A Look At Literary Prize Overlap

Last week, Wolf Hall collected a second major literary prize for its "Mantel" (sorry...) when it won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hillary Mantel's period piece about Thomas Cromwell's rise to power in the court of King Henry VIII also won The Man Booker Prize last year. 

Wolf Hall's second award got me thinking: Is such award overlap frequent among the major literary prizes? By major literary prizes, I mean the Pulitzer, the National Book Award, the Man Booker and the NBCC. And I only mean the fiction version. 

So let's take a look: Wolf Hall's dual Booker and NBCC prize isn't even the first time it's happened in the last five years. Karin Desai's The Inheritance of Loss won the Booker and NBCC in 2006. That book won my own literary prize, too: Longest, most fractured, and totally boring book I've ever read. 

In the last 30 years, other prize overlap also has happened several times — most frequently with the Pulitzer and NBCC. Junot Diaz's fantastic novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao won the NBCC in 2007 and the Pulitzer in 2008.  Edward Jones's The Known World (which bored me silly) won the NBCC in 2003 and Pulitzer in 2004. Rabbit at Rest by John Updike won the Pulitzer in 1991 and the NBCC in 1990. And Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres won both in 1992.

Only twice in the last 30 years have the NBA and Pulitzer overlapped: Alice Walker's The Color Purple won the NBA and the Pulitzer in 1983 and Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the NBA in 1993 and Pulitzer in 1994. 

So there you have it — award overlap isn't nearly as rare as I might have thought. Apparently when the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award go to the same novel, then we'll really have a piece of news.

By the way, have you read Wolf Hall? I haven't, but with another award under its tunic, I'm moving it several slots up my priority list. I've heard it's not difficult, just long. Your thoughts?

(Side note: I thought it a little odd that this English novel had won an American critics' award, but when I looked at the list of NBCC winners, I realized that a foreign writer winning an award voted on by more than 600 U.S. book reviewers is not that unusual either. Last year, in fact, Argentinian writer Roberto Bolano won the NBCC Award posthumously for his massive (and all-but-unreadable, I've heard) tome 2666.  British novelist Ian McEwan won the NBCC in 2002 for Atonement.)

Everything Matters!: We're All Gonna Die!!

Ron Currie Jr. would probably take umbrage with a Bud Light commercial making the rounds these days. In it, scientists spot a meteor heading toward Earth, realize that death is imminent, and commence partying as if nothing matters anymore. But Currie takes a rather unconventional route toward trying to convince you that, even when you know you're going to die, everything in fact, DOES matter. 

When our protagonist, Junior Thibodeau, is born, a mysterious voice, which stays with him his entire life, informs him the exact moment the world will end. A comet will crash into the planet on June 15, 2010 at 3:44 pm EST, approximately 36 years from the day he's born. So Junior has to go through life trying to make meaning out of a seemingly purposeless existence, or as he says at a particularly low point of his adulthood, "...life has never been any great f#$%ing shakes in my opinion. In fact, it's always seemed a messy and heartbreaking and overall pointless affair."

Will Junior ever change his mind? I kept hoping so, and that's why I couldn't stop reading. Everything Matters! is a novel about discovering the pleasures of life, the importance of love, and capitalizing on opportunities. Look, death is a part of life, Currie would say. We all know we're going to die. Whether we know exactly when doesn't matter. What does is that for life to fulfilling, to matter, we must find our own paths toward life's meaning. So, carpe diem!

The story is told though a cadre of shifting narrators — Junior himself, his family and his girlfriend Amy, and the Voices Junior hears, which tell their sections to Junior ("We should tell you at this point," eg.) in a numbered countdown to Comet Day. We see Junior come of age, struggle with alcoholism and heartbreak, and generally try to make meaning of his life.

The pleasures of this novel are two-fold: the characters and the writing. The characters: Junior's brother, recovering from a teenage cocaine addiction, which rendered him, um, simple-minded, plays baseball for the Cubs. His mother is an alcoholic and his father a workaholic. And, addition to the fact that he hears the Voices, Junior himself is also the 4th smartest person on the planet, according to the Voices. But he's still a normal, easily recognizable dude, as are all these flawed-but-real characters.

Secondly, Currie is a fabulously talented, fun-to-read writer. At one point, writing about Junior and his classmates watching the Challenger explosion, he describes the booster rockets that "...fly wildly away...tracing slow, chunky vapor trails, like illiterate skywriters." I got chills. What an image!

But beyond a sentence-by-sentence basis, the inventive structure of the novel — the different narrators, the omniscient Voices counting down section-by-section to doomsday — gives a well-rounded perspective on Junior and the events of the story. The fact that other characters tell their own stories in the first person also lends a bit more realism to the novel, lest you're turned off by the narrative gimmick of the Voices telling us what's happening to Junior. And, finally, the structure works and is necessary because Junior is often so jilted and misanthropic that the multiple narrators bring much-needed reliability and trust to the story. They also provide some essential levity. If we only heard Junior's story, most readers would stop after page 75, depressed and frustrated.

