Tonight’s National Book Critics Circle awards ceremony in New York will be a low-key affair. Held in a university auditorium, there is usually little glitz attached to the ceremony. The afterparty is generally more tweedy than boozy. But in a world where “low-key” can mean “high-status”, the lack of glitter is almost an indication of the prestige of the awards.
The NBCC’s membership is about as book-nerdish as it gets, composed as it is of the people who spend all year arguing with each other about the state of literature today. This can be more contentious than you’d think, which some elements of the procedure reflect. For example, the final choices aren’t made until the day of the awards, when the board physically gathers together to argue over the choices. (Full disclosure: I am a member of the NBCC, but because I don’t sit on the board, I have no vote or influence over who wins tonight.)
One good side-effect of that process is that the NBCC awards tend to reflect the larger currents of literary conversation. I do not think it is an accident, to that end, that the NBCC’s shortlists this year seemed particularly diverse, especially in fiction and poetry. To put it bluntly: the NBCC is no longer the kind of body that prioritises the work of “old white men”. It’s reflecting some kind of (very welcome) tidal shift.
That change has brought us the dual nominations given to Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric. The book-length rumination on race relations in America – new printings of Citizen have updated its list of black men killed in America – has been nominated in both poetry and criticism, the first time a dual nomination has ever been given. It suggests that the NBCC is convinced of the continuing social relevance of poetry, an art form which, in recent years, has been often – and prematurely – pronounced dead. It also seems to guarantee that Rankine will be given the award in one or the other category.
Another interesting feature of tonight’s awards will be the prominence of small presses. In an era in which the big publishing houses are seen as overly responsive to commercial tastes, it’s no accident that the NBCC chooses to honour books from smaller houses. University presses, like Harvard’s, are well represented here by contenders such as Thomas Piketty’s Capital. There are also many books put out by independent outfits such as Tin House of Portland, Oregon, or Graywolf Press and Coffee House Press, both of Minneapolis, Minnesota. These presses, while not quite not-for-profit, tend to be more adventurous in their choices, not needing as strong a commercial hook, and have been richly rewarded critically in America for their troubles. Increasingly, they dominate whole genres: Graywolf, for example, has three books nominated in the criticism category: Eula Biss’s On Immunity, Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime, and Citizen.
Few big names are nominated tonight. In fiction, the much-celebrated Marilynne Robinson has been shortlisted for her spare, lyrical novel Lila. But otherwise the novelists are all on the rise, rather than at the pinnacle of their careers. Given that Robinson has won the award before, it seems likely that the NBCC will choose to reward one of the four other books: Marlon James’s A History of Seven Killings, Lily King’s Euphoria, Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, and Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea.
If I were a betting woman, my money would be on the James. But then, the NBCCs have never been a competition that lends itself well to predictions.
