LaValle.

After the National Book Awards finalists were named last week, Laura Miller wrote a column for Slate called "How the National Book Awards Made Themselves Irrelevant." Calling the award "the Newbery Medal for adults" she stated that "whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention." (She was talking about the fiction category, not the scandal-plagued young people's literature category).

We were wondering what exactly is wrong with the Newbery Medal, which as far as we're concerned has a sterling reputation. Is Laura Miller calling Susan Cooper's The Grey King undeserving of an award? Or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH?  Because we might need to have some words. But Victor LaValle, a judge for this year's award, has responded with more pointed criticism. Writing for Publishers Weekly he begins by calling her column "bonkers."

Then he goes on to say:

There are many problems with Ms. Miller’s assessment of what’s wrong with this year’s picks but the first has to be that we, this year’s judges, have been put through some secret National Book Awards ceremony wherein we agree “that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention.” The Masonic Order of Underdogs! If such a thing ever happened then the NBA are really nefarious because they wiped my memory banks clean. I think it’s worth noting here that one of our choices, Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife, was an unqualified hit this year, winning its author the Orange Prize. And a second, Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, was on the Los Angeles Times Bestseller list. How dare all those people have the gall to like books that don’t rate with Laura Miller.

She looked as though a puppy had done something nasty on the blue-and-gold-squiggled carpet of the Marriott Marquis. "I'm not answering questions like that!" she snarled.

Maybe the courageous anti-censorship crusader didn't want to be reminded that it's been 34 years since her classic Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret was first published, though she seems to have held up remarkably well, considering it was some 75 million copies and 20 translations ago. "I'm here to give a speech!" she elaborated.

Struggling to make the most of her non sequitur, The Observer rallied by asking if she had her speech memorized. " No!" she declared stonily, apparently judging that the sixth-floor carpet had been soiled again. "It's long!" Relenting at last, she made a visible decision to crank up the charm. "Don't worry," she said, batting her lashes and nearly flouncing with insincerity, "when it's done, you'll know everything you've ever wanted to know about Judy Blume … and more!"

Other than that, the 55th National Book Awards ceremony was a hearty hoe-down. Divided between the tuxed and the non-tuxed (a.k.a. publishing mavens and the workaday press, loading up on polenta hors d'oeuvres before being relegated to the crispy tuna-fish gallery upstairs), the pre-banquet session featured the Five Unknowns-the relatively unsung New York women controversially nominated for the fiction award over the likes of Cynthia Ozick, Philip Roth and Tom Wolfe (none of whom were in attendance. Were they miffed? Wouldn't you be?).

To a man, the nominees' spouses were stalwartly supportive. "Our 5-year-old doesn't consider it controversial," said Rafael Pelli, the husband of Kate Walbert (destined not to win for Our Kind: A Novel in Stories). Equally admiring was Mike Fleming, the husband of party organizer Meg Kearney, who as head volunteer was charged with laying out nominated books on all the banquet tables for guests to take home. What was it like being the husband of the boss? "Very easy-she's extraordinarily organized," he said. Even daughters got in on the synergy thing: Rebecca Chace, the daughter of poet Jean Valentine (who was to win for Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003), was effusively proud. "To us, she was never just 'Mom,'" said the blond dazzler.

Elsewhere, a famous wen went whizzing by on the face of Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, which produced The 9/11 Commission Report (due to be disappointed later in the evening when the nonfiction award went to Kevin Boyle for his Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age.) An entire table of moribund government-type wonks left early after that one; were they miffed?

At the bar, no one seemed particularly sedated by the absence of Roth, Wolfe and Co., though a stately woman with a flowered glass brooch did allow that she hadn't spotted any of her fellow board members anywhere. "Maybe they didn't show because they'd be stoned," said her companion.

Adjourning to the $1,000-a-seat banquet hall for the main event, Garrison Keillor did a workmanlike job as M.C., in his bemused singsong manner. (How come mock-weary works so well for some, so dismally for others?) Executive director Harold Augenbraum professed to be pleased that this newspaper had called him a "bad-ass"-he promised he would milk the phrase for all it was worth to impress his small sons. Rick Moody, in a tie that could only be called polka-dotted, eloquently defended his committee's choice of the Five Unknowns by saying they were on the hunt "for excellence, and nothing else," defined as that "which adheres in language and in imagination" and "extends the life of the American tongue." Mr. Moody done good.

