Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

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Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2011/09/celebrating-hurricane-harbach-publishing-trades-baseball-cards-at-brooklyn-brewery/#comments Fri, 16 Sep 2011 09:13:08 -0400 http://observer.com/2011/09/celebrating-hurricane-harbach-publishing-trades-baseball-cards-at-brooklyn-brewery/ Emily Witt http://www.observer.com/?p=184509 What was most remarkable about Chad Harbach's book party at the Brooklyn Brewery last night was the bonhomie. An agent pointed it out to The Observer as we stood around the indoor picnic tables drinking lager from plastic cups: it helps that Mr. Harbach is a nice guy from the Midwest (there was a lot of Midwestern pride in the room last night), but it makes everybody in publishing happy when a work of literary fiction by a talented first-time novelist not only gets a big advance but also sells well. For all of publishing's sometime dysfunction, something actually worked.

So the party last night was a veritable peace conference. The Art of Fielding was published by Little, Brown, but editors of literary fiction from across the industry came out to celebrate: we spotted Matt Weiland from Ecco, Megan Lynch from Riverhead, Mitzi Angel from Faber and Faber, Andrea Walker from Penguin Press and Allison Lorentzen from Viking, among others.

Mr. Harbach's parents were in town from Wisconsin (we were told it was their first time in New York!) and his editor from Little, Brown, Michael Pietsch, gave a speech. We missed this, but apparently he referred to the publicity storm surrounding the novel as "Hurricane Harbach." The hurricane was due in no small part to Mr. Harbach's co-editor at n+1, Keith Gessen, who documented the publication of the novel in a lengthy feature for Vanity Fair. Mr. Gessen was there, as was his co-editor Marco Roth, and wine was served by n+1 interns (the brewery staff refuses to touch the stuff).

So sought after was Mr. Harbach (pulled away for introductions by his agent, Chris Parris-Lamb), that The Observer had to get him a beer. Most people had congratulatory handshakes for him, but Jon Jon Goulian, the author of The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt and a cherished presence at New York book parties, had brought a small memento: a signed Milwaukee Brewers baseball card from the year Mr. Harbach was born.

The initial list is here and includes the obvious "It's a home run!" and "rookie novelist Chad Harbach" as well as general suggested phraseology: "With the Internet and social media changing the way we live, it’s the bottom of the 9th for the American novel, and Harbach’s Art of Fielding comes in TKTKTK relief pitching &c. &c. "

Subsequent addenda here and here have added the closer from the New York Review of Books ("Welcome to the big leagues, kid. Now get out there and play") and some home runs from USA Today ("But you never stop rooting for these characters, or for Harbach" and "Harbach is all Derek Jeter, not Alex Rodriguez").

Richards.

British GQ gave Keith Richards its "writer of the year" award for his autobiography Life. The award was presented to Mr. Richards by Johnny Depp, whereupon Mr. Richards disclosed that Life was being made into a film. This is funny because there really is only one actor who might be qualified to portray Keith Richards in a film. Also Keith Richards looks so tan and healthy!

Add Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections to the list of novels by New York writers currently being fashioned into a series for HBO. What kind of series (mini?) is as yet unclear, but Noah Baumbach has reportedly signed on to direct.

Keith Gessen's play by play of the creation of his n+1 co-editor Chad Harbach's new novel, The Art of Fielding (out today), is in the print edition of the October issue of Vanity Fair. An expanded 17,000-word version is also available as a $1.99 e-book, where publishing gets glamorous Vanity Fair treatment: "In this e-book of sweeping scope and fascinating, behind-the-scenes detail, Gessen pulls back the curtain on the insular, fiercely political, and cutthroat literary world of Manhattan—a place where the 'Big Six' publishing houses, owned by multinational conglomerates, reign supreme, while smaller houses are left to fend for themselves."

At The Paris Review, Maurice Sendak speaks about the publication of his first book since 1981, Bumble-Ardy.

