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Oh, the glitz, the glam, the unabashedly sycophantic journalists cooing over a certain author "solidly in the high-art literary tradition!" The National Book Awards, or the publishing world's infinitely less fashionable but infinitely better read answer to the Oscars, were held Wednesday (11/14) in Manhattan.
This year's ceremony was a peculiar one, the event infused with a palpable admixture of excitement and malaise. On the one hand, you have a highly anticipated night of winners and losers on the heels of the buzzworthiest war of words and ideologies to hit the literary establishment in a long while. On the other, there's the inescapable reality of the tragedy that took place only two months ago, just a couple of miles away from where we twitter and tut-tut about Franzen and Oprah. That there was a 20% drop in attendance from last year did not go unnoticed, nor did the heartbreaking significance of the silent auction of original children's book art benefiting the Windows Of Hope Family Relief Fund that went on throughout the evening.
Under the circumstances, there could have been no better choice for Master of Ceremonies than actor/author Steve Martin. An occasional literary circle traveler himself (his novella, SHOPGIRL, was published last year and apparently he has a novel on the way), he knew just the right jokes to make --- new "technical" category this year: "best phony jacket blurb tradeoff from a friend" --- and just the right people to make fun of. True, everyone knew the right person to make fun of this year, but Martin's jibe was particularly clever: "Jonathan Franzen was caught at Border's trying to [put] an Oprah sticker on LOOK AT ME" (a competing fiction nominee).
The first award of the night, the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, was presented to Arthur Miller, for his "consistently thought-provoking and fearless body of work" --- which, in addition to Marilyn and Anaïs, includes more than 40 plays, screenplays, novels, and collections of essays. In his entertaining and at points commentary-rife acceptance, Miller talked of playwrights as "hav[ing] an even lower status than book writers," and being "regarded at best as hybrids." He also paid homage to another great, though oft forgotten, American playwright, Clifford Odets. Like Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill and Miller himself, Odets had dared to subvert the classical aesthetic.
The award for poetry went to Alan Dugan --- winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Prix de Rome, Yale Younger Poets, and now two-time winner of The National Book Award --- for his collection POEMS SEVEN. A final culmination of his previous six volumes (POEMS ONE through POEMS SIX), Dugan's angsty verse is at once comic and bleak, bespeaking the endlessly complex, contradictory, antagonistic, often plain stupid nature of humanity.
Next up was the Award for Young People's Literature. Personally, I was a little torn between Virginia Euwer Wolff for TRUE BELIEVER and An Na for A STEP FROM HEAVEN --- I really liked both books, but An Na happens to be the most adorable, sweetest woman I have ever encountered. But, alas, only one could claim victory, and that honor was bestowed on Wolff for her wonderful story about the struggles of a teenage girl trying not to succumb to the pitfalls of the life in the projects.
The prize for nonfiction was presented by the incomparably cool Terry Tempest Williams (or, as my coworker who attended the awards with me now refers to her, "TTW, my new best friend"). Swathed in head to toe brown, a blessedly welcome change from the sea of uninspired black, TTW looked like Mother Earth in Issey Miyake. Moreover, her presentation of the award was simply charming as she described the strange scene in her Utah town, population 250, as every day saw the delivery of 500 books (she was also a judge in the nonfiction category).
Oh, right, the winner. The nonfiction prize went to an adorably ebullient Brit, Andrew Solomon, for his monstrously brilliant work on depression, THE NOONDAY DEMON. In his acceptance, he emphasized the immediacy of the nation's health crisis in light of the events of September 11, "We've descended into some of the morass of depression and anxiety..." Of course, for the tenure of his time on stage Solomon himself seemed impervious to this morass, joking, "Winning the National Book Award is an extremely efficacious anti-depressant!"
And finally, Franzen. The name that launched a thousand soapboxes. Despite all the speculation about whether the NBA committee, who honored Oprah Winfrey for her unwavering support of all things literary at last year's ceremony, would exact revenge on the thankless scribe by passing him over, Franzen took home the coveted Fiction Award for THE CORRECTIONS. In retrospect, he was a shoo-in. His was the superior work. Of course, this isn't to say that it wasn't highly entertaining watching him squirm in the process: When the names of the five nominees for the fiction award were announced, a smattering of boos echoed back after Franzen's name; when he was announced as the winner, the applause was polite, passive-aggressive even.
But then, just as the tension was mounting to a deliciously fevered pitch, Franzen went and pulled the old "aw, shucks, I'm just an awkward creative type who needs a little patience and a lot of love" routine, killing all --- well, most --- of the ill will. He joked that during these particularly hard times he "served as blood-sport entertainment" for the publishing world, and that he was "happy to perform the service." Then, instead of releasing 100 white doves into the banquet hall while brandishing an olive branch and waving a white flag, Franzen thanked Oprah for her "enthusiasm and advocacy."
And with that, Mr. Martin bid us all adieu. It was an evening of mild surprises and, despite the undeniably dark pall cast by recent world events, an evening of good fun. But fun can't last forever, even the pillorying of Franzen must eventually come to an end.
--- Sarah Brennan
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