On April 16, 2012, the Pulitzer Prize Board announced that it would award no Pulitzer for fiction in 2012. This was, to say the least, surprising and upsetting to any number of people, prominent among them the three fiction jurors, who’d read over three hundred novels and short-story collections, and finally submitted three finalists, each remarkable (or so we believed) in its own way.
The nominees were David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King,” which was not only unfinished at the time of Wallace’s death but left in disarray, and brilliantly pieced together by Wallace’s editor, Michael Pietsch; Denis Johnson’s grim but transcendent “Train Dreams,” set in the American West at the turn of the nineteenth century; and an accomplished first novel, “Swamplandia!,” about an eccentric Southern family, by the alarmingly young writer Karen Russell.
The fiction jury, which changes yearly, puts forward three books to be voted on by the eighteen voting members of the Pulitzer board, who are primarily journalists and academics, and who serve for three-year terms.
The jury does not designate a winner, or even indicate a favorite. The jury provides the board with three equally ranked options. The members of the board can, if they’re unsatisfied with the three nominees, ask the jury for a fourth possibility. No such call was made.
I was one of the jurors for 2012, and am a novelist. The other jurors were Maureen Corrigan, the book critic on NPR’s “Fresh Air” and a professor of English at Georgetown University, and Susan Larson, the former book editor of the New Orleans Times-Picayune and host of “The Reading Life” on NPR. (Both Corrigan and Larson have agreed to be portrayed in this article.)
We were, all three of us, shocked by the board’s decision (non-decision), because we were, in fact, thrilled, not only by the books we’d nominated but also by several other books that came within millimetres of the final cut. We never felt as if we were scraping around for books that were passable enough to slap a prize onto. We agreed, by the end of all our reading and discussion, that contemporary American fiction is diverse, inventive, ambitious, and (maybe most important) still a lively, and therefore living, art form.
And yet, no prize at all in 2012.
How did that happen?
The board’s deliberations are sealed. No one outside the board will ever know why they decided to withhold the prize.
I did, however, learn a good deal about how short lists are formed, how “best” books are selected—a process that had hitherto been mysterious to me. Like many, I’ve often greeted the announcement of certain prizewinners with bafflement.
Really? That book? What were those people thinking of?
I can tell you what three people, in 2012, were thinking of.
First, and probably most obvious, the members of any jury are possessed of particular tastes and opinions, and, however they may strive for it, absolute objectivity is impossible. A different Pulitzer jury in 2012 might very well have put forward three different books, one of which might have pleased the Pulitzer board better than ours did.
Still, they could have called.
Utter objectivity, however, is not only impossible when judging literature, it’s not exactly desirable. Fiction involves trace elements of magic; it works for reasons we can explain and also for reasons we can’t. If novels or short-story collections could be weighed strictly in terms of their components (fully developed characters, check; original voice, check; solidly crafted structure, check; serious theme, check) they might satisfy, but they would fail to enchant. A great work of fiction involves a certain frisson that occurs when its various components cohere and then ignite. The cause of the fire should, to some extent, elude the experts sent to investigate.
A proper respect for the mysterious aspects of fiction is encouraged by the Pulitzer’s guidelines, which are gratifyingly loose. The winning book, be it a novel or short-story collection, must have been written by an American, and should, ideally, be in some way about American life.
That’s it.
When we first spoke (we all live in different cities, and met in person only once), in June of 2011, Maureen, Susan, and I made a few fundamental agreements that had, surely, been made by other juries in the past. We would not favor writers for their obscurity (who doesn’t love an undiscovered genius?), or penalize them for their exalted reputations. We would tend to favor the grand, flawed effort over the exquisitely crafted miniature. We preferred visionary explorers to modest gardeners, and declared ourselves willing to forgive certain shortcomings or overreachings in a writer who was clearly attempting to accomplish more than can technically be done using only ink and paper.
Soon after, the books started to arrive.
