The key to growing roses successfully is to encourage the development of roots, which should grow as deeply as possible, so please water liberally. Monitor newly planted roses carefully, as they will not have yet developed deep roots during the first growing season.
His mother grows roses. This is what he told me, and I think of this when I pass the wild garden in my neighborhood. I call it that because flowers grow in wild profusion at least six months of the year; zinnias wrap their arms around petunias, roses bloom next to weeds and poppies simmer in the tall grasses that are never cut. And when I walk by, I always say: “I love you, wild garden,” and I do. I love it because it’s chaotic, and if it could speak, if I could give it voice, it would not be polite, or well brought up. No. It would clamor for attention: “Look at me, I said, look at me! Am I not beautiful? Come. Come, pluck a flower if you dare,” and sometimes I do: When no one is looking, late at night, as I wind my way home, I pluck one and float it in a bowl of tap water. Then I set it on top of my fridge so my cats can’t get to it.
Your goal is to insure that rose leaves are dry by dusk.
I love you, wild garden.
And I loved this boy, the boy whose mother grows roses. On our first date, I took him to the wild garden, showed him a rose blooming there, so red and big and so fragrant, I was blushing.
Fragrant Cloud. The blooms are coral-orange, high centered, and one of the most fragrant flowers ever. Its green foliage is an excellent foil for the large blooms. This rose will blossom best in areas with long cool summers.
Even though it was late November it still bloomed. Extravagantly. Obviously it had no shame, obviously it reveled in its own beauty. Why was it still blooming in November? He said he would ask his mother, because his mother grows roses. Now it’s early in the new year and the roses are not blooming anymore, but some still linger in the cold nights, and some might call this miraculous. I know I do. Even in the bright frigid morning air, they hang there, frozen, a still-life, but somehow still defiant.
Then, a month later, this boy called me up and told me, “I’m not falling in love with you.” And I thought, How odd, because I have fallen in love with you. I didn’t say this, but I thought it. I thought: How is it possible that a rose can still bloom in November, and how is it possible that I have fallen in love with you?
Meanwhile, the gardeners in my neighborhood have covered up most of their rose bushes with plastic bags. One tall vine looks like a man, a scarecrow, wrapped up tight in plastic with a bucket for a head. So surely his mother has covered up her roses, like he has covered his heart. Because I am just vain enough to feel that he has fallen in love with me, but that this has scared him and now he has run away. And I’ll be honest and say that he wasn’t a boy, he was a man. And I’ll be honest and say I wanted to keep him and plant him in my garden. I wanted him to blossom every night, even in winter, inside my mouth, inside my head, inside my heart. I wanted him to bloom so extravagantly that he would wake up in the middle of night, smiling, a tear running down his face; crying from the sheer exuberant joy of being so firmly twined between my legs. How I would open to him in the morning, like the earth opens to spring. I wanted him to see I am as fertile as the vernal equinox. To show him that the roses that bloom are red and white and sometimes pink and sometimes yellow, and when they blossom beneath the sun, they fill the air, the rise above the garden. They possess such grace. Tell me, who would not want to witness such fertility, such beauty?
So, it’s a good thing he could not see me pacing the small confines of my apartment, all the wildness washing out of me, because I was pacing and crying. It’s hard not to feel the futility of love when this happens. It’s hard, but I resisted. Even as I remembered the way he would grab me and push me down on the bed, enter me without a sound, like a queen receiving her consort; the way it’s done in mythology, the passionate coupling, where words are not necessary. That’s the way he made love to me. He didn’t kiss my neck or my ears, he didn’t tickle my feet, he barely had time to caress my breasts. Once at a bar, while drinking scotch, he let his hands run along the contours of my body; tracing the musical shape of my waist widening to become my hips, my thighs. That was lovely. At that moment I felt mythical, more like a rose than a woman.
Peace. Blended yellow and ochre, 40-45 petals, a sensuous explosion of fecundity, perfectly symmetrical as if one bloom begot another bloom and so on and so forth. Revered for its perfection.