The only major problem I had with the book is that just after I understood the point, and was kind of in awe of Currie's writerly prowess and looking forward to a great, profound ending, Currie turns to a sort of silly narrative trick. It made me wonder if Currie's editor didn't request another 50 or so pages to beef up the book a bit. But I don't want to dissuade you from reading this great book. The good far outweighs the bad, and the uplifting message makes it a fine book for anyone who has ever struggled to understand what it all means.

(Two other reasons I loved this novel, that I'm putting down here because most readers of this review probably won't care:  1) Currie includes a hilarious inside joke intended solely for sports geeks: Junior's older brother Rodney plays for the Cubs, and in one the sections Rodney narrates, he explains that he has to use a fake name to check into hotels to avoid stalkers. That fake name: Ron Mexico, which is also the fake name Michael Vick used when he checked into hotels. 2) There's a homage to David Foster Wallace's short story collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men — a conversation between Junior's brother Rodney and a therapist in which we only get to read Rodney's side of the conversation. Don't worry, if this post-modern strategy isn't your cup of tea, it's only a few pages and doesn't distract from the main story at all.)

Do People Still Read Philip Roth?

Not long ago, I was talking with a high school English teacher about which books and writers he most enjoys teaching. He gave me the standard answers: Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye, Toni Morrison. So I asked him if he'd ever considered teaching Philip Roth. He looked at me quizzically and said "Who? What has he written?"

That seemed odd to me, like a high school geography teacher unable to locate California on a map. But when I thought about it more, the more I worried that this wasn't just an isolated example of an English teacher who should probably consider a new profession. Is Philip Roth, one of the most prolific and brilliant American novelists ever and one of my all-time favorite writers, really losing his vaunted status as a staple of the American literary canon?  Even though he's still publishing frequently, is anyone still reading him? 

My first exposure to Roth was about 12 years ago in a literature survey class in college. Reading Operation Shylock was something of a literary awakening for me. I'd always loved to read, and even though I was wrapping up my degree in English, most of my reading-for-fun was unfocused and directionless. I didn't quite understand what I liked and what I didn't. I just read, and didn't think too deeply about what I was reading — mostly because extracting meaning from Dean Koontz isn't exactly challenging. I was skeptical of literary fiction as stuffy and boring and not cool. Reading Roth, however, was the first time I can remember reading something I knew was supposed to be heady and literary and really smart, and actually really enjoying it!

Soon after, I tried Portnoy's Complaint, perhaps Roth's most famous novel. This wasn't too long after the movie American Pie came out, and I nearly died laughing at the American Pie-esque scene in the novel (first published in 1969!) that involves the main character, and a unique and rather disturbing way of ruining the liver his family was going to have for dinner.

And that's what I've always loved about Roth (and my favorite writers, in general, for that matter.). Yeah, he's regarded as a literary genius who has won the National Book Award twice and the Pulitzer once, and is only the third novelists to have his work collected and published by the Library of America while still alive. But he can also slip into Beavis and Butthead mode, and regale you with low-brow hilariousness.

So, even though Roth, at 76 years young, is still publishing frequently (his latest titled The Humbling came out last fall, though to fairly poor reviews), it just seems to me like you don't hear much about Roth anymore. Every October, I get excited for the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, because any year now, Mr. Roth will get his due. But so far it hasn't happened. Maybe if it does, Roth's work will see a Renaissance. I can only hope!

What do you think?  Do you still read Roth? What are your favorite Roth novels? 

(If you haven't read Roth, I'd certainly encourage you to try him. A good place to start is American Pastoral, but The Human Stain, Indignation, The Plot Against America and The Great American Novel [if you're a baseball fan] are all terrific as well. )

Sympathy vs. Empathy: Ya Feel Me?

Normally, conversations or arguments that dissolve into "Well, it's just a matter semantics" are a tad lame, aren't they? It's like throwing up your hands and agreeing to disagree. But without getting into a whole thing here about prescriptive vs. descriptive grammar ('cause David Foster Wallace already took care of that for us), in my humble opinion, words DO have specific meanings and misusing a word can't be argued away with "Well, that's what I mean." And that brings me to my point: Especially in book reviews, precise language is critically important. So, today, on National Grammar Day, I wanted to spend a post to comment on something of a book review word-choice-related, um, issue I've noticed a lot lately.

Here's the deal: Many reviewers seem to use the words "empathy" and "sympathy" interchangeably when trying to explain their feelings for or reactions to literary characters. The difference is subtle, I'll grant you, but they're certainly not the same. Let's take a look...

