Score another one for the literati. The National Book Award in Fiction was handed out last week to "Mating," a novel that only an academic could love. This is good news for its author, Norman Rush, who presumably will profit from the increase in sales that usually follows a major literary prize, but readers who find themselves thrashing through the thickets of his lifelessly sesquipedalian prose are likely to feel otherwise.
What they're likely to feel, if they know anything at all about the history of the National Book Awards, is that matters have come full circle. After enjoying great success in the 1950s and 1960s by bestowing prizes on authors of the first rank, the NBA lapsed during the 1970s into a program for the private benefit of the literary in crowd. An attempt was made during the 1980s to make the prize more responsive to what real people in the real world were really reading, but that seems to have gone by the boards; once again the NBA exists primarily to honor the obscure, the recondite and the unknown.
According to the New York Times, "The National Book Foundation, the nonprofit organization that gives the awards, has tried over the last few years to bring greater attention to university and small presses and novice writers, and several of this year's finalists were from such lesser-known publishers and were first-time authors." Thus it was that this year's nominees were "Mating" (published by the mainstream firm of Knopf), "Frog," by Stephen Dixon (British-American Publishing), "Beyond Deserving," by Sandra Scofield (Permanent Press), "The MacGuffin," by Stanley Elkin (Linden Press) and "Wartime Lies," by Louis Begley (Knopf).
Questions of merit aside, what these books have in common is that few except their authors and publishers have heard of them. When the short list of nominees was announced earlier this fall, publishing types found themselves rushing about madly, trying to track down copies of the honored five, few of which had managed to find their way into bookstores. It's possible that at one time or another there's been a fiction short list more universally unread than this one, but it's hard to imagine such.
Of course there's nothing wrong with this, at least not in the abstract. Not all obscure books deserve their obscurity, as was demonstrated in the famous instance of three decades ago, when the NBA's fiction jury plucked a novel called "The Moviegoer" from the very depths of oblivion and brought much-deserved recognition to its unknown author, Walker Percy; the same had been true, if less dramatically so, a couple of years before, when an NBA for "Goodbye, Columbus" elevated Philip Roth to the renown he has subsequently enjoyed.
It is quite impossible to read the minds of jurors as they deliberated more than 30 years ago, but it is nice to think that they honored these books not because they were obscure but because they were good. That, one might imagine, should be the prevailing assumption behind any award program, literary or otherwise. But the subsequent history of the NBA proved this mistaken. During the 1970s its juries seemed to go out of their way to present the fiction award to books as far out of the literary mainstream as possible; it was my misfortune to attend several NBA festivities during this period and to be a witness to the smug self-satisfaction with which jurors announced one obscure prize winner after another.
The problem isn't with honoring obscurity; that's fine, so long as the honored work also achieves some reasonable level of literary excellence. The problem arises when obscurity itself becomes a criterion -- when judges deliberately pass by the well-known and/or commercially successful in order to shine the bright light of their attention in the darker precincts of the literary landscape.
This is not, as these judges would have us believe, in service to the higher interests of literature. It is merely perverse and self-serving, the latter most particularly. A jury that manages to find five unknown books with which to fill out a short list is a jury that can say to the world: "Look at us! See how imaginative and nonconformist we are! See how kind we are to the neglected geniuses of American letters!"
This element of self-regard in the awarding of prizes is little remarked upon but often plays an important, and distorting, role. As one who has served too many times on such juries, I no doubt have been guilty of such behavior; certainly I have observed it in others. Anyone who has enough ego to think that he or she is the person to tell the public what is the best book of the year probably also has enough ego to delight in being interviewed about choosing the winner and photographed presenting the prize; if this means doing the unexpected, deliberately going against the popular grain, well, so be it.
Thus it is that we now have a literary awards process in this country, the National Book Awards most particularly, in which extraneous considerations play a central, perhaps even dominant, role. Obscurity certainly is one of these elements, but so too is conformity to the political orthodoxy of the literati. Carol Iannone was widely and expediently criticized for claiming, in a notorious article published in Commentary, that literary awards are turning into affirmative-action programs, but Iannone was right; giving prizes has become one of the ways by which the lit'ry world demonstrates for all to see the utter purity of its politics.
"Mating" qualifies on all counts, even though Norman Rush does suffer under the misfortune of being both male and white. Though the novel received some enthusiastic reviews -- not, I hasten to add, from yours truly -- it qualifies as obscure and its author as unknown. Beyond that it is an earnestly feminist document, in which Rush not merely attempts to write in the voice of a woman but attitudinizes in various ways fashionable within the academic-feminist crowd. As icing on the cake, much of the book is couched in the jargon, or cant, of de Man and Derrida and other high priests of the most arcane twaddle.
There is in all of this a considerable irony. The National Book Awards were founded in 1950 by three book-industry trade groups, and ever after have received most of their support from sources within the industry. It has always been the not-unreasonable hope of the industry that somehow it could turn the awards into a book-selling device. This is why it rebelled against the obscurantism of the 1960s and 1970s by killing the awards and replacing them with the American Book Awards, the apparent purpose of which was to give a prize of one sort or another to every single person who ever published a book.
The ABA quickly became a laughingstock, so in the 1980s the industry decided to scale it down to only two awards (fiction and nonfiction) and to present them in a gaudy setting calculated to appeal to the lords of television and other media. For a few years that seemed to be working, and the awards revived nicely. But then in 1986 the name was changed back to National Book Awards -- it seemed a good idea at the time -- and just like that the bad old habits began cropping up again.
So now the book industry has an annual $500-a-plate dinner at which members of the NBA's board of directors get to puff out their little starched shirts and congratulate themselves on yet another year of service to literature. They and the others in attendance get cocktails, then sit down to a dinner after which they watch their $10,000 prizes go to the winners of the National Obscurity Sweepstakes. Right now the imprimatur of their award is still selling books, but a couple of more years of the likes of "Mating" and that will be ancient history. Or, more accurately, history repeating itself.