It was a warm November, that’s what the almanac said, but still people marveled that the roses were still blooming. But, I love you, anyway, wild garden. I do. I always marvel at your beauty. I love you in the summer because you appear to be sleeping while the cicadas hum in the tall grass. I love you in the fall when the russet leaves drift down into your mouth, and I love you in the winter, when only one white rose, frozen, stubbornly refuses to fall to the ground and say, “Enough. I give up.” I am not a fickle lover. I am steadfast and I have taken you into my heart without a moment’s hesitation. I know you will change as the seasons change, and I know you will shape-shift into different versions of yourself, but I have never let this scare me. And that’s why I am good and pure even though I’ve had many, many lovers. I am still innocent because I believe in wild gardens where roses bloom in November. I am Persephone. I am 11 years old gathering tadpoles in a yellow bucket. I keep a collection of camisoles and knee socks in my dresser drawer to remind me of this innocence. I keep a vial of lilac oil on my bathroom shelf and a dried bundle of roses that hang upside down, so that I will never forget who I really am.
New Year, aka Arcadian. Bright, yet graceful, orange-yellow flowers that are almost resistant to change. Arcadian manages to be both boisterous and refined at the same time.
And now this. This heartbreak. Now the image of him entering me in the morning while the sun was coming up is only a memory. And because it is early in the new year and because the world outside is frozen, I keep warm by focusing on his silhouette emerging from my shower, handing him a cup of coffee. And the way I would gloat as he dressed, “Oh, this man, is here, inside my home, getting dressed. He made love to me three times last night.”
I have to be very careful that I do not let this memory shatter into a mess on my kitchen floor. I have to hold it delicately, reverently. Like the way he would take the tip of himself and gradually push his way between my legs, and the way I would shiver, be covered in goose bumps, when he began to make love to me. And at that exact moment, when he was finally and completely inside of me, I saw stars. This is true and anyone who has lived through this will agree because it’s like the magical four words: once upon a time. Once upon a time, he entered me, once upon a time he made love to me.
Dainty Bess. Instead of double, high-centered blooms, she makes do with five petals, each a delicate light pink, almost silver. She is considered an easy-care rose, and an excellent choice as a specimen near paths, or in the perennial border.
Once upon a time, he pulled me down into the damp grass of a deserted park, the ground cold, the street lights arcing out into the night, a halo of broken leaves inside my hair, a laurel wreath crowning the head of the queen. His tongue like the serpent; a sinuous tangle of flesh inside my mouth, his fingers exploring my cold skin now warming to his touch. My body left an imprint of this warmth, phosphorescent, almost radioactive. Walk by there any time of night, and you will still be able to see it. It glows in the dark. But don’t touch it, or it will shatter, and be forgotten. Best to leave it alone, and let it fade of its own accord, when it desires, when the moment is right.
Mutabilis. High variation in bloom color due to the rapid change as the blossoms mature. Blooms change rapidly from copper orange through the warm spectrum to finish crimson.
Believe it or not it is Jan. 3, the temperature is minus 17 and one white rose will not be forgotten, will not fall. Sometimes it hurts to walk by and see this. Sometimes the impulse to pluck it and bring it home is so great, my hand trembles. I want to pluck it and put it in my freezer until spring. Wrap it in plastic and keep it all winter long, bring it back to the garden in March. I don’t think this is crazy. There is a species of roses, tiny roses, that hibernate all winter long, they look like they are sleeping. Yet, they are awake, but in stasis, just waiting for the first headlong rush into the warmth of spring. This shows an intelligence I had not thought possible in roses, in gardens. But it exists and that is part of the miracle. So, my belief is that this rose is not dead, but sleeping, and that is why it has not fallen to the ground even though it is Jan. 3 and the temperature is minus 17. And that if I bring it home, it will revive in the spring. There is plenty of evidence to support this theory. Think of Attis. They say that in the old days, during the spring festival, he was hung or otherwise slain beneath a pine tree. And the pine tree was always in a grove or a garden. His blood fertilized the earth, and everything bloomed like it was supposed to year after year, century after century. So I think it would work.
Angel Face. Deep mauve, ruffled flowers; a tremendous rose because the flowers are produced profusely … the only drawback is that it’s so low-growing that the scent may not reach your nose unless you bend over to enjoy it.
Why should my heart break every time I pass this garden? Why should I have fallen in love with someone who doesn’t love me? I should take matters into my own hands, I should take this white rose home, pray for its return. He said his mother grows roses, right? All the more reason to do something. Something is better than nothing. Better than pacing this small apartment, piercing my skin on the wrought iron gates of the garden, that in truth, I have never entered. And yes, I know it’s not really my garden. And of course, I don’t grow these roses. They are not mine. I don’t tend to them, water them, mulch them and cover them up in October or November to keep them safe. I have not given birth to this garden, but that doesn’t mean I love it any less. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have a right to happiness, to fertility. Let me fall in love again. Let me grow a garden of wild roses in my heart. Let this white rose bloom in the spring and let me bring it home.
