trip and the packed book is finished.- I read Stephanie Meyers partial transcript of Midnight Sun that way- all 600 something words. I don't recommend it!)

Thanks Ann Patchett for writing an article that expresses some of my feelings and yet I still fall prey to.