National Book Awards - 77 Winning Fiction Books

2011

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Thu, 14 Jun 2012 14:43:12 +0000

Salvage the Bones

By Jesmyn Ward

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA

Melinda Moustakis writes:

Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones is a beautiful and lyrical novel about survival and resilience and the bare-bulb and bare-bones life of a family in Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. The story is told through the captivating voice of Esch, a smart and vulnerable and complex only-girl among her three brothers named Skeetah, Randall, and Junior, and her widowed father and all her brother’s friends. Esch, in true fashion of a classic Bildungsroman, uses texts she reads in school such as Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and the story of Medea to form her own metaphors and similes in describing the fragile and complicated emotional eco-system of her family and community. Her story and the stories of those she holds dear and the stories of the place she calls home are worthy of an epic.

Esch guides the reader through the ten days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, through the thrall of the storm and the aftermath the very next day. The immediacy of present tense is masterfully rendered―every moment counts, every moment is felt and captured and hard-hitting. The present is tense, intense: How to deal with a father’s incapacitating grief? The need of a basketball camp scholarship for Randall? Skeetah’s dream of turning a profit on his prized fighter-champion pit bull China and her pups? Pregnancy? Hunger? A beautiful boy who turns your heart but may or may not love you back? A hurricane no one else believes is actually coming?

Esch’s inner life is as rich and imaginative as her family’s house is dilapidated and sparse. One of the many triumphs of the book is the way in which the characters are tough and rough-hewn but also dignified by their devotion to each other. This devotion is tested many times and in many ways as each family member seeks comfort and sustenance as an individual and is then asked to make that one sacrifice that threatens to break one’s spirit so that the family can carry on. Because perhaps a semblance of comfort can be found in each other when one more tragedy, one more setback, one more heartbreak, one more storm threatens to destroy everything.

When asked, “Why did you want to write about Hurricane Katrina?” Ward, in the Q&A at the end of the novel, said, “I lived through it. It was terrifying and I needed to write about that. I was also angry at the people who blamed survivors for staying and for choosing to return to the Mississippi Gulf Coast after the storm.” In reading this book, in becoming immersed in Esch’s story and feeling every hunger pain and injury along with her, one comes to understand that Bois Sauvage, with its oppressive heat and humidity and wild chickens and pathways strewn with broken oyster shells, is a place where an oncoming storm is just another possible tragedy in a life filled with them. When the shiny foil seasoning packet from a package of ramen noodles is a bright spot on a dark day, leaving the one possession that keeps the family together, the house, is not an option and even preparing the house for a hurricane is a mundane and maybe unnecessary chore among many chores. There is no other place to go. The day-to-day is enough of a struggle.

But it is the future, the gaping mouth of it, that is the biggest threat to this family. The novel ends at a point where so much has happened and so much will happen in the days and years after Hurricane Katrina. Either the characters’ resolve and full-hearted hopefulness will remain intact or this is the beginning of what cannot be endured, but must be endured. For the reader, the loss of any one of these characters would be like losing family, losing a bright, vibrant, flawed, surprisingly cruel, gorgeously tender part of oneself. With Esch’s searing voice, bite-your-nails tension, arresting imagery, and precision with every word, Salvage the Bones is, as many have said, a haunting and unforgettable read.

Melinda Moustakis is the author of the debut collection Bear Down Bear North: Alaska Stories, winner of the Flannery O' Connor Award in Short Fiction. She was named a 2011 5 Under 35 writer by the National Book Foundation and will be a 2012-2013 Hodder Fellow at The Lewis Center of the Arts at Princeton University.

Fiction Finalists That Year:

Fiction Judges That Year: Deirdre McNamer (Chair), Jerome Charyn, John Crowley, Victor LaValle, Yiyun Li

The Year in Literature:

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Tomas Tranströmer won the Nobel Prize for literature.

Suggested Links:

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2010

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 12:14:00 +0000

Photo credit: Brian WiddisLord of Misrule

By Jaimy Gordon

Publisher: McPherson & Company

Katie McDonough writes:

Whenever I come across a book that centers on the world of horseracing, I feel a twinge of recognition, of longing. I grew up cleaning rooms at Starting Gate Cottages, my family’s once charming, now decaying cabin-court motel ten miles south of Saratoga Race Course in upstate New York. Some of our guests traveled to the area for short-term construction work or for concerts at SPAC, but the majority came to stay with us for one reason and one reason alone: to go to the races.

Some had spent time in the business. Others were inveterate gamblers. Many were just grown kids whose dads had once boosted them up for a better view of the backstretch. I made their beds and cleaned their toilets every summer until I was eighteen, but I never understood what all the fuss was about. During the racing season, my parents, my younger brother, and I were chained to the motel, working almost around the clock some days to keep up with arriving and departing guests. We went to the track a few times over the years, but I always felt like there was a curtain between me and the action, a secret I wasn’t being told.

Jaimy Gordon’s Lord of Misrule is that secret, that peek behind the scenes that I never got as a kid. I stood under the red-and-white-striped awnings and squinted to see the bright white-and-green starting gate at Saratoga, but I never got the chance to go deeper—to be on the other side of the long, white fence of the paddock, to smell the air inside of a hay-filled stall. This is where the real story of horseracing plays out, in hushed conversations and hastily made deals. This is where horseracing lives.

