There is a downside to citing these numbers. “Wait just a minute,” you say. “Nobody can read 300 books in the few months the judges have.” And you’re right. Judges have to sample in the early stages. So in the spirit of putting you in a judge’s seat, below are samples from each of the novels, along with some context and description. The passages are short — bite-size pieces of prose like the chocolates in a Whitman’s Sampler — but should provide a taste of each writer’s style, sensibility and, indirectly, his or her approach to fiction. Perhaps the excerpts will take you to the books themselves, and then you can imagine yourself in the hot seat, a chair at the table where the judges have to argue their criteria and decide on the winner.

In Lionel Shriver’s “So Much for That,” the irascible middle-aged metalsmith Glynis is married to the usually placid Shepherd Knacker, who observes his wife’s combative relation with an old schoolmate:

Glynis disparaged Petra’s work as safe and cookie-cutter. Unlike Glynis, Petra did not press against the limits of “craft” and yearn to join the art world proper. She made jewelry, period, for people to wear. Another tactless observation? Shep liked that. He liked functionality. He was a handyman. He had always cherished the fact that his wife made objects not only attractive but utile, which should have made them more valuable, not less. Thus he’d no patience for the loopy distinctions between art and craft that put the latter at a commercial disadvantage. If you made a clay pitcher that held water, it was virtually worthless. Bang a hole in the bottom and it was “art”: you could charge an arm and a leg. How fucked up was that?

Living in expensive Westchester, Shepherd used to complain about Glynis’ unprofitable artistic bent. Now that she is dying from Mesothelioma, he praises her aesthetic dedication. Although he can’t say so, he still resents it because their one-income family is being bankrupted by the healthcare industry — co-payments, out-of-network doctors, incredibly expensive experimental drugs. His ambivalence seems to surface in the range of diction: the arty “utile,” the cliché “arm and a leg,” the vulgar rhetorical question. As Glynis’ condition worsens, the good Shepherd finds larger issues than art or craft to resolve: When should one calculate the costs of extending a life of suffering? When might suicide be a plausible decision? For perspective and commentary, Shriver includes Shepherd’s best friend Jackson, who is raising a child doomed by Familial Dysautonomia and who supplies amusing libertarian rants. Dictated by incurable disease, the plot is inexorable but surprises with the ways that death can twist the living. As a novelist, Shriver is similar to her expert handyman protagonist: She knows her material, the novel’s illnesses; she believes in the utility of fiction, the value of showing ordinary people in extreme situations; and she employs a functional and plain-spoken style occasionally punctuated with rage.

Jaimy Gordon’s “Lord of Misrule” is a horse-and-human story set at a small-town West Virginia track in 1970. The following passage describes Maggie, the young protagonist, as she rubs down her gelding:

She had to slow down time, go into a kind of trance state where sweet electricity pooled at her nerve endings like nectar on the pistil of a honeysuckle. And then by running her fingers over the animal she could find his hidden landing places. Not that there were jungle airstrips, few and hard to find. They were all over the place. But you had to approach the body boundary reduced to this one brooding spark. You dangled from a headland, black empty space rushing by, and suddenly you were across. The key was being tuned down so fine that you felt the crossing. Without that your fingers were just dead prongs on a rake and nothing happened.

Gordon “rubs” her characters the same way, using “nerve ending” observation, linguistic fine tuning, extended metaphor, and shifting point of view (third to second) to bring out the “brooding spark” of the sometimes masochistic Maggie, the hidden mania of her boyfriend Tommy, the family sentiment of Maggie’s loan shark relative Two-Tie, and the suspicious generosity of Medicine Ed, an aged groom who, no doubt, will be played by Morgan Freeman in the movie. Even horses are massaged into characters with emotional lives: the goofy Little Spinoza, the gutsy Lord of Misrule. The plot is somewhat conventional — the rookie couple gets entangled in the cynical dishonesty of low-end racing and finally has to confront a violent gangster–but Gordon handles with aplomb the required final Big Race, when the major characters have different stakes. Plot, like a race, is less important to her than the slow time of the “backside” world of stalls and grooms and walkers that prepares horses (and readers) for a few minutes of intense action. Ultimately, it is this now lost world that Gordon “rubs” back into being.

