Betting on Books: Spotlight on Fiction

by Michael Scharf -- Publishers Weekly, 11/6/2007 9:18:00 AM

As part of our coverage leading up to the National Book Awards on November 14th--and don't forget to cast your vote in our poll--PW's reviews editors are taking a close look at the finalists in their respective catagories.  Today it's fiction.  The five finalists in fiction this year range from big names who've written career masterpieces, like Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, to Mischa Berlinski's debut Fieldwork (both FSG books, by the way; in fact, that fabled house took three of the five fiction nominees). 

Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) ,Berlinsky's debut has real plot (note: the return of plot to literary fiction must be rewarded wherever possible) and a captivating setting--but it's too early in the career or the book to win. A big piece of the nomination is a nod to the book's having done well, and it also sets up the next one. An annointing.

Lydia Davis' Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), her latest set of probing fictions, really is great: smart, sad, entertaining, firing on all cylinders.  But it's too slight to win: it's microscopy, not "big-picture."  Emily Dickinson wouldn't have won, either.

Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company) by Joshua Ferris is really carried off beautifully, but this debut is, in essence, a gimmick--just as the dot.90s themselves were. Does he have another book in him? We'll see.

The favorite, and the certain winner, is Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). Johnson has a full career's worth of great work behind him, and has never before produced at this scale, and on a subject with this much culture weight. Small return, but put your money here. And read it. The real question is whether this book will win the Triple Crown: NBA, Pulitzer, NBCC. (Commenters: the first person to name the last book to win the Triple Crown wins a copy of Tree of Smoke.)

As far as Jim Shepard's  latest collection of stories, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf), goes,
buyers don't understand, but critics and writers do. A gorgeous, weird, masculinist melange of eco-doom and failed relationships--just like the world. But reality bites. An acknowledgement that we still love books like this--we just still can't sell them.