Because it so elusive, the pursuit of a blue rose has been the goal of many a breeder. The closest anyone has come has been lavender roses, normally moving the magenta tones toward the blue end of the scale. The problem is that most of these hybrids have been plagued with weak growth, and shy blooming.
I love you, anyway.
This originally appeared on
The Chimerist, a site devoted to the intersection of art, stories, and technology.
Whatever interactive fiction is (and we’re still figuring that out) it suffers from all the problems of traditional fiction and then some. The vast majority of novels and short stories aren’t much good, but when a branching fiction — along the lines of the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books — fails to engage, the first impulse is to blame the form rather than the content. Let “Frankenstein,” just released by Inkle Studios and Profile Books, serve as a reproach to that reflex. The app is a creative, subtle and sensitive adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novella, and it has singlehandedly renewed this critic’s hopes for interactive fiction.
What this “Frankenstein” isn’t is a replication of the source text with the addition of a lot of digital doohickeys like sound effects and illustrations that animate when tapped. The app is all about the text, even if it is beautifully framed by period art and anatomical illustrations. The reader is presented with a screenful of narration and then offered one or more responses to it. The preferred response, when tapped, delivers up another screen of text. (In an absurdly pleasing visual touch, these appear as sheets of paper fasted together by straight pins.) According to the press materials, the reader’s responses will shape the way the narrative is presented, although not to the degree of substantively changing the plot.
This is an important point. The pleasure of storytelling lies in the dynamic between the surprising and the inevitable. The reader wants to feel the story is going somewhere, that its events follow from each other in meaningful, but not too obvious ways. When a story can go anywhere, it feels meaningless. In Mary Shelley’s novella, which is saturated with the Western tradition of the tragedy, Viktor Frankenstein’s character is such that he must create a monster, and the monster’s body is such that he can never belong among human beings however much he yearns to. A “Frankenstein” that ended with either misfit finding a comfortable place in the world would be a travesty.
But that doesn’t mean the reader doesn’t long for the story to unfold otherwise; that’s the nature of tragedy. The great insight that writer Dave Morris brings to this adaptation of the novel is that while a reader cannot significantly change the outcome of the story, the interactive element can change the shading and flavor of the tale. It can be mournful and reflective or action-packed. The creature and his creator can show greater or lesser ambivalence about their own behaviors. The ambiguity of both figures is baked into Mary Shelley’s novella, and while Morris has nearly doubled the word count of the original, this mostly amounts to playing up or down what’s already there.
Morris — a novelist who has written graphic novels, games and, yes, Choose-Your-Own-Adventure stories for kids — has changed the original text in other ways, as well. (Let’s take a moment here to point out to all future narrative app developers that hiring a real writer who actually knows what he or she is doing is totally worth it.) He’s moved the setting to revolutionary France, a choice that shows shrewd understanding of the idealistic political climate that affected Shelley’s thinking; the new Republic is its own kind of Frankenstein’s monster. He’s also eliminated much of the 19th-century framing of the tale and converted it into two present-tense narrations. One is Frankenstein’s dialogue with either himself or a (possibly imaginary) companion. The other is a second-person account of the monster’s first weeks of life as it spies on a family of dispossessed French nobility and has the chance to observe the loving relationships it can never enjoy itself.
Morris presents the reader with choices I’ve not encountered in other interactive fictions. Is humanity mostly good, or mostly evil? Does the most recent development make you (the monster) feel hope or despair? Is the revolution the dawn of a brave new world or a descent into chaos and barbarity? While I’m usually skeptical that present-tense narration increases the “immediacy” of a story, in this case, it really does work, particularly in the sections concerning the monster. Depending on your own outlook, you may urge him to keep trying to connect with humanity, or promptly forward him on to homicidal rage.