In Peter Carey’s “Parrot and Olivier in America,” the time is the early 19th century, the young aristocratic Olivier resembles Alexis de Tocqueville, and the low-born, middle-aged Parrot is Olivier’s British secretary. During their travels, they argue about almost everything. In the following passage, Parrot narrates and Olivier speaks first about art in America:

“Art is produced to suit the tastes of the market, which is filled with its own doubt and self-importance and ignorance, its own ability to be tricked and titillated by every bauble. If you are to make a business from catering to those people, the whole of your life will be spent in corrupting whatever public taste might struggle toward the light.”

“America is new.”

“Indeed,” he said, and I frankly loathed the certainty of his judgment. He might go away and write a book about this, but what could he know from so short a visit? The time it would take to make this nation would be put in centuries and it did not do to come prancing around in your embroidered vests and buckled shoes and even if the “New York Sentinel” reported what you said, it did not mean you knew.

Like the excerpt, the novel’s chapters alternate point of view, Olivier’s formal, structured and often pompous manner, Parrot’s more colloquial, loosely organized and mocking speech, both probably modernized a bit by the author. Their subject is personally crucial because Olivier believes himself a connoisseur of beauty, and Parrot, an amateur sketcher, has a painter wife and a business associate whose works resemble Audubon’s. For Carey, art represents cultural invention and reinvention as his protagonists struggle to create themselves as Americans: Olivier to marry, Parrot to survive. The novel’s first third describes Parrot’s outlaw youth in England and Australia and Olivier’s royalist upbringing in France. The companions’ episodic and mostly comic adventures in the New York City of the 1830s include contact with crooks and officials, resurrected acquaintances and recalcitrant Americans. As an artist, Carey would probably elicit scorn from Olivier, for the novel is a democratic “bauble,” designed to satisfy “the tastes of the market” for historical entertainments.

One of the five narrators in Nicole Krauss’ “Great House” visits a castle in Belgium where she sees a hall full of stored furniture, which reminds her of a photograph of Jews awaiting deportation to Treblinka:

The photo had struck me at the time because of the thoughtful composition which the photographer had clearly taken pains over, taking note of the way the pale faces topped with dark hats and scarves were mirrored by the seemingly infinite pattern of light and dark bricks of the wall behind them that trapped them in. Behind that wall was a rectangular building with rows of square windows. The whole gave the sense of a geometric order so powerful that it became inevitable, where each common material — Jews, bricks, and windows — had its proper and irrevocable place. As my eyes now adjusted and I began to see, rather than just vaguely feel with some unnameable sense, the tables, chairs, bureaus, trunks, lamps, and desks [were] all standing at attention in the hall as if waiting for a summons.

A piece of furniture confiscated by the Nazis connects Krauss’s narrators and other characters, most of whom are Jewish. The Israeli antiques dealer Weisz wants to find, five decades after World War II, his father’s desk, which has passed from a German novelist in London to a young Chilean poet, who reminds the novelist of her abandoned son, to an American novelist in New York City, who journeys to Jerusalem to find Weisz. This is the basic story that eventually emerges from Krauss’s “thoughtful composition,” her almost perfectly “mirrored” two-part “geometric order” that begins four narrations in part one and finishes three in part two. The American confesses hidden suffering, a British professor discovers secret suffering, an Israeli lawyer attempts to assuage past suffering, and Weisz causes current suffering, as if the desk that unites them were a curse of the Holocaust. Like the grad student narrator of the sample, the other speakers are monologist interpreters of experience who struggle to overcome self-indulgence. With its 19 drawers, the desk separates and conceals things. Krauss makes her house of fiction a similar construct of deceptions and evasions. The novel is saturated with emotional “common material” and is painstaking in structure but perhaps not, like the photograph, “inevitable” in its resolution and revelations.

Karen Tei Yamashita’s “I Hotel” is a 613-page novel in the form of 10 free-standing novellas linked by setting, a residence hotel in San Francisco during a decade beginning in 1968. Because the novellas are in wildly different styles — cinematic and dramatic scripts, collages of literary and political documents, narrative voices inflected by African-American dialect and Chinese and Japanese culture, cartoons and drawings — only the following sample represents them all:

Authors sometimes take strange liberties.