When it was time for the winners to be announced, it was evident at once that Oscar needn't fear that the National Book Foundation was going to steal his glitz anytime soon. Apparently, the notion of glamour held by bookworms is of a different category altogether from the one held by screen actors. Shortly after each name was delivered, a feeble huzzah went up from some dim corner, everyone looked about in strobe-lit confusion, and at length the award winners stumbled forth (sometimes literally, though it would be cruel to name names) to claim their bronze statue, blinking as though unearthed from beneath a rock. For pizzazz, a half-hearted attempt at music occasionally warbled on, though you could be forgiven if you thought it was emanating from someone's late-night bar mitzvah down the hall.

As is customary, certain revealing truths were unveiled from the podium. Pete Hautman, the author of Godless, the young people's winner about teens worshipping a water tower, said: "I would give anything if I could be 11 years old again, reading Lord of the Rings." Lily Tuck, author of the fiction winner The News from Paraguay, confessed, "I have never been to Paraguay, nor do I intend to go." But all of this paled in comparison to the revelations delivered during Ms. Blume's turn.

One of the things The Observer likes best about sitting with the press is that we're not supposed to take part in standing ovations when everyone else does. Even clapping is suspicious, like we're compromising our precious objectivity. So The Observer did neither when Ms. Blume took the stage to receive her lifetime-achievement medal (the one that caused such a dust-up when Stephen King got it last year).

Evidently, Ms. Blume is one of those people who waxes warmer at a distance, dropping only a few names, admitting that she had eczema as a child and that she suffered "emptiness" when her own children were young, revealing that she cried in the closet when she got her first rejection, before she came to the Solomonic realization that "rejection hurts but doesn't kill you." She didn't even lose points when she bragged that she is "more connected to Philip Roth than he will ever know" (she claimed their mothers went to high school together in Elizabeth, N.J.). The beloved author had a stage presence that was belovable.

But still, you could tell. After thanking an 11-year-old for her fine reading of a passage from Margaret, she didn't stop to let the applause build, but barreled on to talk about how speechless the award left her, as well as to choke back tears that seemed, from The Observer's vantage, distinctly crocodilian. And was she being sarcastic when she thanked her husband of 25 years, George Cooper, with a dedication that she had to know sounded like an inscription from a junior high-school yearbook? ("I love you, you're perfect, don't ever change!") But then again, we weren't objective. We'd been snarled at.

The take-home lesson? Never talk to an aging children's-book author about aging, especially before she delivers a speech that she hasn't memorized. Oh, and one other thing: Apparently, books on the Shoah sell even worse in 2004 than they used to. After the ceremony was over and everyone had hit the many escalators home, almost half the banquet tables still had a copy of one worthy book left, mid the empty coffee cups and crumpled napkins. Its title? Shoah Train. Holocaust marketers, take note: They couldn't give 'em away.

Ah, the scent of November! Wood fires wafting up through chimney tops … the tacit agreement among New Yorkers to order dessert (everyone's in dark, bulky sweaters, so who cares?) … the rise in anxiety as related to upcoming family events -all these conspire to make this fair city's residents horny as hell. So brace yourselves for Instant Messages and phone calls from exes looking to "catch up" ( translation: sate themselves on your naked form and then never call again-hey, come to think of it … ). Those who manage to keep their pants on this month can follow the MTV saga of Ally Hilfiger and Jaime Gleicher's plan to unseat the Newlyweds as the dumbest pair on television-or the queasy saga of Freddy Ferrer, Mark Green and city Democrats getting "pumped" and thereby reminding us why we all voted for Mike Bloomberg in the first place …. And don't forget that it's National Alzheimer's Awareness month (shut up-someone had to say it), as blow-dried former Extra anchor Leeza Gibbons hosts a reception with "frooze" (free booze) to raise the green stuff for the Alzheimer's Foundation of America. Meanwhile, if you're like us, your kitchen is the deli on the corner, and you thought of canned goods as a quaint notion for elementary-school children, who collected them once in awhile. Then the blackout happened, your "good-natured" deli guy quadrupled his prices, and all you found in your pantry was your college diploma …. Now you have a newfound respect for canned goods, so today grab your "jolly" Green Giant's niblets and take them to the Can struction ( clevah! ) competition, where architects and engineers will use them like Legos to build structures before they all get donated (the canned goods, not the architects) to the Food Bank. It's a "serious" actor smorgasbord, as couple Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco pitch in with Steve Buscemi , Oliver Platt and John Turturro.

