Earlier in the week, the longlist for this year’s Man Booker Prize was announced, and the Anglophone news media dutifully sat up straight and took notice. In September the shortlist will be announced, and the news media will sit up even straighter and take even more notice and, for a month or so, fiction — six works of fiction published in the last year, to be exact — will be a more prevalent topic of discussion in the press and online. Already, the customary kvetching about unjustly overlooked books is well underway. In Ireland, where I’m from, the number of our long- and shortlisted compatriots is usually seen as a reliable indicator of the award’s continued relevance. If William Trevor or Anne Enright or Colm Tóibín makes the grade, there is hope yet for the Booker; if not, it is doomed to subside more or less irrevocably into irrelevance. As I write this, The Irish Times already seems to be cracking its knuckles and asking its readership to hold its jacket as it prepares to duke it out over the coming outrage of the shortlist. A report on the longlist points out that Sebastian Barry is “the lone Irishman alongside eight British subjects and three Canadians” (note the subtly politicizing insistence on stressing the British authors’ relationship to their head of state). The article then moves on to discuss the matter of neglected books, drawing the battle lines in historically explicit (and absurd) terms, informing us that “surprise omissions this year amount to a literary Somme.”
You’ll find similar stuff in most of the major newspapers, at least in Britain and Ireland, where the Booker has the highest level of what I think is referred to, by people who use words like “traction,” as “traction.” This is all pretty harmless stuff, of course — most of us would like the writers we think important to be recognized — and it gets people talking about books, buying them, and maybe even reading them, all of which are good things. But every time there is an announcement about a major literary award, there is always this low tumult of grumbling about all the great writers the judges have “snubbed” (this is usually the verb of choice when it comes to describing the failures of those charged with awarding prizes to books). And I have to admit to being as guilty of this as the next guy, and probably more so. When Tom McCarthy’s C was shortlisted for the Booker last year, I fooled myself into thinking that a) it had a chance of winning the thing and that b) if it did win, it would, more importantly, mark the beginning of a trend toward greater mainstream interest in novels of a non-middlebrow persuasion. When Howard Jacobson’s almost aggressively unremarkable The Finkler Question eventually won, I briefly allowed myself to get irritated about it, as though it were some kind of personal affront that Sir Andrew Motion and his panel of judges had chosen to give a prestigious award to a writer I didn’t much care for over one I did.
But here’s the question: why do we even care about this stuff? So Tom McCarthy — or whoever it was you might have wanted to win — didn’t get a prize. Does it really matter? By and large, awards like the Booker are intended to promote solid, well-written, more or less middlebrow fiction — the kind of books that broadsheet newspapers tend to give coverage to. And that’s surely a good thing for the publishing industry, for the literary editors of papers that still have books pages, for the small number of writers who get the nod, for booksellers and (I would guess) for the manufacturers of those stickers that get slapped with startling speed onto the dust jackets of shortlisted titles. But does it really matter at any other level — at the level, for instance, of literary culture as opposed to the publishing industry? I’m not convinced it does.
I recently taught a night course focusing on novels which have won the Booker over the course of its short history. It was a hugely fun class to teach. The students were predominantly in their fifties, sixties, and seventies — retirees, middle-aged professionals and empty-nesters, mainly, who wanted to be better informed on contemporary fiction. The individual novels mostly went over well (albeit with a couple of pretty grim exceptions), but two questions kept coming up again and again in the classes: 1) why are literary awards important? and 2) why do we give so much attention to the Booker Prize specifically? Given that I was teaching the class, it wasn’t unreasonable of them to expect me to be able to answer these questions, but I could never manage anything less lame than “well, literary awards highlight exceptional books — or they’re supposed to, at least — and the Booker Prize is often very controversial, so it gets people talking about fiction, which is positive…” I don’t think the students were especially convinced. I know I wasn’t.
Reading and discussing certain novels, there was an unavoidable sense of arbitrariness, a sense that these books probably would not be much read had they not won the Booker, and that that might not necessarily have been an unsustainable loss to the literary world. By what reasonable criterion (I found myself obliged to address) could Ian McEwan’s harmlessly diverting Amsterdam, for instance, be considered the best work of fiction published in Britain, Ireland, and the countries of the Commonwealth in 1998? Why had Kingsley Amis won the prize for a pretty dull book called The Old Devils, while his son Martin had never got a look-in for those brilliant ones he wrote in the eighties and early nineties? Could I please explain why anyone could consider Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (a novel I happen to like quite a lot) even worth talking about? And, most pressingly of all, what the hell was so great about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children that they had to give it not just the Booker itself in 1981, but also something called The Booker of Bookers in 1993, and then something else called The Best of the Booker in 2008? (I was, and still am, at a complete loss to answer this last question, apart from hazarding that they were perhaps so insecure about their initial choice that they felt a powerful need to overcompensate by reinforcing it in more and more ostentatious ways).
A lot of great novelists have won the thing for really excellent novels — Ishiguro, Atwood, Banville, Coetzee (twice) — but spending months reading through so many of the winning books in order to set the reading for the course really impressed upon me how unreliable an indicator of literary importance or comparative quality the prize is per se. And the same is true, to some degree, of all book awards. So why do so many of us get so bent out of shape when they fail to represent what we think of as the best of contemporary fiction? Was it really an outrage that Howard Jacobson had been awarded the Booker over Tom McCarthy, as I fleetingly managed to convince myself last year? No, it wasn’t: it was an anomaly that a wildcard like C had even been shortlisted in the first place. Getting worked up about the fact that really interesting, innovative fiction so often gets ignored by awards judges is, when you think about it, a little bit absurd. I don’t think it’s an injustice that, say, The Minutemen never won a Grammy — it would be frankly odd of me to even bring that up. Why would they have? The idea that that might even matter is somehow quietly insane — they weren’t the kind of band the Grammys were set up to be awarded to, and who cares about the Grammys anyway? And I think a more tempered version of the same stance should probably be taken toward literary awards. They’re great for the publishing industry, they’re great for the handful of writers who win them, and they’re great for the readers who would not otherwise have discovered those writers. But I don’t think anyone in their right mind should be looking for them to accurately reflect what’s really happening — what is truly vital and new and exciting — in contemporary fiction.