– Charlie Chan

The “passage” in a section titled “Analects” is a bald statement set off by itself without any obvious context. Much of Yamashita’s prose is active, telegraphic and assertive, yet qualified — the “sometimes” — by other direct statements. Her constant subject is liberation — political, economic, racial and artistic. Perhaps a tenth of the book is composed of quotations from political theorists, poets, popular singers, jazz musicians, revolutionaries and others. The quotes, like the sample, may be authentic or invented by the author. Many of them are concerned with perceptions by or about Asians. Since one of the primary liberties that Yamashita takes is rendering novelistic action in the form of cinematic directions, Charlie Chan is an appropriate “authority.” As a detective, he is an ironic model for the Asian-American author’s investigations of the criminalized political activists of the period (one of the fictions takes the form of a police “dossier”). And just as a detective explains his reasoning at the end of a case, the novelist articulates her rationale in her final novella, an epilogue that could have been a prologue to welcome readers into her book.

Each novella has two or three conflicting characters; several of the most memorable are a Chinese historian and a Chinese saxophonist, a Japanese professor, a member of the Black Panthers, a Filipino activist, an early feminist. Characters from the first novellas sometimes appear briefly in later stories, but Yamashita’s most daring liberty is reversing the usual proportion between foreground (continuity of character and action) and background (setting and cultural information). To readers who were conscious adults in the early 1970s, her information about strikes, occupations and riots may seem over-familiar, but to younger readers “I Hotel” offers a thick description of the period in a cut-and-paste structure that resembles contemporary hypertext. The only novel like it that I know is Robert Coover’s similarly obsessive and excessive “The Public Burning”, which did for politics of the 1950s what Yamashita does for her decade. Since her West Coast novel published by a Midwestern small press went largely unreviewed in East Coast media, “I Hotel” is a true odds-beater as a finalist.

And now the hard part.

“So Much for That” is a very good mainstream novel with important topical concerns and engaging realistic characters but is rather pedestrian in its handyman style. “Lord of Misrule” is a very good indie press novel with no topical concerns and somewhat stereotyped characters but contains award-worthy sentences. Although a comic novel recently broke through to win the Booker Prize, “Parrot and Olivier in America” is not as amusing as other Carey novels, and it doesn’t penetrate America as perceptively as a European buddy book it resembles, Pynchon’s “Mason and Dixon.” The extensively voiced sufferings of the graduate student, lawyer, novelists and professor in “Great House” actively solicit one’s sympathies but are given only an oblique connection to the Holocaust. Although Krauss is possibly more profound than the first three, “Great House” seems “needy” to me, artfully contrived to elicit the admiration of other writers. Of the five, “I Hotel” is the most ambitious in its cultural range, the most diverse in character, the most ingenious in form, and the most idiosyncratic in style. It also has by far the most longueurs. I still think “I Hotel” should win — as a similar book by a West Coast writer, William Vollmann’s “Europe Central,” did the year I was a judge. But Yamashita may be too anarchic or too declamatory or too alien — too off-putting in one way or another — to get the votes she needs. Krauss and “Great House” will probably receive the award. In this space last year, I picked the winner, Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin.” But don’t bet on “Great House” — unless you get great odds.

Although strong positions on Israel, Zionism and anti-Semitism comprise the bulk of this talky book, they are expressed through characters who each, eventually, change their minds. More impressively, behind these characters it is impossible to find any puppet master. You cannot deduce an authorial stance, only evidence of a frighteningly smart and insightful thinker and stylist. Jacobson — an established British author who has been terribly under-known this side of the pond — has written a brave book. Even more welcome, he has written a seriously funny one.

Jacobson exploits the nonthreatening veneer of a novel — “it’s just a story” — to make fun of everybody, defusing with an appealing lightness the heady political discussions the characters cannot stop themselves from having. “I wonder whether we feel nothing,” says a main character about Jews, “precisely because we rehearse our feelings on the subject too freely and too often?” “Crying Wolfowitz, you mean?” responds another character, “with a wild laugh.”

The novel revolves around Julian Treslove, a former BBC producer turned celebrity look-alike. Treslove is a textbook Romantic: he longs for an Ophelia, a lover who will die young and beautiful, so he can mourn her. His daydreams end this way: “The curtain always came down on Treslove’s fantasy of happiness with him crying ‘Mimi!’ or ‘Violetta!’ and kissing the cold dead lips a last goodbye that would leave him inconsolable forever.” It’s not much of a surprise that Treslove has never married, but has instead been involved with a string of women whose names all begin with “Ju” (or, as he later wonders, “Jew”), the only syllable he could hear a psychic utter when he had his romantic fortunes foretold.