In either case, the narrative is shaped not by the reader deciding to turn left or right, to go down into the cellar or to get out of the house — the usual actions offered on the choose-your-own menu. Instead, the options have more to do with personality and interpretation, beliefs and ideas. As a result of the reader’s choices, the characters seem more like him- or herself, with a concurrent ratcheting up of emotional investment. To my surprise, I found myself more moved by this adaptation of the Shelley novel than I have been by the source text. (Although the app does include the original if you want to compare and contrast.) This is the only interactive fiction I’ve ever read with that quintessential, old-fashioned readerly avidity: the hunger to know what happens next. Of course, I already knew, but that didn’t matter at all.
Ron Rash’s atmospheric, strangely uncomplicated novel, “The Cove,” begins with a scene of melancholy and abandonment, the promise of obliteration, and a shocking discovery. It is 1953 and a man called Parton, a scout for the Tennessee Valley Authority, is investigating a remote parcel of land in North Carolina’s Appalachia for inhabitants who will have to be evicted in advance of the valley’s inundation. In a small notch — from which the book takes its title — over which looms a light-exterminating, anvil-shaped cliff, he finds a deserted farm. Pasture fenced by sagging barbed wire, a collapsed barn, a cabin and two wells are the desolate relicts of past life and labor. The general doominess of the setting is further enhanced by an ash tree decked in charms against evil forces, dead American chestnut trees (victims of the plague that wiped them out across the land), and the memory of the now extinct Carolina parakeet. Parton, thirsty, manages to winch up a bucket of water from one of the wells — and with it a human skull.
I give little away in revealing this, as it occurs on page 4; it takes another 243 pages and a step back to the late summer and autumn of 1918 to discover the skull’s owner. It is then, during the last months of World War I, that the story takes place. At its heart is Laurel, a young woman afflicted with a large birthmark. She is shunned by the residents of the nearest town, Mars Hill, who believe that the cove is cursed and that she herself is a witch. Both her parents are dead, and with occasional help from a neighbor, she survived the previous summer alone on the farm while her brother, Hank, was away fighting in France. He has returned, absent a hand but resolutely capable and preparing for marriage.
In passage after passage, Rash describes life and work on the farm in its dailiness — the preparation of meals, tending to chores, mending clothes, setting fence poles, pulling wire — creating a sense of order and industry that would seem to promise future happiness and prosperity. But as the initial scene of desolation and death promises the reverse, an air of menace and foreboding pervades the story. And, indeed, like the waters that will inundate the farm decades later, powerful, destructive forces are gathering outside the cove.
On one of her forays to do her laundry in a stream away from the farm, Laurel hears and secretly observes a young man resting in a makeshift camp, playing a flute; days later she finds him near death, stung by a swarm of wasps. She brings him home; he recovers and produces a piece of paper saying that his name is Walter and that he cannot speak or read or write. As we — unlike Laurel or Hank — have already learned that a man has escaped from what turns out to be an internment camp for Germans, we get the picture. Walter won’t speak, but he will help with the farm, and this he does handily, capturing Hank’s admiration and gratitude — and Laurel’s heart.
All the while, anti-German hysteria is escalating in Mars Hill, a volatile temper encouraged by one Sgt. Chauncey Feith, a preposterous character ripped from a handbook of one-dimensional villains. Vainglorious, opportunistic and cowardly, he is a jingo, a sneak and a bully. The son of a politically connected banker, he has been deployed as the town’s recruitment officer, thus avoiding the perils of the battlefield. He has gone about this zealously, congratulating himself at every turn for sending young men off to the war and priding himself on being an “unsung hero, because you couldn’t go around telling people that any man can hold a rifle and stand in a trench but only a select few could do what a general or commodore or recruiter did.” That’s Chauncey Feith for you — believe it or not.
If Walter were to show up at Mars Hill and be recognized, there is no question that he would be strung up as a Hun. Meanwhile life and love go on at the farm. Walter helps Hank in sinking a second well, and the description of digging and lining it deep, deep in the earth is wonderfully potent. Indeed, Rash’s material detail, depiction of work and evocation of place — of nature, woods and stream, the play of light and the oppressive dark of the monstrous cliff — are truly splendid. Still, between the threat of a lynching and scenes from the cove, a vacuum yawns, and into it flows one simple question stripped of complexity: Whose skull? Or, put another way, happy ending or sad? The answer, when it comes, seems perfectly arbitrary.