Gordon’s novel is set at the fictional Indian Mound Downs, a rundown West Virginia racetrack that feels like the anti-Saratoga, a place run by monsters and haunted by ghosts, a place where humans are slaves and horses are kings, but only as long as they’re worth something. Its devil-red dust and darkened shedrows bear little resemblance to the sunny Saratoga of my memory, but from what I can tell their guts are the same: money and competition, hope and luck.

[Luck] came to you because you called to it, whistled for it, because it saw you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Luck was the world leaping into your arms across a deep ditch and long odds. It was love, which is never deserved; all the rest is drudgery.

The lives of characters like the toothless, black groom, Medicine Ed, and the “dilapidated hull of a woman,” Deucey Gifford, could only be described as drudgery. They sleep on haystacks and wake in the dark to muck stalls and rub horses that they love like people and could lose in an instant—a claiming race ends with cash in someone else’s hand. But the ones who hold the cash aren’t immune to suffering. Men like Gus Zeno and Joe Dale Bigg are just as lost as the rest, just as needy—the type of people the racetrack calls.

Without a doubt, this is Medicine Ed’s book. It’s his voice that speaks to us, his eyes we use to see. “Medicine Ed, like the boll weevil in the song, was looking for a home.” And everyone here is, and the racetrack is a sort of home. Ed has spent his life at the track; at seventy-two, he’s hoping to get out. But as much as the reader wants that for him, it’s hard to imagine him anyplace else.

This is Medicine Ed’s book, but it’s Maggie and Tommy’s story. The novel opens with their arrival from Charles Town—all eyes on her, a “frizzly hair girl” of twenty-five, and him, her lover/captor with the wild laugh. She is the phantom twin he’s spent his life looking for, the one his mother swore he consumed in the womb. Tommy needs Maggie, and she crumbles at his touch. Theirs is a story we already know.

Each of Gordon’s characters is both good and bad, fair and cruel; try as you might, you can’t completely love or completely hate any of them. And the same goes for horseracing itself. With language like a poem and images like a dream, the novel is a gorgeous, uncensored tribute to the sport, a book like a racehorse that deservedly beat the odds.

As for my question, it’s Medicine Ed who answers:

I tell you a secret, horse racing is not no science. Some of em tries to make it a science, with the drugs and the chemicals and that, but ma’ fact it’s more like a religion. It’s a clouded thing. You can’t see through it. It comes down to a person’s beliefs.

Katie McDonough is Marketing Media Manager at the National Book Foundation. She received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from The New School in 2010, and her work has appeared in Used Furniture Review, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Fiction Finalists That Year:

Peter Carey for Parrot and Olivier in America
Nicole Krauss for Great House
Lionel Shriver for So Much for That
Karen Tei Yamashita for I Hotel

Fiction Judges That Year: Andrei Codrescu, Samuel R. Delany, Sabina Murray, Joanna Scott, Carolyn See

The Year in Literature:

Tinkers by Paul Harding won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for literature.

More Information:

Lord of Misrule is an expansion of Gordon’s short story, “A Night’s Work,” which was selected for The Best American Short Stories 1995.

Suggested Links: Jaimy Gordon’s 2010 NBA Page

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2009

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 13:58:54 +0000

Let the Great World Spin

By Colum McCann

Original and Current Publisher: Random House

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Colum McCann, conducted by Brett Anthony Johnston upon the announcement of the Finalists for the 2009 National Book Awards.

Brett Anthony Johnston: The image of the tightrope walker crossing the space between the Twin Towers becomes the touchstone for most of the characters in the novel. What was it about that iconic event that you found so inspiring, especially in light of the Towers falling?

Colum McCann: Yes, it was the catalyst for everything. A man a quarter of a mile in the sky. But the further the novel goes along, the less important the tightrope walk becomes, until it disappears from sight altogether, and the thing that holds the novel together is the very low tightrope of human intention that we all negotiate. Some of us walk very close to the ground, but we can hit it awful hard. We are all, in the end, funambulists.

I live in New York. I was there on 9/11. And there was so much happening -- it was a deluge of images. It’s probably the most documented couple of days in all of media history. Not just the big picture, but the small intimate moments too. The car outside my window that got a parking ticket on September 10th, and another early on the 11th, but then one day it got a flower instead of a ticket, and then you knew, you just knew, until eventually it was just covered in flowers and the parking tickets were obscured. Or the supermarket shelves that were cleared of eyewash. Or the little film of dust that sat on your windowsill and you wondered what it might contain. Or the bagpipe players who were exhausted from playing at funerals. Or my own father-in-law escaping from the World Trade Center towers and coming home, his clothes covered in ash from the cloud of dust he had to run through, and my four-year-old daughter hiding because she thought he was burning. It was a whole collision of the personal and the public. I wrote plenty of journalism about 9/11, and it was all right, but what I felt down deep was that I would have to try to write a novel. But what was difficult for me as a writer was that everything was so very full of meaning that it seemed so difficult to write a sentence, or take a photo, or draw a picture without it having some heft or meaning. And it just kept getting gaining momentum, with Iran and Afghanistan and Madrid and London, and all that justice turning into revenge. My question was, How can I write about this? How can I discover how I, on a personal level, feel? I really wasn’t interested in trying to draw out a moral landscape, or to make some big comment on 9/11. I leave that to others. But I wanted to discover what all this meant, to me, and what it might mean for my family.