Julian Treslove (or, perhaps, “Jewlian Very Love”) was childhood friends with Sam Finkler. Finkler was the first Jew Treslove ever met, and Finkler did not quite live up to the stereotype. Then, “he supposed a Jew would be like the word Jew — small and dark and beetling.” The two develop an intensely homosocial relationship straight from the British school-chums genre, but with a twist. For Treslove, Finkler represents the mysterious, desirable Other; he represents Jews, that is. Hence the novel’s title: Since he first met his first Jew, Treslove has called all Jews Finklers — but only to himself, wondering and mulling the age-old question of what it means to be Finkler.

Finkler, meanwhile, grows up to become a hugely successful pop philosopher, writing self-help books such as “The Socratic Flirt: How to Reason Your Way into a Better Sex Life.” Raised Orthodox, Finkler has fallen away from any faith, and is so anti-Zionist Treslove wonders if he is at heart anti-Semitic. When Finklers’s wife, Tyler, a convert, dies young, Finkler mourns — as Jews always are doing, at least in Treslove’s romantic imagination — but he also feels guilty (perhaps also as Jews are always doing). Finkler was an inconstant, distracted husband, is still a poor father, and spends his nights with zaftig Jewish mistresses or playing online poker. He holds the most outrageous political views in the book, and he is also the least likable member of a cast of characters who, although fascinating, are not always sympathetic. He is the kind of person who, at a restaurant, always asks the waiters for more hot water, “no matter how much hot water had already been brought. It was his way of asserting power, Treslove thought. No doubt Nietzsche, too, ordered more hot water than he needed.”

Finkler is also, of course, very funny. Treslove endlessly and unsuccessfully tries to crack the code of Finkler humor. It is all in wordplay, he concludes, but you also have to time the linguistic cleverness correctly. Poor Waspy Julian’s jokes are usually met with confused stares.

Treslove and Finkler are also linked by a mutual teacher from their childhood, now recently widowed and bereft, named Libor Sevcik, a Czech who has become, of all things, a celebrity journalist. With this trio of lost, mourning men at the center of the story, Jacobson sets himself a tough task. How will a novel in which these men meet, talk and fight about Gaza be engaging? Somehow Jacobson makes it work, in no small part because it’s funny.

Whenever the three get together, Libor and Finkler debate the state of Israel. Libor always pronounced it “Isrrrae.” Treslove analyzes his pronunciation: “Whenever Libor said the word Israel he sounded the ‘r’ as though there were three of them and let the ‘l’ fall away to suggest that the place belonged to the Almighty and he couldn’t bring himself fully to pronounce it. Finklers were like that with language, Treslove understood. When they weren’t playing with it they were ascribing holy properties to it.” Finkler, on the other hand, refuses to pronounce the word at all, calling the country Palestine: he “spit out Israel-associated words like Zionist and Tel Aviv and Knesset as though they were curses.”

Treslove mainly listens and envies the witty, headstrong Finklers. After Finkler and Libor become widowers, Treslove is only more jealous: now they have even greater tragic auras! Finkler, in turn, always competes with Treslove, and perhaps wishing for himself a less troubled past, envies Libor his memories of a better marriage, and therefore his greater share of grief.

The action that sets the plot into motion is hilariously inconsequential: Treslove is mugged. The improbable consequence is his decision to convert to Judaism. He learns Yiddish, a language Finkler considers “the lost provincial overexpressiveness” of his Orthodox father. He visits a blogger who is trying to grow his foreskin back to discuss circumcision and sexual pleasure. What was his “Jewish thing” really? asks the Jewish woman he falls in love with. “A search for some identity that came with more inwrought despondence than he could manufacture out of his own gene pool? Did he want the whole fucking Jewish catastrophe?”

With anti-Semitic attacks on the rise in London, Libor also undergoes a change of heart, as all the English Jews find themselves wondering of a swastika here or a smear of bacon grease there, “Was it something or was it nothing?” As the debates migrate from past times or faraway places to the streets of the diaspora, the characters all find themselves surprised by their own reactions.