There would be three hundred of them—culled from the year’s output by America’s wildly various fiction writers—but they came in increments of about thirty. We three were all reading from among the same thirty books at the same time, but not necessarily reading the same book at the same time.
A lot of them, you will not be surprised to hear, were fairly easy to dismiss. They were trivial, or badly written, or lurid, or overblown, or mawkish—the list goes on. Some were delightful, but too slight for a prize of this magnitude.
We each kept a list, however, of any book that seemed even remotely plausible as a contender. When we’d all finished a shipment of hopefuls, we presented our lists of “keepers” to one another and talked about why we’d liked or, on occasion, loved the books on our lists. We made no eliminations. We simply combined our three lists, and went on to the next thirty-plus.
The members of most literary juries, it seems, find themselves to be in almost miraculous agreement during the initial phases of judging. It’s not particularly difficult to agree that certain books have no chance at all and that others have merit. The arguments come later, when some of the variously meritorious books need to be struck from the final list.
My own most dramatic reading experience occurred when, from the third shipment, I pulled Wallace’s “The Pale King.” I confess that I was not a huge fan of his novel “Infinite Jest,” and further confess that I thought, on opening “The Pale King,” that it was a long shot indeed, given that Wallace had not lived to complete it.
I was, as it happened, the first of us to read “The Pale King,” and well before I’d finished it I found myself calling Maureen and Susan and saying, “The first paragraph of the Wallace book is more powerful than any entire book we’ve read so far.”
Consider its opening line:
Maureen and Susan both started the book, and both agreed. It was a little like having heard a series of chamber pieces, and been pleased by them, until the orchestra started in on Beethoven. Needless to say, “The Pale King” was added to the ongoing list.
We spoke to each other, by phone or e-mail, once every two or three weeks. And, as we asserted our own opinions and listened to those of the others, our general predilections began to make themselves apparent.
Maureen was drawn to writers who told a gripping and forceful story. She did not by any means require a conventional story, conventionally told, but she wanted something to have happened by the time she reached the end, some sea change to have occurred, some new narrative continent discovered, or some ancient narrative civilization destroyed.
Susan was a tough-minded romantic. She wanted to fall in love with a book. She always had reasons for her devotions, as an astute reader would, but she was, to her credit, probably the most emotional one among us. Susan could fall in love with a book in more or less the way one falls in love with a person. Yes, you can provide, if asked, a list of your loved one’s lovable qualities: he’s kind and funny and smart and generous and he knows the names of trees.
But he’s also more than amalgamation of qualities. You love him, the entirety of him, which can’t be wholly explained by even the most exhaustive explication of his virtues. And you love him no less for his failings. O.K., he’s bad with money, he can be moody sometimes, and he snores. His marvels so outshine the little complaints as to render them ridiculous.
I was the language crank, the one who swooned over sentences. I could forgive much in a book if it was written with force and beauty, if its story was told in a voice unlike anything I’d heard before, if the writer was finding new and mesmerizing ways to employ the same words that have been available to all American writers for hundreds of years. I tended to balk if a book contained some good lines but also some indifferent ones. I insisted that every line should be a good one. I was—and am—a bit fanatical on the subject.
This is not to say that any of us was obdurate or inflexible about our inclinations, but rather that it was good for all three of us to know what our inclinations were, so as to allow for them, in ourselves and one another, as we continued to talk and talk and talk about the books. I might say, of a particular book, “Maybe I’m being too easily seduced by the language.” Or Susan might say, “Maybe I’m a little bit blinded by love.” That, it seemed, was one way to move toward relative objectivity. We declared ourselves. We wanted to be called out by the other two, if calling-out proved necessary.
Once we’d read all three hundred and some books, we found ourselves with a list of thirty or more. We fairly quickly crossed off a number of them. This book had seemed more impressive before we read the next two hundred. That book was greatly admired by one of us but not all that much by either of the others.
The disagreements (always civil, we truly did respect one another) started when we’d finally pared the list down to six or seven candidates.
Each of them was remarkable in certain ways. Each of them inspired doubts, in one or more of the three of us.
