National Book Awards
Last night the National Book Foundation handed out the 2005 National Book Awards. Europe Central by William T. Vollmann took home the fiction award, while Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking won the award for nonfiction. Jeanne Birdsall's debut novel, The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits and a Very Interesting Boy, snagged the award for young people's literature; and eight-time nominee W. S. Merwin won his first NBA for poetry with Migration: New and Selected Poems. You can get a handful of links to reviews of all the fiction and nonfiction nominees if you want to find out more. Not impressed? Then you'll enjoy this weekend's essay by A. O. Scott on the uselessness of such spectacles. Here's a snippet:
Or, to put it another way, the prizes, transparently trivial, implicitly corrupt and utterly detached from any meaningful notion of literary value, will be greeted with cynicism, derision and, if we're lucky, a burst of controversy. It will escape no one's attention - not even the winners' - that the very idea of handing out medals and cash for aesthetic and intellectual achievement is absurd, if not obscene. Furthermore, the selections will inevitably reflect the rottenness of the literary status quo, which is either hopelessly stodgy and out of touch, or else distracted by modish extraliterary considerations - hobbled, that is, either by conservative complacency or by political correctness.
Happy reading.
posted by Doug @ 11:17 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
I’m having some trouble understanding what Mr. Scott is so ticked off about. If that was a condemnation of awards shows as shallow, politically compromised, self-aggrandizing marketing opportunities, well gee, let’s come out against murder, incest, and fraud while we’re at it. That’s hardly new ground, and hardly a productive rant. But if he’s saying that it would be better for such awards to not exist at all, then I don’t think he’s thought this thing through. If you got rid of awards for such things as writing – even, let us assume, these shallow and stupid awards – then we’d have to put up with people in the business bemoaning the sad state of affairs that this post-literate society can’t even bring itself to publicly recognize artistic merit. So ultimately, in my opinion, if these awards didn’t exist, we’d have to create them. Of course, I’m a glass-half-full guy most of the time, so my feeling is: appreciate these awards for what little good they might do. The fact is, I’ve found out about some cool books over the years due to such awards, and you have to remember that reading is contagious – when you read one book, even if it’s a book that got an award it didn’t deserve, it’s very liable to lead you to read another, and another. I’d like to tell Mr. Scott to save some of that vitriol for a more worthy target.
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