Rare is a work of fiction that takes on the most controversial issues facing Jews so directly — and with enough humor, intelligence and insight — that it changes a reader’s mind. Be warned: “The Finkler Question” will probably distress you on its way to disarming you. Can we pay a novel any greater compliment?

“The Finkler Question,” on the other hand, ruminates on the nature of British Judaism. Its author, despite having two previous novels on the Booker long list, has complained in the press that comic novels like his aren’t taken seriously enough. He’s got a point, but as someone who couldn’t make it through “The Finkler Question,” I’d suggest that this isn’t necessarily due to what Jacobson has termed “a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness.”

Instead, while more or less everyone can agree that tragedy is sad, humor is far more dependent on individual predisposition. The corrosive satire that some readers find hilarious strikes others as repellently misanthropic. One man’s whimsy is another’s unbearable cuteness. Physical comedy leaves some people cold, while others complain that strictly verbal wit is too dry. And when a comic novel doesn’t impress you as funny, then chances are that the whole book will seem pointless.

That said, the Booker will surely give Jacobson’s reputation a boost in this country as well as in his own. Hillary Mantel was a writer’s writer with a relatively small following of American connoisseurs before “Wolf Hall,” last year’s Booker winner and her first bestseller. As a general rule, booksellers and publishers think the Booker has a greater influence on American sales than even the National Book Award, its stateside equivalent. (The NBA shortlists will be announced today and the winners declared next month.) Despite a few blips — “Vernon God Little,” anyone? I didn’t think so — the Booker is seen as a more reliable indicator of quality. One longtime Salon reader, Toby Levy, has even made a practice of reading each year’s shortlist; you can see his rankings here.

The most important factor in the Booker’s success is the diversity of its judges. This year’s panel included a dancer, a broadcaster and an author, as well as chair Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate and celebrated biographer. Although book people like to kibbitz about “typical” winners, most major awards, like the Booker, change their judges every year. (The Nobel Prize for Literature is the exception.) The line-up that picked Aravind Adiga’s “The White Tiger” for the 2008 Booker is entirely different from the one that selected Alan Hollinghurst’s “The Line of Beauty” in 2004. Nevertheless, the criteria used to select those judges has been consistent, and while even the most breathless prize-watchers seldom stop to consider such details, it’s these criteria that determine the character of each prize.

The Pulitzer Prize for fiction — the most influential of the American prizes — is, for example, awarded by the Pulitzer Board, which is mostly composed of newspaper editors and journalism professors. However, the board selects its winner from a list of three candidates chosen for it by a panel of three jurors: usually a working critic, an academic and a fellow novelist. (Full disclosure: I served as Pulitzer juror last year.) So while the final choice tends to reflect the relatively mainstream tastes of the board (which famously rejected Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” in 1974, despite strong recommendations from all three jurors), the winner is often the most accessible alternative among three candidates selected by readers with the expertise (and esotericism) of specialists.

The National Book Awards, by contrast, are chosen by panels of five judges in each category (fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature), who have “written and published works in that category.” In theory, fellow practitioners are the best judges of excellence in a given form, but this perfectly plausible reasoning suffers from a basic flaw: Writers are rarely disinterested in their evaluations of their closest peers.

Authors are competitive and often envious. Even at their most scrupulous, they tend to assume that prizes exist to help writers, not readers. Readers want judges to tell them which book is the best, but as far as most authors are concerned, attention, that precious resource, ought to be more equitably distributed. The National Book Awards’ reputation for erratic and even baffling choices, particularly in the fiction category (Susan Sontag’s “In America,” Lily Tuck’s “The News from Paraguay,” etc.), has its roots in the many clashing agendas that come into play when five novelists get together to name the year’s best novel.

There’s a lot to be said for including the civilian perspective, which is just what the Booker does by routinely bringing in nonwriters as judges — not as the only judges, but as an essential part of the mix. The book world is perpetually in danger of becoming too insular, of speaking only to itself. A literary culture in which the only people who read novels are other novelists is neither healthy nor, ultimately, sustainable. Any literary prize that wants to be valued by a wide variety of readers must, like the Booker, be willing to return the favor.

