In the second week of Hannah and Oliver’s relationship — which is already messy, because dating a co-worker is never a good idea — he announces that earlier that morning, another woman in their office gave him a blow job in the handicapped bathroom. Oliver is Boyfriend No. 2 for Hannah in Curtis Sittenfeld’s new novel, “The Man of My Dreams,” but if you’re thinking to yourself that Oliver may not be the man of her dreams — or anyone’s, really — you are right. Don’t tell that to Hannah, though. She thinks he might be “the best I can do.”
“The Man of My Dreams” is the story of Hannah’s search for love in all the wrong places, bathrooms included. It opens in the summer of 1991, when Hannah is 14 and living in exile with an aunt and uncle after her emotionally abusive father kicked her, her sister and her mother out of the house. Jumping in time, we next find her at Tufts University, and finally, as a woman in her 20s, working at a nonprofit. She takes up with Oliver after breaking things off with her doting college boyfriend Mike, and before spending a couple of years lusting after her best friend Henry. Grown up and looking back, she understands each as a certain type — “the man who is with you completely, the man who is with you but not with you, the man who will get as close to you as he can without being yours.” There may be other possibilities, she hopes, but she “can’t imagine what they are.”
Obsessed with boys as a teenager, Hannah doesn’t date, or kiss one, until college. When she sleeps with Mike for the first time, she is neither impressed nor devastated. She is confused — ” Really? Just this? ” she thinks — but also relieved. At last, she is like other people. She feels a little closer to normal.
As a college student, Hannah finds normalcy is more romantic than love — she is not like the others she sees on campus, who fall easily into each other’s arms and beds. She passes Friday nights alone in her dorm room and fantasizes about being married, when she can stop worrying about parties and just grab takeout and a video. (Lucky for her, she is described by Henry as “exactly the kind of girl a guy marries” — just before he turns and throws away his burrito wrapper.) She knows she is chronically “judgmental and disappointed,” but she doesn’t know if she can change. And besides, “the unflattering things she notices about other people, the comments she makes that get her in trouble, aren’t these truer than small talk and thank-you notes?”
In this Hannah is very much — perhaps too much — like Lee, the protagonist of “Prep,” Sittenfeld’s bestselling first novel. Both young women experience life behind a screen, as a series of things that happen to them; they are dedicated anthropologists who study their peers, looking to the behavior of others for the secret of their confidence. Like Lee, Hannah is not particularly gorgeous; neither is she devastatingly witty, or brilliant. She lacks hobbies and passions, devoting most of her free time to finding fault with others and examining herself with the same microscope. This close attention to social behavior — so typical of girls and young women — is familiar. It is easy to feel close to Hannah, to feel that she is someone you have known, or have been.
When she’s alone one Friday night, “She wishes she owned nail polish so she could paint her nails right now, or that she wore make-up and could stand before the mirror, with her lips puckered, smearing them some oily, sparkly shade of pink. At the very least, she wishes she had a women’s magazine so she could read about other people doing those things.”
More than anything, Hannah is blank, propelled not by goals or aspirations, by likes or dislikes, but by outside events. She reacts to, and is formed by, whatever happens to come her way. Because of that, “The Man of My Dreams” makes for strange reading — a character study that is driven by plot. It is an ordinary, routine journey of divorce, remarriage, boyfriends had and lost, but Sittenfeld makes it captivating, like another family’s home movies. She writes in the third person, inside Hannah’s head, which turns reading into something closer to eavesdropping. Like here, when Hannah takes a camping trip with her sister Allison, Allison’s fiancé, and the fiancé’s brother Elliot, Hannah is forced to share a tent with Elliot. She’s drawn to him, but notices he has a crush on her sister.
“It is in this moment, in his worship of Allison, that Hannah feels a weird kinship with Elliot. Watching them, she can feel in her own hand the desire to touch this girl’s wavy hair, this girl whose kindness and beauty could make your life right if you could get her to be yours. Hannah wonders if Elliot imagined she would be another version of Allison.”
In this moment, as in so many others, it is easy to slip inside Hannah, to get into her head. And because Sittenfeld is so good at bringing Hannah to life, she is also very good at getting you to turn the pages.
Unlike “Prep’s” Lee, Hannah is not just a morose adolescent — she is a depressed adult. She is not deeply ashamed of her father, but has been damaged, traumatized by his outbursts. The screen she hides behind doesn’t just separate her from others, it makes her into a bit of a zombie, removed from her own feelings. After Oliver tells her about the bathroom blow job, “it occurred to her that she should feel more devastated than she did.” Any emotional outbursts embarrass her; she is even bemused by Mike’s passionate defense of migrant workers, which she finds “silly.” During her childhood, “any given day was about not stirring the pot, so people who stir the pot voluntarily” strike her as “playing a game, even if they’re not aware of it.”
This attempt to preserve balance and tranquility means that Hannah does what she thinks she should do, not what she wants to do — a problem compounded by the typical confusion around determining what it is one really wants. (She and Mike take a walk along the Charles River, which she “imagines will feel fake-romantic, like they’re trying too hard,” but is surprised that “it just feels nice.”) For her, life is a problem to be solved, a code to be cracked: While at Tufts, she begins to see a therapist, Dr. Lewin. When she returns each week from her session, she scribbles down notes, trying to force an epiphany, imagining that “when enough pieces of paper have accumulated” she will “understand the secret of happiness.” The drama of the novel is Hannah’s passage from adolescence to maturity; she only grows up, becomes unstuck, when she learns how to go after the things she wants instead of trying to follow an imaginary script.
Still, with all that recommends “The Man of My Dreams,” why did Sittenfeld choose such an awful title? In this month’s Glamour, she writes that it is meant to be “more than a little ironic,” but irony or no, it’s cringe-worthy. And given the care she has taken to develop Hannah slowly, to let the impact of each new year and major change sink in, the ending is baffling — a letter to Dr. Lewin, in which Hannah recaps the previous two years. It seems like she runs out of steam at the end, even taking the downright corny shortcut of resolving a major argument with the appearance of a rainbow.
But Sittenfeld’s ear for dialogue is always sharp, and her observations can be shiver-inducing. She is especially good at capturing the spaces that divide people from each other, the invisible gulf between how we see ourselves and how others see us — and the sadness when we get a glimpse of that divide, when what one thinks is keen observation is revealed to be simple misperception. One night Hannah and Frank, her mother’s second husband, see an elderly family friend home. After a trying visit in which stooped, slow Mrs. Dawes breaks a glass, insists on cleaning it up herself and refuses to be helped on the stairs, they sit in the car together.
“Frank shakes his head. ‘I never want to grow old, Hannah,’ he says. She looks at him in astonishment. She thinks, But you already are.”
At the end of “Prep,” it was easy to think, Thank God that’s over and I never have to go back to the horrible person I was in high school and all those other horrible people I knew. Closing “The Man of My Dreams,” someone in her 20s might wonder, Is this ever going to end? Sittenfeld captures the pain of growing up in such a raw, palpable way, that it is a relief to finally close the book and put it aside. Of course, if characters have lives when books end, Hannah will still have to move forward, into an unknown future. It’s a testament to Sittenfeld’s writing that there’s no way to guess what will happen when she gets there.
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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" 