(When Herman Melville was writing Moby-Dick, he wrote a letter to his publisher. “So far as I am individually concerned, & independent of my pocket," he wrote, "it is my earnest desire to write those sort of books which are said to ‘fail.’”)

The Hugo Awards for Science Fiction were this weekend! Hurray. And the winner for best novel is... Blackout/All Clear by Connie Willis (Ballantine Spectra). Best editor goes to Lou Anders at Prometheus Books imprint Pyr and best new writer to Brooklyn's own Lev Grossman. The great thing about the Hugo Awards is that not only do they award best novel and best novella, but also "best novelette", as well as a category called "best semipro zine." Is Girl Crush semipro?

Mike Shatzkin went on NPR's On the Media this weekend to tell us all "What Amazon is Up To." It's a good background on what Amazon is up to.

And Publisher's Weekly looks into the "shady history" of print-on-demand service PublishAmerica, which recently got in trouble with J.K. Rowling for offering to drop authors' books off at her house for her perusal for $49. It turned out Ms. Rowling did not feel like reading all those books.

Harbach.

Chad Harbach, n+1 editor, novelist and now "consulting producer" has been snapped up in HBO's general raid on everyone in New York City who has written a book. Variety reports that Scott Rudin will executive produce Mr. Harbach's novel, The Art of Fielding, for HBO. The novel about a college baseball team in Wisconsin comes out in September.

Blogger Sarah Weinman has a list of HBO-optioned books up that is littered with New York-based writers: Lipsyte, Egan, Shteyngart and surely there are more. We hope they all follow in the footsteps of George R.R. Martin and sell millions of books.

But then there we were, at a BEA  kick-off party thrown by Flavorpill and Electric Literature at Le Bain, on the rooftop of the Standard Hotel, which someone remarked was like standing atop a giant Kindle. From the massive device, the expansive views of the ghostly spires of fogbound Manhattan were lovely, but few noticed.

"The problem with New York publishing is that everybody is looking at each other instead of the view," lamented Mark Krotov, an editor at FSG. If only! The real problem, as we saw it, was that you had to buy your own drinks.

This posed a particular problem for the novelist Chad Harbach, who was standing on the Astroturf next to his agent, Chris Parris-Lamb. Mr. Harbach was prepping to give a two-minute speech at a dinner thrown that night by Little, Brown in honor of his first novel, The Art of Fielding, which is to be published in September. It took Mr. Harbach nine years to finish the book, which was famously rejected by the industry's top agents before being rescued and sold at a six-figure premium by Mr. Parris-Lamb, who was eagerly telling anybody at the party who would listen that they should read it. But even after all that, the prospect of two minutes of stand-up filled Mr. Harbach with dread.

The answer was drink, of course. Transom accompanied Mr. Harbach to the bar, where he put two whiskeys on his agent's tab. We took the advice of the magnificently named Italian novelist Francesco Pacifico and ordered something called a "Paris Spritz."

"It's Italian," he said. "Except for the olives."

Those two olives turned out to be our dinner.

The other problem with certain New York publishing parties, as the writer ZZ Packer observed while waiting in line at the rooftop crepe stand later: you have to buy your own food. "All I've had today is a half-caffeine latte" she cried. "I am a starving artist!"

Agent Chris Parris-Lamb of the Gernert Company shepherded Harbach's book through what publishing industry sources say was "an old-fashioned auction"--stretching from Wednesday to Friday and involving eight imprints, seven bidders, and a final price in the mid-six-figures.

Harbach is the third n+1 editor to prove his sad young literary manhood with a novel. Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision came out in 2005, and Keith Gessen's All the Sad Young Literary Men in 2008.

Harbach's book centers on a Wisconsin liberal arts college and the lives that intersect around its baseball team. There's a gifted shortstop with a psychological block, a college president in an unlikely relationship, and the president's daughter, fresh from a failed marriage. It's about baseball and so much more, insists everyone who's seen the book.

It would seem so: the excitement extended even to scouts for foreign publishers, who were evidently undaunted by the prospect of getting Europeans to read a baseball book. But hey: if Netherland can make Americans care about cricket, why not?