[ Can struction competition, New York Design Center, 200 Lexington Avenue, 6 p.m., www.canstruction.org.]

Thursday 13th

Husbands and boyfriends start practicing their best fake cough this morning, because tonight is "In Our Own Words: An Evening of Jazz and Poetry." The ladies attempt "literary glam" (strapless tweed dresses, frown lines lightly penciled onto botoxed foreheads) and practice for next week's National Book Awards. But maybe this will bring the boys out: Malaak Compton-Rock will co-chair and, who knows, maybe bring hilarious hubby Chris Rock . If not, bail out and crash the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show at the Lexington Avenue Armory, and cross fingers for more shenanigans from PETA when Gisele Bundchen, Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum and their concave cheeks take to the runway. Bonus fun for the whole family : play "spot the straight guys!" (Hint: They're the ones with a newspapers on their laps …. ) If you'd prefer a whole bushel of straight guys, head down to the Borders on Wall Street, where Nick Hornby ( About a Boy ) reads from his new collection of essays, Songbook . We found the author in his "work flat, around the corner from my regular flat" in Highbury, England, and asked him about the junk they're playing on the radio right now. "There's plenty to hate!" he agreed. "I do love the Outkast record, though-especially that song 'Hey Ya!' I've been playing it nonstop. That's what I always do-put the song on repeat, and then it's dead two weeks later." What's he been up to? "I'm still messing about with some screenplays. I'm working on a novel, but I can't tell you what it's about because once I hear the plot coming out of my mouth, it seems like the worst idea that anyone's ever had and it takes me a month to recover. When people asked about High Fidelity , I said it was about a guy who works in a record store who just broke up with his girlfriend. Oh, the pitying looks I got from people! I couldn't write for weeks." Did he make the pilgrimage to see David Blaine? "I couldn't really imagine anything more boring to do than throwing something at someone in a box."

[Safe Horizon benefit, Apollo Theater, 253 West 125th Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-577-5095; Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, Lexington Avenue Armory, 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, 8 p.m., by invitation only; Nick Hornby, Borders Wall Street, 100 Broadway, 5:30 p.m., 212-964-1988.]

Friday 14th

We're broke, and no one is responding to the "tip if the service is excellent" jar we've put on our desk. So tonight we lay off the benefits and go hear Harper's editor Lewis Lapham -the best-dressed lefty in town (except for Al Sharpton )-read from his collection of essay s , 30 Satires .

[Lewis Lapham, Barnes and Noble, 2289 Broadway, 7:30 p.m., 212-362-8835.]

Saturday 15th

"I have two beautiful kids and some not-so-attractive ones," said the Emmy-winning comedian Jonathan Katz , whom you may remember from his Comedy Central series, Dr. Katz: Professional Therapist . Now living in Newton, Mass., with his wife of 23 years and their children, this morning he's in town to speak about his experience of living with multiple sclerosis. "I have an M.S. act," he told us. "It's a very funny disease. There's nothing funny about having it, but for me it's a gold mine of material. When I was first diagnosed, my doctor told me, 'You have to cut down on red meat, salt and alcohol.' I asked, 'What about sex?' He said, 'Sorry, I'm seeing someone.' … I both entertain and provide a source of inspiration. I'll have to remind myself that I'm not at a nightclub or opening for Garry Shandling ; I'm following some neurologist who, hopefully, isn't funnier than me. I tell newly diagnosed people that there are drugs you can take. Every week I take a shot of a drug called heroin. It's lovely …. What's your drug of choice?" We're an equal-opportunity drinker. "Yeah? I used to have a drinking problem. I discovered I couldn't hold my liquor in the winter. I think it was the mittens. That was a cute joke-admit it!"