The whole idea of awards is not really compatible with serious consideration of literature in the first place. When you read stuff in the press about there being “a strong field” this year, about certain writers not having “made the cut,” and about bookmakers offering punters (i.e., readers) odds on novels, you kind of have to recognize how essentially daft the whole thing is. Writers are not jockeys, books are not horses, and readers are not punters.
That being said, if you’re looking to make a quick buck you could do a lot worse than putting a little something on Alan Hollinghurst to take the Booker this year. I for one think he’s showing some serious form.
Image credit: ThisisHoop/Flickr
Are they geniuses or are they just the latest “cool” writers? Time will tell.
Ben Lerner deserves it for being a good writer and let’s face it, Coates (as much as I think he’s ridiculous sometimes) deserves it. Good for them.
Of course, the stuff about art and the art world is literally the worst parts of Ben Lerner. Less stuff about “the chasm between a life lived and a thing made” and more stuff about writers turning into octopuses.
Whatever happened to that lady who won for “Alligatorland?” Is she still a genius?
Anyone with 625K is a genius. Don’t you know that by now? This is America.
Josef — do you mean “Swamplandia”? It took me some time to remember the real name of the book, so I guess that speaks volumes.
Does that Pynchon guy still write?
Yeah, Swamplandia. Actually, my comment was possibly the meanest thing I’ve ever said on this website.
Sorry for bringing down the vibe, everyone :(
That said, I’m surprised Roxanne Gay never won a Genius Award. That seems like it would have been a shoe-in. She may have missed her moment though.
As far as Coates goes… I can’t really say anything because I haven’t read the book. Every time I go to click “Buy” I start thinking about how worked up the NYTimes people got over it, and then, I just can’t do it. I can’t click “Buy.” It seems like to do so would be a giant waste of my time. I say to myself, “could anything that gets David Brooks that upset be of actual importance?” And then I look at the people who came running to attack David Brooks, and it’s just too much.
Josef you are not wrong – I would also think that Gay would win it, not because she’s a good writer but because she’s on the correct side politically (and very far on that side). I can’t imagine the MacArthur Grant (or any major award) going to a conservative, actually. It’s just not done.
Don’t know the work of the playwright or the poet but Coates and Lerner are horrible choices. The one is already a #1 NY Times Best Seller so I would hope the committee selecting these things would have awarded the genius grant to someone who actually needed the money (also, Coates is a hypocrite and viciously hate-filled racist who screams like a lunatic in a way that if the races were reversed and some purported “public intellectual” was widely and haphazardly degrading “black people” the way Coates says “white people,” they would never work again). Lerner is a gimmicky bastard whose poetic chops are not unsubstantial but to call him a “novelist” is a joke and a affront to the form, in reality he isn’t much better than Lena Dunham, Sheila Heti, Miranda July or the other wave of entitled millennial navel gazers. But hey, maybe Voigt and Miranda are legitimate geniuses so I’m glad to have the opportunity to look into their work when I have time. It’s hard for any organization, even the MacArthur grants, to bat a thousand. Over half a million dollars to Coates who doesn’t need it and Lerner’s smarmy behind is a disgrace though.
There’s a very sapient saying we have in German: Those who have, will be given. The same applies to our literary awards and grants here in Switzerland: a stipend for those who already earn handily from their publishers.
[On a surrealistically related note: the disgraced, ex-VW CEO might be getting a cool 24millions as a farewell tip…]
@Sean H
“a hypocrite and viciously hate-filled racist”
Tell us how you really feel!
The opprobrium being lobbed about in this thread is uncalled for. Yes, it’s a stupid name for a big prize. Bunch of real critical thinkers up in here.
Critical thinking is why we have a desire to turn back upon it’s perpetrators this ray of contempt for the American reading public.
I am in the midst of reading Coates now. It seems he has hit a nerve, at least for Sean H., which is fine. It is amazing how many writers he dissed within a single post. I wonder if he writes and, if he does, is he better than Lena Dunham and co.
I do write but I’m also a professor and, honestly, the average college upperclassmen English major at a halfway decent school has more writing ability than Dunham, Heti or July. They’re literally terrible, part of the “famous for no reason” cult that has taken over America. I think Coates’ ideology is absolutely divisive, noxious and deluded but the guy has legitimate journalistic chops and even though I wholeheartedly disagree with him, his ability to put together words and images is not at all dismissible. And Lerner has to get his head out of this quasi-memoir phase of his career but his poetry is no joke. He’s a real talent, he just needs to do what he does best and be a poet instead of thinking he’s some sort of prose writer. Young notoriety, as David Foster Wallace has talked about, is often the worst thing for a writer.
I really like Ben Lerner’s books of poetry, and I was happy for him when I heard that he got the big cash prize. But I also suspect that he would not have been anywhere near that list of winners if he had not written two books of prose. His poetry is outstanding, but I have yet to warm up to his prose. Writing both is a crossover that is very hard to master, even for the most talented of authors. At least in my opinion.