Literary commentators can probably now stop calling Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life a “sleeper hit”, seeing as it’s won a place on this year’s National Book award fiction longlist as well as the Booker shortlist. Yanagihara’s lyrical tragic novel about a group of friends coming of age in New York may have had a slow start sales and publicity-wise, but it’s now just a regular old literary success.
That Yanagihara should be the most widely known name on the longlist – her only real rival in that regard is Nell Zink, whose Mislaid generated plenty of its own press – suggests what an open and somewhat eclectic year it’s been for American contemporary fiction. Only American citizens are eligible for the National Book award, which significantly narrows the field of appropriate choices. And 2015 was not a year stuffed with many marquee releases, or at least not American ones.
Yet the lack of established literary names on the list – everyone will undoubtedly note the absence of Jonathan Franzen’s Purity – still feels like the deliberate work of the jury. This year’s judges are indeed an unusually particularly varied crew: the novelists Laura Lippman and Daniel Alarcón, the Los Angeles Times book critic David L Ulin, the poet Jeffrey Renard Allen and Sarah Bagby, a bookstore owner from Wichita, Kansas.
And these novels are all pretty different from one another in style, tone and content. Zink and Yanagihara, to start with, are almost at opposite ends of the literary spectrum though both are at least somewhat realist. Mislaid is an irreverent, playful satire of race and class in America; A Little Life is a traditional bildungsroman with an elegiac manner, barely if ever cracking a joke.
Jesse Ball’s novel, A Cure for Suicide, contains few character names – “the claimant” and “the examiner” – and is narrated in an arch, distant voice of more experimental work. Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies is, meanwhile, a more traditional novel of a marriage in good times and bad. Karen E Bender’s short stories are about money, Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House about several generations of a family in Detroit.
In fact, the only close similarity on the list that I can draw – though I haven’t read either Johnson book, or the Pearlman – comes between Yanagihara’s book and Clegg’s which are similar in tone and both leap off from animating tragedies. (I’ll admit I much preferred the Yanagihara, and agreed with the New York Times’s devastating review of the Clegg: “This is one of those novels in which digression piles upon digression until the digressions become the thing itself.”)
In short, what the list shows (to the extent it shows anything; prizes are always a bit of an arbitrary game) is that at the moment things are in full, glorious flux in American literary fiction. Which is, no doubt, as it should be.
The longlist, in full:
Jesse Ball, A Cure for Suicide
Bill Clegg, Did You Ever Have a Family
Karen E Bender, Refund
Angela Flournoy, The Turner House
Lauren Groff, Fates and Furies
Adam Johnson, Fortune Smiles
T Geronimo Johnson, Welcome to Braggsville
Edith Pearlman, Honeydew
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life
Nell Zink, Mislaid