Then came the moment when I thought that I could go backwards in time to talk about the present: that’s when the tightrope walk came in. And the deeper I got into the novel the more I began to see that it was, hopefully, about an act of recovery. Because the book comes down to a very anonymous moment in the Bronx when two little kids are coming out of a very rough housing project, about to be taken away by the state, and they get rescued by an act of grace. That’s it, not much maybe, but everything to me. And there’s hardly a line in the novel about 9/11, but it’s everywhere if the reader wants it to be. I trust my readers. They will get from a book what they want. It can be read in many different ways. In this sense I hope it works on an open poetic level: make of this child what you will.

Read the entire interview >

ISBN-13: 9781588368737

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Fiction Judges that Year:

Alan Cheuse, Junot Díaz, Jennifer Egan, Charles Johnson, Lydia Millet

The Year in Literature:

Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Herta Müller won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Suggested Links:

Colum McCann’s 2009 NBA Winner Page with Acceptance Speech (VIDEO) and Book Excerpt
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_f_mccann.html
Colum McCann’s Website
http://www.colummccann.com/
The Soul of a City, By Jonathan Mahler
New York Times, Sunday Book Review, Published: July 29, 2009
www.nytimes.com/2009/08/02/books/review/Mahler-t.html

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2008

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:55:55 +0000

Shadow Country

By Peter Matthiessen

Original and Current Publisher: Modern Library

Harold Augenbraum writes:

What becomes a legend most?

Edgar Watson, a story of the Everglades, one of the last frontiers around the turn of the twentieth century, of the man who supposedly killed the legendary Belle Starr—O, how these legends intertwine! until no one can be sure who lived and if they did how they died. After the age of exploration, the War Between the States, the Indian Wars, the division of baseball into the Major Leagues and the Negro Leagues, but before paved roads, the Sherman Antitrust Act, the federal income tax, and women’s suffrage, Matthiessen gives us the frontier of swashbucklers in ketches and dories and plume merchants and croc hunters, and we can pretend that such things are past, but, hey, really, we’re still trying to civilize.

Peter Matthiessen took up Watson in three books in “The Watson Trilogy,”—Killing Mister Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999)—and in 2008 turned them into one hang-together novel in three parts, simply titled Book I, Book II, and Book III—tight even at 892 pages, an undertaking worth undertaking. The number of voices are legion, a cracked portrait from a variety of viewpoints, as you learn about the individuals who killed Watson and why, their fears and anger. First you get the inexorable rushing toward Watson’s death at the guns of a dozen or so men. The there is his historian son’s investigation of his life and death, and then “Watson’s own words,” or at least Matthiessen’s imagining of them, his telling his own story, until again the moment of his death, and words push against words. You began with Watson’s death and then you end with it, bookends like tombstones. To sum it up in a few words is impossible since its interest lies in the ambition of storytelling and inevitability of story.

And my favorite line, “spoken” by one of the band who killed Mr. Watson: “Fallen angel, Mama Ida said, and it was true. Laying so still at our feet, Mister Watson looked like he had fell all the way from Heaven. You never seen a man so dead in all your life.” It’s the capitalization of the word “Heaven” that does it for me. In a way its themes reminded me of the fascination Africa and Asia held for English and American writers in the twentieth century, but set in the States themselves, a heart of darkness for the American region, an end of the matter.

Harold Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, an editor and translator.

ISBN: 9780812980622

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Aleksandar Hemon for The Lazarus Project
Rachel Kushner for Telex from Cuba
Marilynne Robinson for Home
Salvatore Scibona for The End

Fiction Judges that Year:

Gail Godwin, Rebecca Goldstein, Elinor Lipman, Reginald McKnight, Jess Walter

The Year in Literature:

Peter Matthiessen won his first National Book Award in the short-lived Contemporary Thought category in 1979 for his nonfiction work, The Snow Leopard, and won the Award in the General Nonfiction (Paperback) category for the same book the following year. Almost thirty years later, in 2008, Matthiessen's fiction trilogy, Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone, based on accounts of Florida planter Edgar J. Watson's death shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910, was reformatted into a single volume entitled Shadow Country. The book won the 2008 National Book Award for Fiction when Matthiessen was 81 years old.

Suggested Links:

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2007

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 17:33:20 +0000

Tree of Smoke

By Denis Johnson

Original Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Current Publisher: Picador (Macmillan)

Matthew Pitt writes:

Why didn’t I believe? Believe Denis Johnson could pull off a sparring, sprawling, 600-page masterwork about the Vietnam War, our 20^th-Century National Moral Scar? Perhaps because his earlier masterwork, Jesus’ Son, is so haloed with hallucination. A voice of torque and lyricism Johnson couldn’t possibly sustain through a lengthy novel.