[Jonathan Katz, Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, 9:30 a.m., 800-522-5185.]

Sunday 16th

There are two movie events tonight, and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to crash them both. First up, a screening of the new film House of Sand and Fog , about the struggle between a formerly wealthy Iranian immigrant and the inevitable "troubled young women" over the control of a rural California house. ( Trading Spaces as film noir.) Stay and chat with co-stars Ben ("My grandfather was a spice trader in Zanzibar!") Kingsley and Jennifer Connelly, who used to have the best breasts in Hollywood. Or, if you like your "show people" in the flesh, directors Robert Altman and Curtis Hanson ( L.A. Confidential ) glitter up the Directors Guild of America Honors gala as host Richard Belzer deadpans. S.A.G. prez and closet sex bomb Melissa Gilbert and Julianne Moore -who's proven that an actress can flash bush in her career (Mr. Altman's Short Takes ) and still be regarded as one of the world's most respected actors-will hand out trophies.

[ House of Sand and Fog , D.G.A. Theater, 110 West 57th Street, 7 p.m., 718-784-4520; Directors Guild of America Honors gala, Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, 301 Park Avenue, 6 p.m., 212-647-8765.]

Monday 17th

The blind-date problem is solved! Take him/her (or both if it's a she-male) to the Village tapas lounge Suba , where dinner will be served in the dark by waiters wearing night-vision goggles. City Harvest gets the proceeds. The raucous fun continues uptown, where women get tickled by champagne and their latest swain ("Oh, Zander! … ") at the Jazz at Lincoln Center's fall gala. Ed Bradley (the hip one on 60 Minutes ) hosts as Schiffs (Drew, Karenna), Astons (Sherrell, Muffie) and Bronfmans (Andrea, Charles) kick up their $500 heels …. Meanwhile : Mayor Mike as "Boyfriend of the Year"? We picture him more the sort that's always nagging you to quit smoking and does a mean "robot" on the dance floor, but whatever! Tonight, the Lower East Side Girls Club bestows that title on everyone's favorite sidetalker at their annual Willow Awards. "There was a Boys' Club with massive facilities, so finally we were like, 'Screw this, we're going to build a Girls' Club!'" said Adriana Pezzulli, director of development. "For six years under Giuliani we tried to get land from the city, and there was, like, no negotiating with the Mayor. As soon as Bloomberg came into office, we got the land three months later!" Attire is "hi-lo couture." (Think Bowery chic: guys wearing Chuck Taylors with a tux, ladies resurrecting that Jessica McClintock number they wore to the prom with their virginity on their sleeve and a tiara.) Actors Chloë Sevigny and father-to-be Billy Crudup will be there. Will His Mayorness? "We're working on him!" If he does, ask him to be a good sugar daddy and loan you $750 for a ticket to the Actors' Fund of America gala. Martin Richards and Meryl Streep each receive a "medal of honor." (Please, this ain't Iraq, people.) Michael Douglas climbs out of his Craftmatic Adjustable Bed ( whirrrrrr … ) and escorts hot mama Catherine Zeta-Jones.

[Dinner in the Dark, Suba, 109 Ludlow Street, 7 p.m., 212-982-5714, ext. 3; Girls' Club, Capitale Ballroom, 130 Bowery at Grand Street, 7 p.m., 212-982-1633; the Actors' Fund of America gala, Cipriani 42nd Street, 110 East 42nd Street, 6:30 p.m., 212-221-7300, ext. 129.]

Tuesday 18th

What, no Oprah scandal or 16-year-old first-time author? Where will the "juice" come from in this year's National Book Awards? Tonight, the camisolettes (the city's budding number of female editorial assistants/would-be authors who have mastered the art of using their cleavage to land plum jobs at tweedy magazines ) show up as the award finalists read from their work at the New School. The fiction nominees are T.C. Boyle ( Drop City ), Shirley Hazzard ( The Great Fire ), Edward P. Jones ( The Known World ), Scott Spencer ( A Ship Made of Paper ) and Marianne Wiggins ( Evidence of Things Unseen ). None of which we've read because we're still plowing our way through the insufferable Corrections , but our money's on Edward P. Jones …. Less literary doings today at Grand Central Terminal, where a Holiday Laser Light Show meant for the kiddies instead draws a cannabis-befumed bunch of New York private-school teens .

