What happened to hypertext fiction? If you were alive and literate in the 1990s, you may remember the hype with which hypertext was touted as the next big thing: a medium that had the potential to transform storytelling in the post-Gutenberg era, the way the invention of movable type gave rise to the novel. Hypertexts were published, first on diskette, then on CD-ROM, then on the Web. Robert Coover’s essay about Stuart Moulthrop’s 1993 hypertext “Victory Garden” was on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.
And then … nothing happened. The Wikipedia entry for hypertext fiction lists no works published after 2001, and although Wikipedia isn’t the final word on anything, you have to think, if someone had written a hypertext fiction, this is where they’d want to tell you about it. The form’s seeming demise is puzzling, given that the last 10 years have seen the rise of the e-book and the e-reader, lavishly animated projects like Electric Type’s Jungle Book, and innovative publishing ventures like Richard Nash’s Red Lemonade — and, perhaps not coincidentally, a crisis in traditional book publishing. You can’t swing a cat on certain blocks of Manhattan near Union Square without it asking, “What about the future of the book?” If there was ever a time for the hypertext novel to come into its own, you’d think it would be now. But, so far, nothing. (I should mention here that I have been working on a hypertext fiction. Yes, recently. Yes, you can see. And I feel like the kid who showed up to school on a snow day — I’m wondering, where is everybody?)
One conclusion you might draw from the recent total lack of hypertext fiction is that the genre is not viable: that the literary experiment of the ’90s got what scientists would call a negative result. And in fact, if you read those fictions now (if you can read them: I’ve got a copy of “Victory Garden” on my desk, but when I try to play it, my computer tells me that “the classic environment is no longer supported,” a strangely portentous phrase), they seem difficult and problematic and not encouraging of successors. For one thing, the interfaces are terrible. Michael Joyce’s “Afternoon, A Story” (1988) offers the reader short passages of monospaced text, in which some words lead to other passages, and some words don’t, and the only way to find out which words are which is to click on every word in a passage, one by one. It’s interesting in a John-Cage-like, if-it’s-boring-for-two-hours-do-it-for-four kind of way, but the appeal of endless clicking was perhaps greater in 1988 than it is now, when we click plenty at the office, thank you.
What’s more, too many of the early hypertexts relied on the novelty of their form to do literary work, particularly in the keeping-the-reader-interested department. (The same might have been true of the first bound books. Who cared what was written in your codex? Wasn’t it cool that you could turn the pages?) Here, e.g., is a passage from Moulthrop’s “Victory Garden”:
Thea studied Veronica’s face in the flare of a long drag. There was concern in her face tonight, along with what looked like raw weariness — as if, this early on, she’d already been in some tight scrape. The resemblance to Emily was vivid: the same high cheekbones and long, stepped nose, the ash-blonde complexion a shade more delicate in the younger sister. Emily was the slender, elegant one driven crazy by endless comparisons to La Streep. Veronica’s looks were less easily put down to type, a touch androgynous like a femme Lennon, especially in these granny glasses she’d taken to wearing.
Drilling down into the hyperlinks doesn’t yield what you think it might. “Tight scrape” takes you to a snippet of dialogue between Veronica and Thea about generational difference; “nose” drops you into the middle of a scene between Veronica and someone named Harley: another time, another place. The effect is kaleidoscopic. It’s also one of overwhelming stasis. “Victory Garden” refers several times to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” but the spy-versus-spy intrigue that lures the reader into Borges’ dangerous garden (which, by the way, is not a hypertext: its forking paths are, like so many of Borges’ creations, only gestured at) is absent here. In its place we get snippets of description, snatches of quotation, academic conversations, and, in flashes, the first Gulf War, which is supposed to make us feel that the world has fundamentally changed, but somehow doesn’t. True, the hypertext offers you the puzzle-solving pleasure of making sense of the story, arranging the pieces in your head to see the whole mosaic, but why would you do that, if the pieces don’t suggest a picture you care to see? Not every puzzle has an interesting solution.
This is not a flaw in the medium, though; it’s a failure of craft. With two exceptions (Shelley Jackson and Geoff Ryman, whose hypertexts “Patchwork Girl” and “253,” respectively, may be the first classics of the genre, both for the quality of their prose and because they found ways to make their fragmentary forms feel purposeful), the early hypertextualists just weren’t good enough writers to carry off such a difficult form. Because it is a difficult form. Hard as it is to write novels, hypertexts are harder, because you don’t have the spring-loaded crutch of linearity and “arc” to support your work; the sections have to be readable along multiple paths; they have to be richly related in multiple ways; and they have to keep you reading. It’s a tall order, but it can be done: think of Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” (1962) or Cortázar’s “Hopscotch” (1963), two great non-linear novels that were published before Ted Nelson coined the word “hypermedia.” Or Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” (1759-69), a novel written almost entirely in digressions. Or Jacques Roubaud’s heartbreaking “The Great Fire of London” (1989), a story “with interpolations and bifurcations,” which chronicles Roubaud’s grief at the death of his young wife, and the failure of the “project of his existence” — an unfinished work called “The Great Fire of London.” You need six bookmarks to read it, but you can’t put it down.
Hypertext fiction is in a tough place now. Born into a world that wasn’t quite ready for it, and encumbered with lousy technology and user-hostile interface design, it got a bad reputation, at least outside of specialized reading circles. At the same time, it’s impossibly hard to create, one of the only modes of fiction I know of which is more demanding than the novel. (And then add to that the need to create a user interface, and maybe a content-management system, and is it going to be an app? Suddenly your antidepressants aren’t nearly strong enough to get you out of bed.)
It’s tempting to leave the story there, and to let the hypernovel, or whatever you want to call it, become part of the technological imagination of the past, like the flying car. But I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now. On the one hand, e-books are beginning to offer writers technical possibilities that, being human, we’re going to be unable to resist. On the other, the form fits with life now. So much of what we do is hyperlinked and mediated by screens that it feels important to find a way to reflect on that condition, and fiction, literature, has long afforded us the possibility of reflection. Just as the novel taught us how to be individuals, 300 years ago, by giving us a space in which to be alone, but not too alone — a space in which to be alone with a book — so hypertext fiction may let us try on new, non-linear identities, without dissolving us entirely into the web. It may give us room to concentrate on dispersion, to focus on distraction, and in that way, possibly, to get a sense of what we are becoming before the current sweeps us away. In the end, this isn’t a question of what hypertext can do for fiction, or for the novel; it’s a question of what fiction, and in particular the novel, can do for hypertext. Hypertext is here to stay, but the novel’s future may depend on the answer.
Paul LaFarge’s new novel is “Luminous Airplanes.”
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/alsos/photo.ua via Shutterstock) 
(Credit: iStockphoto/RapidEye) 
Details from the covers of "Train Dreams," "Swamplandia!" and "The Pale King" 