Yes he could. Invoking Dante’s Inferno and Conrad’s Kurtz, the labyrinthine Tree of Smoke is full of hitches, tangents, but it reads exceedingly fast. It suggests a protracted war that moved in an exacting blur. Early on, a green soldier reflects, with both relief and delight, on a firefight he evaded: “He’d never moved so fast or felt so certain of what he was doing. All the bullshit had been burned away.” A page later, this character frames the war’s central, useless drive for quantifiable victory: “He’d fired over three hundred rounds and thrown two grenades and traveled ten kilometers and killed one possible VC.”

Johnson introduces a spectrum of characters favoring the war, or hostile to it. They include an eager CIA operative, men of cloth, and a Seventh-Day Adventist. Johnson takes each view—whether truculent, or tormented—seriously. He tunnels convincingly into perspectives of top brass certain in their righteous mission, declaiming hippie naïveté; as well as pacifists waging their own combat, to steer the nation’s soul back to its better angels. Views viewing one another with equal chagrin: You just don’t get it.

Speaking of opposing views: I tried to let slide without comment B.R. Myers’ dyspeptic, prissy review of Tree of Smoke in The Atlantic. But I must at least defend Myers’ dismissal of the novel’s opening line: “Last night at 3:00 a.m. President Kennedy had been killed.” This sentence is entered as evidence that Johnson’s prose possesses scant “feel for the English language.” But in one quick stroke, that modes line imparts three key pieces of information. It locates readers in a land where Kennedy’s death was reported in the dead of night. The phrase “had been killed,” meanwhile, lays the ground for much of the bureaucrat and military strategists’ cognitive dissonance witnessed later. Finally, it serves as a decent timeline marker for the conflict’s escalation.

Johnson somehow plucks spiritual yearning from the war’s miasma. An enlisted man opines that his mother’s faith is a case of someone “flinging herself at the Bible and its promises like a bug at a window.” Even Biblical “Tree of Smoke” allusions are ambiguous. One, in Song of Solomon, describes the titular tree as bringing forth a sweet perfumed scent. Another in Joel uses it to describe apocalyptic fires.

The book offers no bromides: a nightmare the war may have been, but that didn’t mean we learned lessons from it once we woke. The moral haziness is clearest when Kathy, the Seventh-Day Adventist, wrestles with American servicemen’s conflicted actions: “They threw hand grenades through doorways and blew the arms and legs off ignorant farmers, they rescued puppies from starvation and smuggled them home to Mississippi in their shirts, they burned down whole villages and raped young girls, they stole medicine by the jeepload to save the lives of orphans.”

As for the ending, conveyed by Kathy in a coda: It’s as soaring and searing as the final paragraphs of Middlemarch. I re-read it often, admiring craft and message equally, both of which reach the ragged rafters of spiritual reverence, the hard-earned kind that comes only after some brink is breached.

Recent stories by Matthew Pitt were cited in both the Best American and Pushcart Prize series. Autumn House Press will publish his first collection, Attention Please Now, in spring 2010.

ISBN: 9780312427740

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Mischa Berlinski for Fieldwork
Lydia Davis for Varieties of Disturbance
Joshua Ferris for Then We Came to the End
Jim Shepard for Like You’d Understand, Anyway

Fiction Judges that Year:

Francine Prose, Andrew Sean Greer, Walter Kirn, David Means, Joy Williams

The Year in Literature:

The Road by Cormac McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

Denis Johnson first came to prominence after the publication of his short story collection, Jesus’ Son (1992), which was adapted into the 1999 film of the same name.
Tree of Smoke was Johnson’s first full-length novel in nine years; his previous work was a novella called Train Dreams (2002).
In addition to winning the National Book Award, Tree of Smoke was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Suggested Links:

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2006

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 10:29:43 +0000

The Echo Maker

By Richard Powers

Original Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Current Publisher: Picador (Macmillan)

Harold Augenbraum writes:

After a night of drinking, a man rolls his pick-up truck into a field where thousands of sandhill cranes have stopped in Nebraska on their migration. Cranes are fascinating creatures, Powers tells us. They populate mythologies; they become mnemonic. From this gathering of cranes emerges the altered pick-up driver. He is no longer who he was. He has severe brain injuries, and when he wakes up in the hospital, first he shows evidence of echolalia (a sort of doppelzunger), and later he thinks everyone close to him has been replaced by an identical imposter, including his sister and his dog (a measure of doppelgängers): He has Capgras syndrome.

He has what? Capgras syndrome, identified by Joseph Capgras in 1923. And this precipitates not only one but two family dramas, and a questioning of not only of how the mind works but what effect do changes in any natural environment have on the individual and that individual’s place in the human ecology. The book’s readers believe Karin is his sister, but the protagonist Mark does not. He thinks that for some reason “an actress” has been brought in to play his sister. And even a dog that resembles his own has been found to visit him at the rehab facility. And we as readers believe he is Mark’s dog even though Mark does not. They bring in the neuroscientist Weber, who resembles Oliver Sacks—at least to me, but that would make him a sort of imposter (or he may be related in some way to Ernst Weber, the psychophysicist). As much as he tries to help Mark, he ends up damaging his own marriage. He tries to decipher the case and ends up recognizing (and I use that word advisedly) his own alienation from his wife back east. I mean, this is a man who, when he writes case studies, in order to protect the patient’s identity, makes up names for them. So they become imposters in their own cases. And then he develops a fascination for Mark’s rehab aide, so he becomes an imposter in his previous life. And then you remember that none of these people are real, so they are all imposters, puppets, with Richard Powers the grand puppenmeister convincing you of their reality.

