Richard Powers’s novel The Overstory was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize in Fiction.
In a starred review, Kirkus called the book “a magnificent achievement: a novel that is, by turns, both optimistic and fatalistic, idealistic without being naïve.”
Here’s a sampling of this year’s Pulitzer winners and finalists, with bonus links where available.
Fiction:
- Winner: The Overstory by Richard Powers (This book was the subject of two essays on the site.)
- The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai (Read our interview with Makkai here.)
- There There by Tommy Orange (Read his Year in Reading.)
Drama:
- Winner: Fairview by Jackie Sibblies Drury (Drury is mentioned, briefly, in Donald Quist’s Year in Reading.)
- Dance Nation by Clare Barron
- What the Constitution Means to Me by Heidi Schreck
History:
- Winner: Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight
- American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson
- Civilizing Torture: An American Tradition by W. Fitzhugh Brundage
Biography:
- Winner: The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (Winner of the 2018 National Book Award in Nonfiction.)
- Proust’s Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris by Caroline Weber
- The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam by Max Boot
Poetry:
- Winner: Be With by Forrest Gander (Mentioned in Ada Limón’s Year in Reading.)
- feeld by Jos Charles (An August 2018 Must-Read.)
- Like by A.E. Stallings (A September 2018 Must-Read.)
General Nonfiction:
- Winner: Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold
- In a Day’s Work: The Fight to End Sexual Violence Against America’s Most Vulnerable Workers by Bernice Yeung
- Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
Winners and finalists in other categories are available at the Pulitzer website.
William Gass: “Because the Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill – not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.”
Fret not, Anon, Richard “Patzer” Powers is just a token white guy… he isn’t being lauded for being a mediocrity, he’s merely embodying being lucky to be one.
Here’s a numbingly Franzenoid sample from the prize-winner:
“HE CONSULTS with his advisor. Professor Mieke Van Dijk, she of the sublime Dutch bob, clipped
consonants, and soft-core softened vowels. In fact, she makes him confer with her every two weeks, in her office up in College Ten, hoping the enforced check-in will jump-start his research.
“You are dragging your feet over nothing.”
In fact, he has his feet up, reclining on her Victorian daybed across the office from her desk, as if she’s psychoanalyzing him. It amuses them both.
“Dragging . . . ? Not at all. I am utterly paralyzed.”
“But why? You make too big a deal about this. Think of a thesis . . .”—she can’t pronounce the th—“as a long seminar project. You don’t have to save the world.”
“I don’t? Can I at least save a nation-state or two?”
She laughs; her wide overbite quickens his pulse. “Listen, Adam. Pretend this has nothing to do with your career. Nothing to do with any professional approval. What do you, personally, want to discover? What would give you enjoyment to study for a couple of years?”
He watches the words spill from that pretty mouth, free from the socialscientific jargon that she tends to drop into in seminars. “This enjoyment you speak about . . .”
“Tsh. You want to know something.”
He wants to know whether she has ever, even once, thought of him sexually. It isn’t inconceivable. She’s only a decade older than he is. And she is —he wants to say robust. He feels a weird need to tell her how he got here, in her office, looking for a thesis topic. Wants to draw his entire intellectual history in a straight line—from daubing nail polish on the abdomens of ants to watching his beloved undergraduate mentor die—then ask her where the line leads next.”
Tepidly dire stuff. The stylistic difference between this “magnificent achievement” and ten thousand bland TV entertainments of the past and present = ?