It was time, then, to get into judgment mode. We’d been excited, to different degrees and for different reasons, about all the books that remained on our still-too-long list. We loved each of the authors for their triumphs over the forces of banality, contrivance, predictability, thinness, falseness, randomness, tidiness, and all the other forces that defeat almost everyone reckless enough to write fiction at all.
It was time, however, to get tough. It could no longer be, “Why shouldn’t this book be honored?” but “Why should it?”
The nitpicking began.
A ravishingly beautiful, original novel went down when one of us pointed out that, lovely as the book was, Toni Morrison had already told a version of that particular story, to similarly powerful effect, in a single chapter of “Beloved.”
I lobbied to eliminate another because its language was sometimes strong and sometimes indifferent. At one point I said to Maureen and Susan, “Please don’t make me read you a dozen limp, lifeless sentences taken from the book. I don’t want to be that guy.” But I insisted that although there were plenty of good lines, there were simply too many slack, utilitarian ones. And, in that case, the language crank got his way.
A third fell under the wheel (and this one was particularly heartbreaking to all of us) when we reluctantly acknowledged that although it was wonderfully written and fabulously inventive, its central love story, while moving, was insufficiently complicated and a bit sentimental; that it failed to depict the body of darker emotions that are integral to love: moments of rage, disappointment, pettiness, and greed, to name a few. All three of us wished love to be as simple as the author imagined it to be, but we acknowledged that love, as far as we could tell, is not only not simple, but that part of its glory is its ability to survive incidents of rage, disappointment, and etc.
And so it went.
We didn’t enjoy that part of the process. We didn’t like putting aside any accomplished book because its author had made a single fatal misstep.
Literature, however, is a tough business.
Our final three picks were all controversial, each in its own way. “The Pale King” was, of course, unfinished, but so are a number of great works of art. We have only fragments of Sappho’s poetry. Chaucer was a little more than halfway through “The Canterbury Tales” when he died. And, of course, there’s Haydn’s unfinished string quartet, and all those magnificent sculptures by Michelangelo, only half emerged from their blocks of marble.
It seemed, too, that a Pulitzer for “The Pale King” would be, by implication, an acknowledgement not only of Wallace but also of Michael Pietsch, the editor. As a novelist, I well know how much difference an editor can make—and there’s no major prize given to editors. The best an editor can hope for is mention on the acknowledgments page, when, sometimes, that editor has literally rescued the book.
Denis Johnson’s “Train Dreams” had been written ten years earlier and been published as a long short story in The Paris Review. It was, however, magnificently written, stylistically innovative, and—in its exhilarating, magical depiction of ordinary life in the much romanticized Wild West—a profoundly American book.
It contains lines like:
“Train Dreams” had only been published as a novel in 2012, which made it eligible, for the first time, for a Pulitzer. We checked with the Pulitzer administrator about that. He gave us the O.K.
Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!” was a first novel, and, like many first novels, it contained among its wonders certain narrative miscalculations—the occasional overreliance on endearingly quirky characters, certain scenes that should have been subtler. Was a Pulitzer a slightly excessive response to a fledgling effort?
However, it seemed very much like the initial appearance of an important writer, and its wonders were wonderful indeed. Other first novels, among them Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” have won the Pulitzer. One is not necessarily looking for perfection in a novel, or for the level of control that generally comes with more practice. One is looking, more than anything, for originality, authority, and verve, all of which “Swamplandia!” possessed in abundance. For instance, this memory of the narrator’s mother:
When we’d agreed on our three choices, Susan, Maureen, and I drank two consecutive toasts over the phone. First to the finalists, and then to the valiant, gifted almost-finalists. We were truly sorry about some of the books we’d rejected. We were enormously pleased with the artfulness and fearlessness and unorthodox beauties of the books we’d decided to nominate.
And so, we submitted our choices to the members of the board and waited, with gleeful anticipation, for their announcement on April 16th.
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This is the first part of a two-part piece. Read the second installment here.
Illustration by Maximilian Bode.