J.G. Ballard was born in 1930 in Shanghai, China, and returned to England in 1946, having been interned with his family in a Japanese prison camp, an experience that inspired his most popular novel, “Empire of the Sun.” Ballard’s astonishing fiction ranges across continents and galaxies, but a quiet London suburb was his home until his death in 2009, and it is to the suburbs that he returned in his last novel, “Kingdom Come.” In its opening pages, the narrator, a London advertising executive named Richard Pearson, travels to one of the “perimeter towns dozing against the protective shoulder of the M25″ to find out who murdered his father. It sounds like the setup for a cosy English mystery. But this is Ballard. It will not be cosy.
“The suburbs dream of violence,” Ballard declares as we enter the blandly menacing town of Brooklands. Among this “placid sea of brickly gables” Richard searches his father’s flat for clues to the life — and violent death — of a parent he barely knew, a pilot who had “flown millions of miles … and then died in a bizarre shooting incident in a suburban shopping mall.” Three others died, and the suspected gunman, a mentally unstable local, is arrested but then released. The police, the family lawyer, the doctor who treated Richard’s father — all appear to be hiding something, while many respectable Brooklands residents seem to have formed a fascist militia.
When Richard first witnesses a racist attack, he concludes that “a new kind of hate had emerged”; its hub is the Metro-Centre, the mega-mall in which his father was killed. During one visit, Richard sits beside the mall’s manmade beach, where Julia Goodwin, his father’s doctor, has arranged to meet him. “The wave machine had been turned to its lowest setting,” he notices, “and a vaguely gastric swell, like a suppressed vomit reflex, flowed across the colorized water.” This languid, sickly image could only be Ballard’s. No other writer so effectively alienates his readers — and his protagonists — from an everyday reality that he reveals to be shifting, often nightmarish terrain.
At the same time, he soothes us. In “Kingdom Come,” as in Ballard’s short stories and in novels like “Crash,” the rhythmical balance of the sentences has a tranquilizing effect, like the shushing roar of the ceaseless traffic on the motorway outside Brooklands. Richard, too, seems oddly numbed as he probes his father’s involvement with local thugs, falls in love with Julia Goodwin, and is increasingly drawn to the Metro-Centre and to the figure of David Cruise, the mall’s TV celebrity.
The novel’s pace quickens as violence spreads and the Metro-Centre comes under attack. “Fights broke out, fists flailing through the workmanlike rise and fall of police truncheons” as screams are drowned out “by the blades of army helicopters cuffing the night air.” Soon the mall becomes a fortress, hostages are taken, and the wave machine churns up a corpse. Emerging from the wreckage, Richard predicts that “In time … an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise.” In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.
This week sees the publication of “The Hunger Angel,” by the Romanian-born German author Herta Müller. It’s her first novel to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize three years ago, and the book, set in a Soviet labor camp in the years after World War II, arrives in America trailing behind it a passel of rave reviews in the European press: a masterpiece, they say, to be put next to Solzhenitsyn or Primo Levi.
But, more quietly, “The Hunger Angel” is something else – a major addition to the tradition of gay literature, and a rare evocation of gay life in the war years and after. Leo, the narrator, is just a teenager when he’s deported from Romania to the Ukraine, but he has already had his first “strange, filthy, shameless and beautiful” assignations in the town park and the local bathhouse. At first he sees his deportation as a welcome escape from his Nazi-supporting father, and a mercy for the mother he truly loves, for in his own eyes he is a double disgrace: not just gay, but an ethnic German who sleeps with Romanians. In the camp, hunger becomes all-consuming, and he longs for home, but he also watches fellow skin-and-bones detainees sneak off to an industrial wreck for sex and knows, “If I’d been caught in the camp I’d be dead.” “The Hunger Angel” lets a gay man embody universal themes of suffering and endurance but also captures the unique contradictions of gay desire – a substantial accomplishment, and one that’s even more impressive because Herta Müller is a straight woman.
Müller is part of a small but growing number of heterosexual writers publishing novels that not only include gay characters as central parts of their narrative, but are largely about gayness itself. It’s a trend that suggests that homosexuality may no longer be the taboo it once was, for writers — and for readers.
These days, in American and British fiction, at least, it’s no longer uncommon for straight writers to feature gay characters in a novel. Think of Claire Messud, whose “The Emperor’s Children” examines a young gay writer’s friendship with his two best friends, both straight women. Or read Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad,” which features a young gay kid experimenting first with drugs, then with sex. More recently, Chad Harbach in “The Art of Fielding” didn’t just feature a gay and decidedly not butch baseball player, but a 60-something, theretofore straight college president who falls in love with him. (These examples all feature gay men, obviously: Straight writers’ interest in lesbians is usually less edifying, as any gay person who endured Philip Roth’s “The Humbling” will remind you.)