Referenced in this article:

The Man Booker Prize home page

Howard Jacobson on taking comic novels seriously

The Pulitzer Prize home page

National Book Awards home page

In fact, it’s a banner year for Jackson’s legacy: the Library of America has just published “Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories,” edited by Joyce Carol Oates and containing 47 short stories in addition to her two most celebrated novels, “The Haunting of Hill House” and “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” Yet these laurels were tarnished a bit in April, when Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones used the publication of the Jackson volume as the occasion for an essay asking whether the LOA was running out of important writers to publish. “Shirley Jackson?” he wrote. “A writer mostly famous for one short story, ‘The Lottery.’ Is LOA about to jump the shark?”

The question of whether a figure like Jackson is sufficiently “Rushmore-sized” (Jones’ term) to deserve inclusion in a series of collections dedicated to such writers as Mark Twain and William Faulkner was again brought to mind by a blog posting by Lee Siegel at the New York Observer. “Where Have All the Mailers Gone?” it was called, and in it Siegel lamented the irrelevance of fiction since the heyday of such titans as “Bellow, Updike, Mailer, Roth, Cheever, Malamud” and pointed to the ascendancy of nonfiction in its stead. Even the commercial fiction of yore, Siegel maintains, “mattered to people” more than today’s bestsellers. The soapy epics of Herman Wouk and Marjorie Kellogg “illumined the ordinary events of ordinary lives … and they were as primal as the bard singing around the pre-Homeric fire.”

While Siegel’s posting was for the most part too silly and uninformed to bother responding to, it serves as a reminder of just how arbitrary, unreliable and tiresome the Literary Greatness Sweepstakes can be. Make no mistake: Mid-20th-century Americans believed that novels by the jostling alpha males on Siegel’s list were important and “central to their lives” largely because a chorus of cultural authority figures united to tell them so. That’s not to say that those novelists weren’t fine writers, or that the depiction of an upwardly striving middle-class descended from relatively recent immigrants (many of them Jewish) didn’t provide lively new subject matter. But it certainly wasn’t everyone’s story (as it was often made out to be), or a literature that everyone found interesting or that everyone would have consumed with “existential urgency and intensity” in absence of those endorsements.

Jackson, mostly unendorsed, wrote during more or less the same period, but where the fiction of Mailer and Bellow is expansive, hers is (intentionally) claustrophobic. She was the bard of the domestic nightmare (as Ruth Franklin astutely pointed out in a recent essay for the New Republic), of people who were trapped, excluded, usurped and pushed in a corner to wither away unnoticed. If there was anything Homeric about her — and come to think of it, I believe there was — it was the serene pitilessness with which she dispensed their doom.

Jackson’s style was as clean and unfussy as a Shaker chair, but unlike most practitioners of this mode of American prose (Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver being the exemplars), she did not smuggle in the maudlin under a mask of stoic realism. She’s often described as a master of the gothic, a mode that in this country is typically associated with the lushly overflowing prose of Faulkner and Poe. Located somewhere on the spectrum between Patricia Highsmith and Flannery O’Connor, she has the most in common with a British novelist: Muriel Spark. Like her characters, she never quite fit in.

To make matters worse, Jackson helped support her family (she was married to the literary critic Stanley Hyman and they had four children) by writing humorous essays for women’s magazines about her eccentric home life — imagine a very acerbic, high-end Erma Bombeck — pieces that hold up astonishingly well. Serious contenders for Great American Novelist status are not supposed to stoop to this sort of thing, not even the vanishingly small number of women who might possibly qualify for the early rounds of that particular game of King of the Mountain. Furthermore, as Jackson’s excellent biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, observed, it must have been a shock to the fans of her popular autobiographical writings to learn that the same author produced “The Lottery,” the most controversial short story ever published in the New Yorker.

Jackson told interviewers that “The Lottery,” which depicts the lead-up to a sacrificial stoning, was based on her experiences living in the small New England town of North Bennington, Vt., where her husband took a job at Bennington College. Asked what the story was about, she replied “anti-Semitism”; after Jackson launched an unsuccessful campaign against a schoolteacher she believed to be abusing children, her family was harassed by their neighbors and at one point found swastikas drawn on their windows with soap.