Add to all of this that in interviews Richard Powers has said that he wrote the book using a voice-recognition program because he believes that the computer keyboard distances the writer from the words themselves. How far from the computer microphone did he stand? Fascinating.

Harold Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, an editor and translator.

Rebecca Keith writes:

The flat land of the Great Plains, flat land of a blank mind, hills of a mind replaced with an altered mind, each face meaning something different than it once did. Guilt of not caring, not knowing how to care for someone who once knew the map of your face before sketching an entirely new landscape on it, devoid of blood, flesh, shared DNA. This is where Richard Powers takes us in The Echo Maker, swooping down crane wing and dust bowl, bowl of skull crushed in a motor vehicle accident.

Twenty-seven year old Mark Schulter barely survives his truck flipping on an icy Nebraska highway. When his sister, Karin, returns home to care for him, he wakes from his coma and at first mimics sounds shared with him: echolalia. He doubles, creates words without meaning, words that are only sound. “At last notions climb out of his throat. Belching, birthing words. Baby wolf spiders, scattering off the back of their mother sound. Every curved line in the world is saying. Branches tapping the glass. Tracks in the snow.” Soon, able to form sentences again, to question how he wound up in the hospital, to question at all, he subtracts the one thing that is certain— the strongest link to his past— his sister. Mark insists she is an imposter— not Karin, but an actress playing Karin. This is Capgras syndrome, and it is this lack, this great mistake of the brain, that drives the whole book, set against the backdrop of the sandhill cranes’ migration pattern.

Each year the cranes return to Nebraska to breed on the banks of the Platte River, knowing where they are from. Powers writes, “This year’s flight has always been. Something in the birds retraces a route laid down centuries before their parents showed it to them.” Mark does everything, involuntarily, to erase the route between he and his sister, even as the two of them return to the scene of his accident time and again, looking at the tire tracks left by his truck, or maybe another set, the directions of speed on asphalt unclear, black against black. What do we remember? What makes a memory and what do we make up, smoothing out the craters we’d prefer not to stumble into? How do we know who to trust, how to trust, when we don’t even know who wrote the words on a page, a note left on Mark’s hospital nightstand?

Mark’s body returns to him piecemeal— “His parts come back to him, so slowly he can’t know. He lies in the shrinking bed, taking stock… Makes a list of himself, like old rebuilt machines.” But his mind is an imposter of itself. He can’t read the people who care for him— Karin, the nurse’s aide, Barbara Gillespie, or Dr. Weber, a neurologist to whom Karin writes at the suggestion of her lover, Daniel. After tearing through Weber’s books, Karin is “in Daniel’s debt again. On top of everything else, he had given her this thread of possibility. And she, once again, had given him nothing. But Daniel, as ever, seemed to need nothing but the chance to give. Of all the alien, damaged brain states this writing doctor described, none was as strange as care.” Mark is reluctant to accept care from anyone besides the angelic Barbara Gillespie, a seemingly selfless public servant. Powers explores many motivations for care through his characters. Mark, clouded as his brain is by Capgras, is right to be suspicious. Karin is propelled by blood, guilt, obligation, and habit, albeit a genuine love beneath her resentment of her brother’s recklessness. Dr. Weber is driven to succeed, excel in his field through research with Mark. He tells Barbara, “I didn’t come out here to help the man. Not originally. Simple narcissism, to think I could help him in the first place.”

When Weber returns home from Nebraska, he confesses a near-infidelity to his wife, Sylvie. She asks him how serious it is, and he thinks, “How serious could it be? Three days versus thirty years. A total cipher versus a woman he knew like breathing.” He says, “I don’t want it to mean anything at all,” like Mark’s indecipherable post-coma chatter, something to erase with a new season and not return to, a problem he will leave to its mysteries without further research. He tells Sylvie that the woman he was drawn to is “a totally unreadable story” but that she, his wife, has all his history. He thinks of Sylvie as “still heartbreakingly herself,” while he begins to act like a double in the mirror who she can pass but can’t touch. Powers writes, “All that unbearable care would crush him.” Mark eventually begins to care from himself as best he can, digs at the tracks he left on the highway, digs through the history he shares with the people caring for him, and that which he doesn’t know he shares. Powers does a beautiful job with these characters, as we see each of them navigate through their self-preoccupations, their histories (shared and not) and where their own needs intersect with others’.

Rebecca Keith is Program Manager at the National Book Foundation. Her poetry is forthcoming in the 2009 edition of Best New Poets, edited by Kim Addonizio, a 2001 National Book Award Finalist in Poetry.