Empathy suggests a very deep level of understanding of and identification with a character, a sense of vicariousness. To empathize is to know what it's like to walk a mile in a character's shoes, to see the world through his/her eyes. For a novelist, creating empathetic characters is really, really hard, and novelists who do so successfully are truly masters of the craft. When reading Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, about a mid-30s dude colliding with life, I kept think "YES! He nailed it. I know exactly what that's like, why he's thinking like that, and why he just did that!" That's empathy, in my view.

To sympathize, on the other finger, seems to imply that something bad has happened and you feel sorry for a character. There is certainly a level of understanding here as well, but the sharing of feeling isn't quite as complex or fully realized as when you empathize. Sympathy can actually be counterproductive if taken to its extreme: pity. Pitiful characters are usually not well-liked characters. But as an example of good sympathy, in Markus Zusak's The Book Thief, I sympathized the holy bejesus out of Liesl, the teenage girl stuck in Nazi Germany. But, I actually have NO idea what it's like to dodge air raids and eat nothing but weak pea soup at every meal. So I can't say that I could empathize with her. 

To illustrate the difference another way, I'd argue that you can sympathize with a cat, dog or duck billed platypus (normal, non-talking ones), but unless you're a Buddhist (reincarnation), it would be all but impossible to empathize with an animal.

What's your take on this "matter of semantics"? Am I right about the difference between empathy and sympathy, in your view? Have you notice these words used synonymously as well?  Does it bug you?

(By the way, I just went 'agoogling, and discovered that I am about the 4,563rd person to write on this topic. Perhaps, in the interest of originality, I should've looked into that before spending time crafting a post. D'oh!)

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders: Class Struggles in Pakistan

You've never read anything like this slim volume of eight interconnected short stories about life in modern Pakistan. I can almost guarantee it. Rescued from obscurity by its 2009 National Book Award nomination, Daniyal Mueenuddin's In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is a blend of portraits of Pakistani people, both rich and poor. The effect is a holistic image of everyday life in a country stuck in an seemingly endless loop of feudalism and class struggle.

Mueenuddin, who was born to a Pakistani father and American mother, spent seven years after college at Dartmouth trying to untangle the twisted network of kickbacks, favors, and below-the-level law enforcement at his father's farm in Pakistan. This experience — the basis for these stories — seems to have jaded Muennuddin a bit, as evidenced by a theme-setting Punjabi proverb included at the beginning of the book: "Three things for which we kill — Land, women and gold."

The strength of the book, no doubt due to Mueenuddin's dual nationality, is how these stories cross the cultural divide. When a story focuses on the servant class, American readers have no trouble understanding these Pakistanis, their lot in life and their struggle to rise. That's true even if you're revolted by the male-dominated society and poor treatment of women. When these characters do bad things — like commit adultery, or steal from their bosses — it's still not hard to comprehend why. Sometimes there is no other choice. Sometimes it's a calculated strategy to try to move up.

In one story, a young woman, whose previously rich family has fallen on tough times, believes herself to be entitled to wealth and comfort. So she seduces the rich landowner Harouni (who is the common denominator in all the stories), takes him as her lover, and takes advantage of his generosity. However, when he dies, Harouni's scornful family turns her out completely. Now, her poverty is accompanied by even more shame. Similarly, in one heartbreaking story, a woman finally turns her life around by working hard as a servant at the rich landowner's house, only to wind up back on the streets as a heroin-addicted prostitute when  Harouni dies.

So, the idea seems to be that if you're among the lower class, even if you adapt to the system, your margins still are rather thin. Your entire life and well-being is dependent on the whims and fate of your landowning boss. My favorite passage in the book sums up the dependency of servants on their masters. It is also emblematic of Mueenuddin's beautiful, elegant prose: "Gone, and they the servants would never find another berth like this one, the gravity of the house, the gentleness of the master, the vast damp rooms, the slow lugubrious pace, the order within disorder."

Several stories also focus on the upper class. The longest story in the collection, for instance, is about a rich Paris Hilton-like character who spends all her time partying, ordering servants around and living off her parents' wealth. Another story focuses on the son of a rich landowner, who is dating an American girl. These stories are okay, but don't match the pathos and poignancy of the stories about the servants.

Mueenuddin's writing and storytelling reach their pinnacle in the last story of the collection, my favorite. An old man, who has worked hard his whole life, finally catches a break when he's hired on as gardener at one of Harouni's farms. Newly wealthy (in relative terms), he hopes to sire a son, so he takes a deal to marry a mentally challenged girl, believing it to be his only chance to carry forth his name. The "simple" girl, though, promptly runs away. When he reports this to the police, he is beaten and accused of killing her. So even when things begin to look up for the poor man, the system beats him back down. It's the sad reality for life in the lower class in Pakistan, and these stories illuminate that brilliantly. This is an important book, and highly, highly recommended!