[2003 National Book Award Finalists reading, the New School, Tischman Auditorium, 66 West 12th Street, 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.,

www.nationalbook.org; Holiday Laser Light Show, 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., www.grandcentralterminal.com.]

Wednesday 19th

Book editors suck it up as they bring their straying wives to the National Book Awards ceremony, hosted by mystery writer Walter Mosley . Stephen King gets a nod for his contributions to American letters and nightmares worldwide. Meanwhile, Clarins cosmetics-which makes a swell self-tanner , of which the aforementioned editors could use adollopor two-opens aposh boutique for the ladies of the

Upper East Side who believe a cream can melt that cellulite away. Meanwhile, our media reporter joins Time managing editor Jim Kelley and the rest of the Time Inc. crew for a public debate about who should be 2003's Person of the Year . Some are saying Saddam Hussein, but we'll bet you a new psychedelic $20 that it's George W. Bush, who-if you believe the left-is Le Nouveau Saddam .

[National Book Awards, Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, 6:30 p.m., 212-685-0261; Clarins Treatment Boutique, 1061 Madison Avenue, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., 212-980-1800, ext. 3064; Person of the Year debate, the Luce Room, Time and Life Conference Center, 1271 Avenue of the Americas, 11:30 a.m., by invitation only.]

But until Vanity Fair starts hosting the only decent after-party, no matter how Hollywood the awards ceremony becomes, no matter how many black-tied publishers, agents and authors show up at the Marriott Marquis on Nov. 20 for a $1,000-a-head rubber-chicken dinner and some jokes by Mr. Martin, the most attention-grabbing moment in the yearly publishing extravaganza will always be now, when the nominees are announced.

Typically, the pre-ceremony talk-especially about fiction, which along with nonfiction is the only category most book people really care about-centers on the books that didn't make the short lists. "Where's the new Donna Tartt novel?" asked one critic, referring to the long-awaited and ambivalently reviewed The Little Friend , which, with a publication date of Nov. 1, got in under the deadline of Nov. 30. Where, for that matter, is Knopf's very expensive and, for a few weeks, best-selling The Emperor of Ocean Park by Stephen L. Carter? Also nowhere to be seen: Jeffrey Eugenides' widely praised Middlesex , just out from Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

According to Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, literary opinions are not his job. He's around to choose the judges-whom he culls from lists of recommendations given by previous winners and judges. (He makes those decisions as early as the spring; judges begin reading hundreds of submissions in early summer.) "I tell the judges it's their sensibilities that we want, and that the decisions are theirs alone," Mr. Baldwin said. Judges are also not supposed to talk to the press, but one former judge said that she was told by her committee chairman to try to ignore reviews, blurbs and "buzz" as much as possible.

Except for the fact that one of the fiction judges, Jay McInerney, was the author of a rave review for Mark Costello's Big If (before-miraculously-that book appeared on the fiction list), the panel seems to have taken a publicity-blind approach. Sort of. Mr. McInerney and his teammates-Bob Schacochis, Adrienne Brodeur, David Wong Louie and Jacquelyn Mitchard-chose authors that the National Book Foundation which administers the awards, calls "relatively young writers-none of whom have published more than one other novel." (Somehow they forgot about the 25-year-old Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything Is Illuminated , and also about Alice Sebold, whose first novel, the commercial and critical hit The Lovely Bones , has sold 1.6 million copies and counting.) But most of these nominated writers have some pretty powerful media connections. Mr. Costello, after all, is the partner of Scribner's editor in chief, Nan Graham. Adam Haslett's You Are Not a Stranger Here was chosen for the Today show book club by his former teacher (and last year's fiction winner), Jonathan Franzen, and one of the stories in the book was originally published in Zoetrope , whose founding editor is one Adrienne Brodeur. Martha McPhee ( Gorgeous Lies ) is one of those McPhees. (Extra-credit tidbits: Another of père John's daughters, Sarah, has a forthcoming book on architecture, and her step-sister, Joan Sullivan, just published a memoir of working on Bill Bradley's failed Presidential campaign.) As for Julia Glass, her Three Junes was a Good Morning America book-club choice. Brad Watson-a visiting writer in residence at the University of West Florida and author of the nominated The Heaven of Mercury -seems to be the only nominee out of the big-publishing loop.