ISBN: 9780312426439

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Mark Z. Danielewski for Only Revolutions
Ken Kalfus for A Disorder Peculiar to the Country
Dana Spiotta for Eat the Document
Jess Walter for The Zero

Fiction Judges that Year:

Bharati Mukherjee, Jonathan Lethem, Craig Nova, David Plante, Marianne Wiggins

The Year in Literature:

March by Geraldine Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

After earning his MA in literature from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Richard Powers took a job in Boston as a computer programmer. But an encounter with the 1914 photograph “Young Farmers” by August Sander at the Museum of Fine Arts inspired him to quit his job and spend the next two years writing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985).
The Echo Maker was Powers’ ninth novel, and in addition to winning the National Book Award in 2006, it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2007.

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2005

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:48:45 +0000

Europe Central

By William T. Vollmann

Original and Current PublisherViking Press
(Penguin Group USA, Inc.)

Tom LeClair writes:

Since serving on the 2005 committee that gave the award to William Vollmann’s Europe Central, I’ve become an NBA junkie, reading all of the finalists since then and catching up with many winners that I’d not read since 1974 when Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow shared the award. Europe Central caused some consternation within the committee and elicited considerable surprise the night of the awards. The next day I checked various bookstores around Manhattan, and none were displaying it and several didn’t have it in stock. I continue to see large stacks of remainders, but given this anniversary opportunity I have two claims many readers may find unlikely.

Although the last three winners—The Echo Maker, Tree of Smoke, and Shadow Country—are admirably wide-ranging in their knowledge of science or history, subtle in their examinations of moral ambiguity, and relatively unconventional in their narrative methods, I think Europe Central is the best of this excellent recent group. Vollmann’s novellas, stories, and sketches set in central Europe before and during World War II demonstrate a remarkable knowledge of non-American history and culture. Told through the points of view of Russian and German generals, artists, politicians, and ordinary citizens, the fictions provide original perspectives on ethically complex events that include, but are not limited to, the Holocaust. Vollmann’s successors concentrate on Americans even, as in Johnson’s case, when the novel is set abroad. Europe Central imagines the lives and situations of distant others, making it an instructive literary alternative to the American exceptionalism of its decade.

My second claim: that Europe Central is a worthy companion to Pynchon’s World War II novel Gravity’s Rainbow, which I consider the most important award winner of the last thirty-five years. If not as stylistically diverse or as surreally inventive as Gravity’s Rainbow, Vollmann’s fact-based stories also eschew the sophomoric foolery and cartoonish characters that sometimes diminish Pynchon’s novel after multiple readings. Pynchon is wonderful on pre-human life and post-human existence; Vollmann’s achievement is his compulsive exploration of the all too human. Although I have not read every NBA winner since 1974, I would place Europe Central in my select group of Pynchon’s successors: William Gaddis’s JR, William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, and Norman Rush’s Mating, all expansive books (like Vollmann’s) of great cultural range and narrative vigor.

Limited to 400 words here, I’m unable to provide 200 pages of demonstration for this provocation.

Tom LeClair was a National Book Awards Fiction judge in 2005. His most recent novel is Passing Through.

ISBN: 9780143036593

Fiction Finalists that Year:

E.L. Doctorow for The March
Mary Gaitskill for Veronica
Christopher Sorrentino for Trance
Renè Steinke for Holy Skirts

Fiction Judges that Year:

Andre Dubus III, Rikki Ducornet, Cristina Garcia, Tom LeClair, Anna Quindlen

The Year in Literature:

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

After earning a B.A. in comparative literature at Cornell University, William T. Vollmann went on to the University of California, Berkeley, on a fellowship for a doctoral program in comparative literature. He dropped out of the program after one year and began working a series of odd jobs, including one as a secretary at an insurance company, and saved up enough money to go to Afghanistan in 1982. His experiences traveling with the mujahideen formed the basis of his first non-fiction book, An Afghanistan Picture Show or, How I Saved the World, which was published in 1992.

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2004

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:19:25 +0000

The News From Paraguay

By Lily Tuck

Original Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Current Publisher: Harper Perennial

Harold Augenbraum writes:

On the first page of The News from Paraguay, which is set in an unknown (by most people) and perhaps unknowable place, a blue feather appears. I remember it as being the only primary color in the book (though this might not be true, it remains in my memory), the rest being muted tones of brown and gray, like a series of vintage photographs described and detailed as portraits in words but without any cloyingly romantic or nostalgic description, a spareness of attitude toward objects and scenes that results in structures poking through like skeletons: letters, lists, songs, poems. Gradually, the structures deteriorate, and the characters end up in muck and mire, with no edifice left to either their lives or stories. It’s so interesting that the country dissolves around them as well, as if the external and internal world were so linked in the writer’s imagination that the “real” world in the book and the “imagined” world can fall apart simultaneously. The ridiculous war that serves as a backdrop to the story of love and marriage at the center of the novel, the real war between Paraguay and Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay, The War of the Triple Alliance that took place in the 1850s and still angers many in Paraguay, brings down the political and personal world in which the main character Ella plays an unexpected role. I remember when I first read it five years ago thinking that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq lay as undercurrents to this mad war in Paraguay, but that’s no matter. What matters in this book is the consistent mining of narrative voices in the service of fractured and frantic lives.