Yet while straight writers now include gay characters as a matter of course, putting gay people at the center of a book remains all too rare. Gay characters can help straight writers write a book of larger scope, but a novel that concentrates on gay characters is automatically “gay fiction” – and that, sadly, still puts readers off. Gay novelists know all too well that without the right promotion, their books can end up relegated to the “LGBT interest” section of the bookshop, somewhere between the Spartacus travel guide and “Homosex: 60 Years of Gay Erotica.” (If, that is, the bookshop even stocks gay books; if, moreover, the bookshop hasn’t gone out of business.)
For straight writers, taking on gay subjects isn’t just an imaginative risk, it’s a commercial one. And therefore the list of examples is brief, but even so, they suggest that reader opposition to gay-themed books is on the wane. Although fantasy and science-fiction writers may have taken earlier steps, it wasn’t until the 1990s, with Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, that a straight writer saw major success with gay literary fiction on both commercial and critical terms. The Regeneration trilogy, with its cast of both real and fictional characters during World War I, had a built-in audience among British readers who grew up reading poets like Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. Yet on the first pages of “The Eye in the Door,” the middle book, they were plunged into a rough (and fantastically hot) sex scene between two officers of different class backgrounds, complete with war wounds from Passchendaele and bedside Vaseline. “The Eye in the Door” goes on to detail the horrible persecution of gays in the British civil service, sometimes even by closeted gay men themselves, while in “The Ghost Road,” the last novel of the series and the one for which Barker won the Booker Prize, Sassoon, Owen and fictitious soldiers spend page after page thinking about their desire for men, and about the gaps between the military’s sometimes surprising tolerance and the cruelties of civilian life.
You see similar contrasts of confidence and doubt, narcissism and self-loathing, in Annie Proulx’s short stories, most famously “Brokeback Mountain.” The subsequent film was anxiously promoted as a “universal” love story, but Proulx insists that her two ranchers aren’t any old star-crossed lovers, and that gay desire has a special character. Ennis and Jack aren’t just incapable of having their love accepted by society; much more fundamentally, they hate themselves for loving who they love. Proulx told the Paris Review that she now gets fan mail from readers who have rewritten “Brokeback Mountain” with a happy ending, like the stale 18th-century tradition of letting a victorious Hamlet marry a not-drowned Ophelia. “They can’t understand that the story isn’t about Jack and Ennis,” Proulx lamented. “It’s about homophobia; it’s about a social situation.”
Homophobia is naturally a major theme in straight-written gay fiction, but it’s not all about tears and the law. In “Call Me By Your Name,” from 2007, the straight writer André Aciman looked at the enduring power of first love through a teenager’s overwhelming desire for another man, complete with lashings of sex in the forest, at the sea, and in the streets of Rome. (You will never eat a peach again without thinking about what those two guys do to a piece of fruit.) Straight novelists are even beginning to write about gay history, and in particular HIV/AIDS. Tristan Garcia’s “Hate: A Romance,” co-translated by the Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, examined not only the devastation of the first years of the disease, but the virulent debates between proponents of safe sex and more radical gay activists who see barebacking as a political act. That is the sort of thing even many gay writers are not yet ready to discuss.
It can only be a good thing that the terms of gay fiction are expanding to include not only more readers but more writers. Yet gays have been writing about straight people for hundreds of years, and while straight writers who write gay fiction are celebrated for taking a risk and for imagining something beyond their own experience, gay and lesbian writers who do the opposite, such as Colm Tóibín in “Brooklyn” or Sarah Waters in “The Little Stranger,” don’t really get the same credit. Perhaps this is because straight love and desire is omnipresent; perhaps, more homophobically, it’s because we still think gay writers “naturally” have such powers of imagination. Either way, while the situation has improved, gay fiction still suffers from ghettoization, and while straight writers may be mindful of the risks they take in depicting a minority to which they don’t belong, gays who turn to straight subjects can find the new, larger audience for their books bewildering. Michael Cunningham observed as much back in 2000, when he was asked about the success of “The Hours.” “I can’t help but notice,” said Cunningham, “that when I finally write a book in which there are no men sucking each other’s dicks, I suddenly win the Pulitzer Prize.”