The fiction list lacks not only a clear favorite, but also a controversial anti- favorite-think In America , by Susan Sontag, in 2000-that could provide what contest-watchers live for: a big fat upset. By contrast, the nonfiction judges-Christopher Merrill, Anthony Brandt, Gail Buckley, Mary Karr and Michael Kinsley-put a strong front-runner on the nonfiction list: Robert A. Caro's Master of the Senate , a 1,000-plus-page installment of the author's L.B.J. magnum opus that took almost a decade to produce. Most National Book Awards–watchers have barely heard of the other nominees.

Then again, sometimes the National Book Awards committees like sleepers. That's how Cold Mountain won the fiction category in 1997. And it's how, the next year, Alice McDermott's Charming Billy won over Tom Wolfe's A Man in Full and Robert Stone's Damascus Gate , although I suspect the big guys just canceled each other out that year. If this becomes the year of the underdog, I'd root for Elizabeth Gilbert, author of The Last American Man ; she's every thinking person's favorite magazine writer (in GQ and elsewhere) and a funny, pretty novelist ( Stern Men ) to boot. I haven't read the other three nominees-Devra Davis' When Smoke Ran Like Water , Atul Gawande's Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Steve Olson's Mapping Human History -but their titles, at least, have that eat-your-vegetables quality. Whether this will help or hurt depends on the judges' mood on the day of the awards ceremony. That's when the foundation sends the committees to lunch-just don't look for them at all-too-visible publishing hot spots like Michael's or the Union Square Café-to make their final decisions.

Of course, nobody ever said the National Book Awards are supposed to reflect popularity, although they do-at least for a minute-increase it, despite what one publisher who wasn't nominated told me: "Prize-winners are not usually best-sellers." But this wouldn't be publishing without a healthy dose of Schadenfreude . Publicly, publishers say nothing but nice things about the nominated titles. Privately, they bicker and bitch about who's been excluded. And who came blame them? If I were at F.S.G. or Scribner's, I'd be miffed at being shut out in all four categories. Both of those prestigious houses have, in past years, gotten many nominations; last year, they were winners with The Corrections and The Noonday Demon , respectively. But maybe that's the point: While house-proud publishers think the National Book Awards are reflections on them, the authors and agents who supply them with books know otherwise. How else could the partner of Scribner's editor in chief get away with publishing his book at Norton, and the student of F.S.G. star Jonathan Franzen end up at Nan A. Talese/Doubleday?

Sheesh. Doesn't anybody have brand loyalty anymore?

For a few brief hours, they could pretend the occasional clutch of bewildered tourists wandering into the middle of their cocktail hour had come to gawk at them. Kurt Vonnegut mingled with Sally Quinn while New Yorker literary editor Bill Buford showed off a subtly checked tuxedo to Book Review editor Chip McGrath; Murdoch publishing chief Anthea Disney paraded around Jane Friedman, her new hire from Random House Inc.; Grove-Atlantic Inc.'s glamour puss Morgan Entrekin didn't make a move without a small army; and Harry Evans stood by the dining hall door like an official greeter. The crowd even laughed good-humoredly when the nonfiction winner, American Sphinx author and Mount Holyoke history professor Joseph J. Ellis, joked that when he first heard that the "N.B.A." had called, he had misty-eyed visions of athletic stardom.

The event brought out more than 750 guests and raised a record $425,000 for the National Book Foundation and its programs promoting literacy, inner-city poetry workshops and a summer writing camp, with Studs Terkel receiving the 1997 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Indeed, the perennial soul-searching about the purpose and point of literary beauty pageants and publishing awards was held to a minimum. Perhaps that was why almost nobody noticed one glaring absence: Henry Holt & Company was missing. Michael Naumann, the publishing house's president and chief executive officer, boycotted the awards to protest the exclusion of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon from the nominations.