After you read this, read Lily Tuck’s earlier Siam, about another woman caught up in political irrationality.

Harold Augenbraum is Executive Director of the National Book Foundation, an editor and translator.

ISBN: 9780739451595

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Sarah Shun-lien Bynum for Madeleine is Sleeping
Christine Schutt for Florida
Joan Silber for Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories
Kate Walbert for Our Kind

Fiction Judges that Year:

Linda Hogan, Randall Kenan, Rick Moody, Stewart O’Nan, Susan Straight

The Year in Literature:

The Known World by Edward P. Jones won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Elfriede Jelinek won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

Lily Tuck has published four novels, a collection of short stories, and a biography. In addition to her National Book Award for The News from Paraguay, she also received a nomination for the 2000 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her novel, Siam. Her collection of short stories, Limbo, or Other Places I Have Lived, was published in 2002, and her most recent book, Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante, was published in 2008.

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2003

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 03:00:17 +0000

The Great Fire

By Shirley Hazzard

Original Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Current Publisher: Picador (Macmillan)

Julie Barer writes:

In a 2004 interview for the Washington Post website, Shirley Hazzard addressed why she was drawn to writing about love:

“It's perhaps the most interesting phenomenon, it's almost like a spell that's cast on us, falling in love, that is. There is nothing else like it in life, and I think it is a central element of existence, either the attaining of it, or the lack of it, because the lack of love is a preoccupation of people. It's very obviously a part of our literary history, it has been a central concern to every writer, and that's because it's a central concern to everyone who lives. Also many things happen because of love, people withdraw from life or become violent for lack of love. And where there is not love, there is nothing.”

Hazzard’s fascination with love is evident throughout her gorgeously written and mesmerizing novel The Great Fire. Set in 1947, two years after the end of World War Two, Hazzard’s fourth book is about the emotional fallout of the war and the struggle by those who survived it to create life out of the ashes of death and devastation. Aldred Leith, a British soldier in his thirties, is a decorated and wounded veteran traveling through Asia attempting to record what he sees as the last days of an ancient culture being swept away by both modernization and the destruction of the war.

At the beginning of the novel Leith arrives at a military outpost near Hiroshima where he meets and promptly falls in love with Helen Driscoll, the seventeen year old daughter of Leith’s host, a tyrannical administrator from Australia. Helen’s brother Benedict is dying and the siblings immediately enchant Leith with their curiosity and hungry intelligence, their sympathetic natures, and their passion for literature. As Benedict’s health deteriorates, Leith and Helen’s romance grows, and he finds himself being drawn out of the haunted existence he has been leading. What better way to feel alive, to remember what is good about being alive, than to fall in love?

Thus, at the top of the path, Helen walked on by herself, straight into that other existence where she had less and less place. As she walked, she put her hand to her mouth to hold his kiss, and to her breast to enclose his touch.

The man, instead, went to his own room and to his table – to those papers where the ruined continents and cultures and existences that had consumed his mind and body for years had given place to her story and his. He could not consider this a reduction – the one theme having embroiled the century and the world, and the other recasting his single fleeting miraculous life. Having expected, repeatedly, to die from the great fires into which time had pitched him, he had discovered a desire to live completely, by which he meant, with her.

What makes The Great Fire such a special novel is the lush and palpable desire present in so many of its pages, desire not just for physical consummation but for human connection and hope, made all the more meaningful by the backdrop of the cruelty and violence of war.

Hazzard’s elegant and controlled style and careful attention to detail help the story become more than just a novel about the nature of war, but a novel about the nature of love itself. At one point, Hazzard has Leith reflecting on the kind of man his father was:

“Not a great man, but interesting and singular. Not loving, but seized, even grandly, with the phenomenon of love.”

And thankfully for us, Shirley Hazzard too is seized with the phenomenon of love. We should all be as lucky.

Julie Barer is a literary agent in New York. One of her clients, Joshua Ferris, was a National Book Award Finalist in 2007 for his first novel, Then We Came to the End. www.barerliterary.com

Cecily Patterson writes:

