Powers, Egan Top NBA Winners
by Rachel Deahl, PW Daily -- Publishers Weekly, 11/16/2006
Those who believe New York is the center of the universe, and Manhattan the center of the publishing universe, likely felt right at home in the audience during most of the 2006 National Book Awards, held last night at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. But by evening's end, the ceremony had clearly honored uncompromising literary value above all else.
The black-tie affair was wryly hosted by the quintessentially New York writer Fran Lebowitz, and featured New Yorker editor David Remnick singing the praises of "the deeply intelligent, nurturing, self-effacing and humane" Literarian Award winners--New York Review of Books founding editors Bob Silvers and (the recently deceased) Barbara Epstein.So, later in the night, when Timothy Egan won the top honor in the Nonfiction category for his look at the survivors of the American Dustbowl, The Worst Hard Time, it was particularly amusing to hear a self-proclaimed "third generation Westerner" joke about the discomfort of having to work in such an East Coast-centric business.
While New York wasn't the subject per se of any of the nominated titles, 9/11--or as Fiction panel chair Bharati Mukherjee noted about her category, 9/12--certainly was. Three of the Finalists—in Fiction Jess Walter's Zero and Ken Kalfus's A Disorder Peculiar to the Country and in Nonfiction Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower—used the event as a touchstone. Nonetheless none of the winning books were ultimately 9/11-based. Instead, Richard Powers emerged as the Fiction winner for his unusual novel about a 27-year-old truck driver who, after an accident, is sidetracked by a rare disorder that prevents him from matching what he sees with what he thinks. Powers's decidedly ambitious fiction was no less so than the winning titles in Poetry and Young People's Literature. Nathaniel Mackey, a well respected—if not formally lauded—experimental poet, won the top honor for his collection Splay Anthem. And M.T. Anderson won the children's award for The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, a dense 350-page-plus historical novel written in an 18th-century vernacular. Anderson joked in his acceptance speech that he was especially grateful for his publisher, Candlewick, since his isn't the kind of book that screams bestseller in a pitch meeting.
The event's high-minded tone continued, as Adrienne Rich accepted the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. In an appropriately poetic, thoughtful but critical defense from the 77-year-old of her art, Richdeclared that poetry is unfairly decried for being either "immoral or unprofitable." (Mark Doty, likewise, in his speech introducing Rich, compared her to Walt Whitman saying she "calls us toward the country we could be, but also forces us to see the country we are.") Likewise Mackey, who said he was particularly honored to be winning an award first received by William Carlos Williams, called out that poet's epic work Paterson, which he said was among the first great poems he recalled reading as a teenager. The trend of paying homage to the old writing that makes new writing possible, Fiction winner Powers offered his own eloquent, writerly version of this. He thanked those readers who keep alive "the rich strangeness of many books against the certainties of one."
On an evening during whichmuch of the buzz at the cocktail hour was the announcement of a book by O.J. Simpson, the eloquent praise heaped on writers, editors and publishers was a welcome reminder of the industry's long literary tradition.
WINNERS
Fiction: The Echo Maker by Richard Powers (FSG)
Nonfiction: The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (Houghton Mifflin)
Poetry: Splay Anthem by Nathaniel Mackey (New Directions)
Young People's Literature: The Pox Party: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick)
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