You could say that the National Book Awards are a bit like the Golden Globes of the American literary world. They are the first major awards of the season, held in conjunction with a massive fancy dinner where people in expensive outfits get drunk together. There is, still, that crucial difference: no major television network comes to film the pale, sweaty figures that write most of the great books you read all year.
And the NBAs are not really a dress rehearsal for future book awards the way the Golden Globes set up the actor-acceptance-speech season. The National Book Critics’ Circle and the Pulitzer committee tend to go their own way. The NBAs have struggled for years to articulate their own identity in the field, sometimes going with rewarding obscure, under-applauded work and other years rewarding already popular books in order to remain culturally relevant.
This year’s nominations reveal a compromise.
In fiction, we have both heavyweights and newcomers on the shortlist. Marilynne Robinson, who is often listed among the greatest living American novelists, is nominated for her book Lila, the latest in her sequence of novels about faith in small-town Iowa. The first of those books, Gilead, won the Pulitzer prize in 2005, but the literary community may feel she’s due another accolade. Besides Lila, Phil Klay’s debut collection of stories, Redeployment, is the other book I’d put money on. A former marine himself, Klay’s book drew raves and comparisons to Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for its elegant articulation of the modern American soldier’s experience in Iraq.
But the shortlist is diverse enough that it really could be anyone’s prize. Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, which follows a blind girl caught up in the second world war, has many admirers too. It is joined by Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, which traces the mid-life crisis of a female translator in Beirut, Lebanon. And the list rounds out with Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic, dystopian bestseller Station Eleven.
Odds are even more difficult to gauge with the non-fiction list, though it at least promises to kick up controversy. The American literary scene is obsessed with memoir and essays at the moment. You can’t turn around without tripping on autobiographical essay collections. And yet the only memoir nominated for an NBA is Roz Chast’s Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? It is well-done, but to pick it is to spark a thousand thinkpieces about the ascendancy of memoir.
The other books are all the kind of thick, dense, researched and reported non-fiction. They are the sort of books that used to be called “serious” until someone realized how gendered the compliment sounded and filed the term away in a cabinet. Their titles are designed to preclude any further description: Anand Gopal’s No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, Edward O Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence, John Lahr’s Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh and Evan Osnos’s Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China. And picking one of them will spark a thousand thinkpieces about the marginalization of memoir.
But the real star power, the ingenue moment, may come in the poetry contest tonight. Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric is the first book of poetry in quite some time to capture the attention of the mainstream literary press. It got a long review in the New Yorker. It has garnered that kind of notice because of Rankine’s approach to poetry, which feels new and original and different and could best be called “documentary”. And she is writing directly on themes of race and state violence that we may want to talk about in this year of Ferguson, Missouri. If she triumphs tonight over Louise Glück, Fanny Howe, Maureen McLane and Fred Moten, I’d guess that it’s because Rankine wrote the book that, out of all those on these shortlists, felt the most urgent.