“Persons of sensibility have enough trouble finding their bearings without being plunged into fires not of their making,” writes Shirley Hazzard in The Great Fire. While the Great Fire itself is the conflagration of World War II, it seems there are many lesser fires still burning in the aftermath of the end of the war. Through her hero, Aldred Leith, Ms. Hazzard aims her brilliant prose in an effort to illuminate the center of those burnings. Leith, while indeed a person of sensibility, seems to have the capability of rising above the flames while those around him either catch fire or are the opposite, made of asbestos. Leith seems to be the one who holds the fire extinguisher. The persons of sensibility include the fey young brother and sister Benedict and Helen, who both capture Leith’s imagination and ignite romantic love; his friend Peter Exley, who in a moment of extreme shift away from sense changes the path of his life and health, Aurora, Leith’s former lover and later his father’s lover, Leith’s mother, and a Japanese servant who commits hari-kari. The asbestos-clad include Benedict’s and Helen’s antipodean parents, (who, even though they are horrible petty snobs, I loved to read about) Leith’s own father, (a famous writer who writes of love without seeming to succumb to its snares himself) the American Slater, and a large amount of any country’s civil servants. While the great fires of World War II burned to ashes an unimaginable number of souls, there were those like Aldred Leith who managed to walk through the fires and emerge, while not unscathed, tempered, and with a grave compassion towards those who have lost their bearings. The book skips backwards and forwards in time and place to show us not only how Leith’s personal war unfolded in the greater world of war but also how perhaps Leith’s inherent nature was shaped by his path and by his ability to choose sense when sensibility would prevail. When sensibility does overcome him, it comes in the form of love and young Helen, and while loss both informs and moves their romance forward, the flickering between them seems a fire that heals and warms without burning. To not become asbestos-clad seemed to me the message Hazzard sends. To temper oneself without burning up. This is a beautifully written book whose poetic phrases lingered in my head while driving to soccer games or shopping for the chicken. “Translucent structures are not welcoming in the rain.” I live in a rainy climate and who would not want a gift of a phrase like that to ponder under a dripping awning? Hazzard’s gifts are many.

Cecily Patterson is writer living in Portland, Oregon. Her fiction has been published in Room With A View, the Pennsylvania Quarterly and Critical Quarterly.

ISBN: 9780312423582

Fiction Finalists that Year:

T.C Boyle for Drop City
Edward P. Jones for The Known World
Scott Spencer for A Ship Made of Paper
Marianne Wiggins for Evidence of Things Unseen: A Novel

Fiction Judges that Year:

Antonya Nelson, Alice Elliot Dark, Peter Cameron, Jay Parini, Jean Thompson

The Year in Literature:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
J. M. Coetzee won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

Shirley Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, but left in 1947 to travel through Southeast Asia with her parents. Hazzard's early life “was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll’s”—the heroine of The Great Fire, Hazzard’s fourth novel. That book took her twenty years to write, but the effort paid off. In addition to winning the 2003 National Book Award, The Great Fire won the 2004 Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and named a 2003 Book of the Year by The Economist.

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2002

National Book Awards, www.nbafictionblog.org — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 00:56:23 +0000

Three Junes

By Julia Glass

Original Publisher: Pantheon (Random House, Inc.)
Current Publisher: Anchor (Random House, Inc.)

Judy Blundell writes:

On a first read, I thought it was all about family. The nerve-straining gatherings, the tender places we don’t jab, the tender places we do.

But now I know better. Three Junes is all about death. In a dark kitchen, a man embraces his wife from behind as she stands at the sink. What he doesn’t realize is that she’s in the midst of a mercy killing, drowning a newborn puppy. Love and death in a clinch, and Glass never peels them apart.

There are two agonizing deaths in Three Junes and one accidental, close-to-comical one. Paul, Fenno, and Fern slide through memory, trying to get a grasp on grief. Fenno is the center of the triptych, and oh, how I love him. Poor clenched Fenno, so afraid of desire; for much of the book his most intense physical pleasures are limited to the nibbles of his pet bird and the day in spring when the Fed-Ex drivers switch to shorts.

Three Junes isn’t about AIDS, but it is about a certain place at a certain time, Greenwich Village in the midst of a plague. There’s no political rage in this book, just the rage of Mal as his body fails in excruciating ways. “Burn it!” he cries to his mother, and so they do, scattering his ashes in a lake. At that point in my reading I jackknifed forward, my head in my lap, and let out a sob-- for a young Mal as Fenno imagines him, a joyous boy careening into a lake, but also for the boys I knew in San Francisco in the early eighties, gorgeous in their Levi 501s. It was not uncommon, back then, for a friend to gesture at one of those delightfully painted Victorians and mention that everyone he’d known who’d lived there was dead.

I remember reading Julia Glass’s acceptance speech and enjoying the small parallels between us-- I, too, had been surprisingly and enormously pregnant at forty-four; I, too, had written for hire but published my first novel from the heart in my forties. “You never, never know,” she says, and it is this sense of wonder at how life blindsides you with the terrible and the marvelous that I find so moving in Three Junes. It’s Mal’s cry-- “for fuck’s sake, live.” It’s what makes me love this book, and, incidentally (head duck, author crush), worship Julia Glass from afar.

Judy Blundell won the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature in 2008 for her novel, What I Saw and How I Lied.

ISBN: 9780385721424

Fiction Finalists that Year:

Mark Costello for Big If
Adam Haslett for You Are Not a Stranger Here
Martha McPhee for Gorgeous Lies
Brad Watson for The Heaven of Mercury

Fiction Judges that Year:

Bob Shacochis, Adrienne Brodeur, David Wong Louie, Jay McInerney, Jacquelyn Mitchard

The Year in Literature:

Empire Falls by Richard Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Imre Kertész won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

More Information:

Intending to become a painter, Julia Glass moved from her home state of Massachusetts to New York City, where she lived for many years, painting in a small studio in Brooklyn and supporting herself as a freelance editor. Three Junes (2002) was her debut novel, and she has since written two others: The Whole World Over (2006) and I See You Everywhere (2009).

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