Awards to the Wise

by Sara Nelson -- Publishers Weekly, 10/17/2005

Okay, I admit it: I've been thinking about book awards a lot lately—and not just because a sibling division of PW's parent company just launched the Quills. Lately, it seems, everywhere you look, somebody's awarding or talking about awarding writing and publishing prizes. A few days before the Quills awarded the book of the year to the ubiquitous Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the U.K. Booker prize was announced. On the Booker's heels came the National Book Foundation's announcement of its 2005 NBA finalists and the Nobel Prize in Literature to Harold Pinter, with the Pulitzer and the NBCC lists coming soon.

For a tribe that can't seem to agree about whether book awards matter, or should even exist, we spend an awful lot of time going to and writing about them.

So here's a shocking statement: I actually like book awards. Or, more accurately, I like all the discussion that book awards can engender. I like that sometimes the controversies (see: last year's NBA) are enough to jump book coverage from the back of the newspaper bus to, sometimes, the frontish pages. I like the way they can light a fire under publishers (see: Knopf's pushing up of John Banville's Booker-winning The Sea, originally scheduled for March, to next month; "Knopf clearly never thought the book had a chance of winning," says a rival publisher, suggesting that they should have planned a fall publication all along). And, I like—so sue me—getting dressed up, eating rubber chicken and watching writers and publishers get praised.

Never mind that they're not always the writers and publishers that I would single out for praise—what I like is the process.

For me, then, the best part is not actually the awards themselves (the dressing up notwithstanding); the best part is the nominations. Learning, for example, that the NBA fiction award nominees include such surprising gems as Christopher Sorrentino's Trance and René Steinke's Holy Skirts along with a usual (if deserving) suspect like E.L. Doctorow makes my day, and not just because I'm proud of having been touting Steinke's work for years. Ditto, when the Quills nominations were announced, I felt hope that the panel of nominators had known to tap Stephanie Kallos's Broken for Youand the out-of-nowhere Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, along with the more obvious choices. There are real readers out there, those choices said to me. There may not be enough of them to tip the voting, and political infighting may hinder jury panels, but for a while, at least, we can relish the possibilities.

The problem comes, of course, when the finalists give way to the winners, and hope is trumped by disappointment. As the track coach used to say, there can only be one #1, and with the possible exception of, say, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I can't think of a single award winner that might come close to satisfying everybody. So maybe what we should do is initiate the book award equivalent of the long engagement: make lists of books we love and think deserve praise, have a lot of parties and then take our time making an honest winner of one of them.

That way, it truly would be an enduring honor just to be nominated.