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The curse of the Pulitzer?
BY DWIGHT GARNER | When the New York Times won its 75th, 76th and 77th Pulitzer Prizes this week, the paper celebrated in traditional fashion, springing for a full-page ad featuring (color!) photographs of its smiling, happy winners. There was Supreme Court correspondent Linda Greenhouse, who won for beat reporting, and a group shot of the paper's international affairs team, honored for its pieces on drug corruption in Mexico. The only winner who was missing from the party was the Times' reclusive book critic, Michiko Kakutani, who took home this year's prize for criticism. It's not surprising, really, that the Times doesn't have an updated head shot of Kakutani; recent photographs of the 43-year-old critic are nearly as hard to come by as those of Ruth Reichl, the paper's food critic, who tends to appear on local television only when her features can be electronically scrambled. Kakutani doesn't circulate on New York's frenetic book scene, a fact that has piqued interest in her to the straining point; people who've met the diminutive critic are almost as much in demand at dinner parties as those who've shared straws over a milkshake with Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo. The last image of Kakutani to pop up in print (that I've seen, anyway) was a black-and-white snapshot that appeared in Vanity Fair in 1988; the critic looked casually glamorous in a black ensemble, a cigarette dangling from her thin fingertips. Even the Times seems to have trouble getting Kakutani, who's been a daily critic at the paper since 1983, to sit for an interview. When it sought a post-Pulitzer reaction comment yesterday, the best they could squeeze out of her was: "It feels unreal." Kakutani's win didn't surprise many in the book world. The Times holds legendary sway with Pulitzer committees, and many felt she was long overdue for the award, particularly after Times critic Margo Jefferson walked away with it in 1995 after a relatively short stint in the book-crit lineup. (Jefferson quickly graduated to theater criticism; she's now a roving cultural essayist for the paper.) Noting Jefferson's Pulitzer win, Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott said yesterday that he's often wondered if there's a curse connected to the criticism award. "Most people think Margo Jefferson went right downhill after winning her Pulitzer," he said. "We'll probably have no such luck with Michiko." Curse or no curse, some observers wondered yesterday if the Times might use the occasion of Kakutani's Pulitzer win to gently rotate her from the daily book beat. "There seems to be a tradition at the Times that when a certain critic becomes too powerful, they move him or her to another section of the paper," said one well-known New York book critic, who requested anonymity. "You saw that with Frank Rich. Before he moved to the Op-Ed page, he had so much clout that you began hearing rumors about how theater people were putting shows together with him in mind. Any time a critic -- even one as gifted as Kakutani -- has this much power, you begin to worry about them getting inside artist's heads. You wonder how much Michiko Kakutani is affecting the course of modern literature." While it's hard to imagine Norman Mailer or John Updike commencing work on a new novel while thinking, "Michiko, this one's for you," Kakutani has been particularly hard in recent years on work from male novelists of their generation. In particular, she has pounced whenever writers like Updike, Philip Roth or Nicholson Baker have shown their darker, randier, more misanthropic sides. "She has a very moralistic, cop-on-the-corner mentality," Wolcott said. "When a novel has unsympathetic characters in it, she tends to lash out. Her tone is often cranky and disagreeable, but she wants writers to be nice." As fate would have it, Kakutani's win coincides with that of Roth, who won this year's fiction prize for his novel "American Pastoral." While some critics -- including this one -- thought the novel was Philip Roth Lite, Kakutani gave it a rave, particularly in comparison to Roth's previous novel, the much darker "Sabbath's Theater," which she found to be a sour, gnarled piece of fiction that read like little more that "the depressing gropings of a dirty old man." In general, both Kakutani's and Roth's Pulitzers met with mixed reaction yesterday among literary critics. According to John Leonard, the outgoing literary editor of the Nation, Kakutani "has a tin ear, and her reviews are lacking in generosity." He found her largely negative reviews of Toni Morrison's "Paradise" and Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" to be, in a word, "benighted." Leonard had an even stronger reaction to Roth's Pulitzer for "American Pastoral." "It's a pretty good novel, but it's not among Roth's best," he said. "That Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo were both overlooked once again simply flabbergasts me and dismays me and makes me angry. They both wrote wonderful and demanding books, and the fact that they weren't recognized makes me wonder if panelists -- and readers -- haven't become far too lazy. People complain about the length and complexity of these books; we ought to demand length and complexity of our writers. 'Mason & Dixon' and 'Underworld' are books that change the way we look at the world." Jonathan Yardley, book critic for the Washington Post and himself a Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism in 1981, hasn't read Roth's new novel. "I disliked 'Sabbath's Theater' too much to read the new one," he said. Yardley did say, however, that he has "a feeling that this might be a career award for Roth -- something that wouldn't be unheard of from the Pulitzer judges. The Pulitzer is not really a literary award. It's a journalism award, largely presided over by journalists. You can't expect them to be that original in their selections." As for Kakutani's Pulitzer, Yardley said that he "doesn't read her with any real interest. I don't find her to be an interesting writer. She's conscientious, and she seems to be -- as James Wolcott once put it -- something of a perpetual graduate student." Yardley added that Kakutani seems to be reviewing a lot of shorter books lately. "Maybe there should be a prize for the shortest books reviewed in a 12-month period," he said. He would have preferred that the award go to her Times colleague, Richard Bernstein. In any event, Yardley said, no one needs to worry about any book critic -- Michiko Kakutani included -- garnering too much cultural clout. "There is no such thing," he said, "as a powerful book critic."
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