The news that no Pulitzer Prize for fiction would be awarded this year came like a slap across the face to a book world still reeling from a Department of Justice suit filed against publishers trying to forestall an Amazon e-book monopoly. Double ouch! But does the Pulitzer snub mean that no good fiction was published in America last year?
I would (and have) argued otherwise, most strenuously; 2011 was an exceptional year for fiction, American and otherwise. I also suspect that the Pulitzer Board itself has not turned up its collective nose at every book produced by American novelists and short story writers in 2011. The Pulitzer Prize may wield far more clout with book buyers than any other American prize for fiction. It can turn an obscure title into a success and a modestly successful title into a bestseller. Readers take it seriously and snap up the books it honors by the thousands. But that doesn’t mean that the Pulitzer Prize for fiction doesn’t suffer from the same problems that afflict every literary prize, no matter its size or influence.
I have some insight into those problems because I served on the Pulitzer fiction jury two years ago. I can’t talk about my jury’s deliberations, however — that was part of the deal. I can tell you that choosing the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is a two-tier process, a fact that even people well-versed in the literary world tend to forget.
The first tier is the jury’s selection. Three jurors (usually an academic, a critic and a fiction writer) are responsible for wading through huge boxfuls of books. Anyone can submit his or her book to the Pulitzer competition for a small fee, and believe me: anyone does. We got hundreds and hundreds of them, including many self-published novels with titles like “The Bikinis of Alpha Centauri,” most of which read as if they’d been run through Google Translate into Farsi and then run back again into English before being committed to print.
From the many submissions, the jury picks three titles to recommend to the Pulitzer Board, and the board picks the actual winner, as well as selecting the winners of all the other Pulitzer Prizes. The board does have the option to select a title not on the jury’s list, but it rarely does so nowadays.
The heyday for picking no book at all was the 1970s, a time of considerable cultural upheaval and conflict. In 1971, the board rejected titles from Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates. In 1974, a stellar jury consisting of Benjamin DeMott, Elizabeth Hardwick and Alfred Kazin (three titans of literary criticism) unanimously recommended that the prize go to Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow.” The Pulitzer Board dug in its heels and said no. In 1977, the last time the prize was not awarded, the jury favored ”A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean and the board shut them down.
Why? According to the critic and experimental novelist William Gass, who wrote a notorious diatribe on the subject, the Pulitzer Board’s taste is hopelessly mainstream, middlebrow and unadventurous. (In 1941, most of the board did pick Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but one member — who happened to be the president of Columbia University — put the kibosh on that because he considered the book immoral.) However, Gass’ complaint seems an absurd cavil to level against an institution whose power and influence resides precisely in the fact that it speaks to a broad audience.
The Pulitzer Board consists of working journalists and journalism professors, most with a deep respect for literature but relatively little familiarity with the literary world. This can be a strength and a weakness. The Pulitzer’s excellent record at singling out literary works that also appeal to a lot of readers is one reason why it has so much more influence than “insider” prizes like the National Book Award.
However, because the Pulitzer Board is fairly representative of educated Americans, it surely includes a lot of people who don’t really have time to read fiction — or, at least, literary fiction — anymore. Past boards might have been able to settle on a title that most of them had read even if it wasn’t offered as a finalist by the jury; reading at least a few of the “big” novels published during the year was something a lot more people did before the Internet and cable TV came along. In 21st-century America, the novel has become a marginalized and Balkanized art form, and even when avid fiction fans compare notes, they often find they’ve read nothing in common.
Chances are good that the three novels recommended by this year’s Pulitzer jury — “Swamplandia!” by Karen Russell, “Train Dreams” by Denis Johnson, and “The Pale King” by David Foster Wallace — are the only three serious new novels many of the board members read last year, apart, perhaps, from one or two others. These people are, after all, pretty busy doing things like editing the Denver Post and running the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, jobs that are a lot more time-consuming than they used to be, as well as selecting the winners in the other Pulitzer categories.
By all accounts, the group could not reach a majority on any of the three titles recommended by the jury. It’s certainly unlikely that enough of them read fiction widely enough to agree on an alternate choice. In that, they truly are representative of American readers, and that bodes worse for our national literature than a year without a Pulitzer winner.
(Credit: iStockphoto/RapidEye) 
Details from the covers of "Train Dreams," "Swamplandia!" and "The Pale King" 