The Holt hole struck an especially odd note given the house's active participation in the past, particularly while Mr. Naumann's predecessor, Bruno Quinson, served as a member and then chairman of the book foundation board. It cast an even harsher light, in retrospect, over the media's feverish pitting of genial newcomer Charles Frazier and his lush Civil War novel Cold Mountain against the creative ambitions of literary idol Don DeLillo in Underworld , both of whom not only rode the best seller list together for several weeks but also spent much of the time before the nominees' reading the preceding night engaged in intense conversation.

Neil Baldwin, executive director of the National Book Foundation, first got an inkling of Holt's stance when he called Mr. Naumann because he hadn't heard from the publisher by the R.S.V.P. deadline. Mr. Baldwin was referred instead to a publicist who told him Holt would not attend. In disbelief, he called Mr. Naumann a second time. "Michael told me he was very, very upset and hurt that the Pynchon book wasn't on the list of nominations," Mr. Baldwin said, "and that it would be an insult to his friend-not that I know that they are friends-for him to come."

In vain, Mr. Baldwin tried to explain that Holt's spending $7,200 for a table would help support the book foundation. Mr. Baldwin recounted that he gave Mr. Naumann his "usual spiel." "I tried to make the point that, even though this is a very competitive industry and the ferocity of it is great, especially now, we're a community," he said. "But he was very angry. He said it was a slap in the face. It's a matter of principle for him."

Mr. Baldwin got angry as well: "I said that if everybody subscribed to the idea that if they weren't nominated they wouldn't come, there wouldn't be any more National Book Awards! But Michael just said, 'Neil, I have no obligation to be anywhere I don't want to be.' It's very frustrating; we're trying to create a philanthropic mission out of a commercial nexus, and maybe it's the nature of the culture that we end up in situations where the very people we're trying to promote don't get it."

Mr. Naumann, however, remains focused on the single evening. "I wasn't there because the jury chose not to put Thomas Pynchon into the list of finalists," he said. "I felt it was so awkward, not to say nuts . How could they say, To hell with one of the greatest writers produced in this century? And that's not just my opinion, but of reviewers across the country … I'm not only Tom's friend but also his publisher, and I couldn't be part of that. So I'm a sore loser-and proud of it!"

Mr. Naumann has followed up with a letter to Mr. Baldwin, making another point, one that was a subject of much debate both during and after the awards. "I wrote that I just couldn't have watched the spectacle of the prize not even going to Don DeLillo, who, of the nominees, wrote the most important piece of fiction this year," Mr. Naumann said. "I'm very happy for Morgan, but there's only so much a publisher can take."

Yet spectacle is at the heart of the matter. Commercially minded publishers and their audiences want some bang for their buck, and, as Mr. Naumann recalled of his favorite recluse, "When Tom got the National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow , he sent in some professor who made a funny speech, and people got very angry. The institutional memory is very long." Of course, there is still for Mr. DeLillo-or Mr. Pynchon-the prospect of the Pulitzer Prize. "Wouldn't that be embarrassing for the National Book Award judges," Mr. Naumann laughed.

The DeLillo loss continues to rankle many in literary circles, not the least because they feel the award's outcome is the result, as an editor in the DeLillo camp said, "of soft committees who all have friends or enemies among the nominees. It's payback time. You wonder what they bring to bear besides grudges.… This year's vote was really a knock against the postmodernist novel and what DeLillo was trying to do with it."

It is a criticism that Mr. Baldwin takes to heart. "How can you feel badly about the choice of Cold Mountain ?" he said. "On the other hand, when I read Underworld , I thought there wasn't even an analogy for it-not even 'the Moby-Dick of the 90's.' It's truly unique, regardless of whether you like it or think it's good." To his relief, the DeLillo-versus-Frazier issue so consumed the other diners at the ceremony that he thought no one picked up on Holt's disappearing act. "Bruno Quinson was at my table," Mr. Baldwin said, "and I didn't even tell him."

Mr. DeLillo took a rather different approach to the evening. He arrived equipped with printed cards, which he gave to fellow finalists, bearing his name in the upper right-hand corner and the message "I Don't Want to Talk About It" centered in large letters below. "He said he planned to hand them out whether he won or lost," one recipient said. And, silently, he did.