But from the stories in the new LOA collection, it’s clear that Jackson’s mordant view of social relations preexisted her purgatorial sojourn in Vermont. Witches are a recurring theme in her work, and she liked to suggest that she was a witch herself; you get the sense that what spoke to her about the motif was less the witchcraft than the witch hunts. To judge by her fiction, she regarded most people as reflexively vain, petty and censorious — and she’d never even been on the Internet! Humanity did not disappoint her expectations. Of the hundreds of letters she received about “The Lottery,” she found that at first “people were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.”

Jackson never felt sorry for her characters, but she did sympathize with them — that parade of bullied, fanciful, shy and potentially murderous girls. For a woman who had no sister herself, she wrote a lot of books, including her masterpiece, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” that dwelt on sisterly pairs. This is a bit mystifying until you understand that the sisters are essentially the same woman, so alienated from herself — specifically from her own monstrous rage — that she has divided in two. Those “meek little wives” Raymond Chandler wrote about at the beginning of “Red Wind” — the ones who, under the influence of the Santa Ana, suddenly begin to “feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks”? Those are Jackson’s people. Was their experience any less American — or any less “central” — than Alexander Portnoy’s or Rabbit Angstrom’s?

Is Jackson as “great” a writer as Bellow or Malamud? Oh, I don’t know. I suppose not, by whatever conventional standards of greatness are still being propped up by the mugs who advocate such competitions. But, as someone who has manfully hacked her way through the anecdotal thickets of “The Adventures of Augie March” (“What I want to know,” I crankily asked a friend about two-thirds of the way through, “is when the adventures are going to start”), I can say that such questions come to seem more meaningless to me every day.

One thing I do know: If I were stuck in an isolated cabin, with nothing but “Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories” and the equivalent LOA volumes of Roth, Cheever and Carver to choose from, there would be no contest as to which book I’d reach for first, although it would mean dipping into the dreamy menace of “We Have Always Live in the Castle” for the third time. If it ever comes to that, I’d like to think that Shirley Jackson, that patron saint of oddballs, would look down on me from whatever pagan pantheon she inhabits and smile a wicked little smile.

Referenced in this article:

Finalists and winners of the Shirley Jackson Awards for 2009 are listed here.

Malcolm Jones questions the editorial choices of the Library of America in Newsweek.

Lee Siegel proclaims the irrelevance of contemporary fiction in the New York Observer.

Ruth Franklin teases out the domestic disturbances in Shirley Jackson’s fiction for the New Republic.

Additionally, Jonathan Lethem wrote about “Just an Ordinary Day: The Uncollected Stories of Shirley Jackson” for Salon in 1997.

I wrote an introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition of “The Haunting of Hill House” by Shirley Jackson.

Farrell was chosen over five other finalists: Patrick White’s “The Vivisector,” Mary Renault’s “Fire From Heaven,” Nina Bawden’s “The Birds on the Trees,” Shirley Hazzard’s “The Bay of Noon” and Muriel Spark’s “The Driver’s Seat.”

Farrell, who drowned while fishing on the Irish coast in 1979, also won the Booker in 1973 for “The Siege of Krishnapur.” Those two novels — along with a later book, “The Singapore Grip” — form a trilogy exploring the end of the British Empire.

Television news anchor Katie Derham, one of three judges who chose the finalists, said the prize should bring a new generation of readers to the author, whose reputation has faded since his death at 44.

“He was this great talent whose life was cut short,” she said. “I think at the time he was building up into someone we would all have heard of and studied at school.”

The shortlist was selected by a jury whose members were all born “in or around” 1970. The winner was decided by public vote on the Booker website. Organizers said Farrell’s book had 38 percent of the votes, more than double the support of any other title.

Of the shortlisted authors, only Bawden and Hazzard are still alive, but all the books remain in print.

The Booker Prize — officially named the Man Booker Prize after its sponsor, Man Group PLC — was first handed out in 1969, and is open to writers from Britain, Ireland and the Commonwealth.

The prize was originally awarded for books published the previous year. But in 1971, it became a prize for the best novel published that year — leaving novels published in 1970 out in the cold.

The Lost Booker is the third special prize to be created by the organization. To mark the prize’s 25th anniversary, a “Booker of Bookers” was created and in 2008, the 40th anniversary, there was a “Best of the Booker” award. Salman Rushdie won both prizes with his novel “Midnight’s Children.”

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Online: http://www.themanbookerprize.com