Columbia University's 2015 Pultizer Prize Announcement

Twenty-two winners in twenty-one categories are announced today. My reviews of some of the finalists and winners are attached below the announcement.





Nonfiction
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
No Good Men Among the Living by Anand Gopal
TheAge of Ambition by Evan Osnos

Fiction
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

Links to all the prizes and mentions are here.


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The Illuminations by Andrew O'Hagan

Andrew O’Hagan, I only just discovered, has been nominated for a number of prestigious awards, including the Booker Prize (1999), the Man Booker Prize (2006) and was voted one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists for 2003. He is editor-at-large for the London Review of Books. In September of 2014, O’Hagan interviewed Karl Ove Knausgård for the London Review of Books at St. George’s Church in Bloomsbury. At that time, Books 1-3 of Knausgård's six-volume novel/memoir, Min Kamp (My Struggle), had been translated into English.

O’Hagan elicited something more from Knausgård than earlier interviewers had: his silence as an interlocutor was voracious. He raised questions citing Nietzsche, Camus, Saul Bellow, Emile Zola, Ibsen. He elevated the level of discourse, provoking revelatory statements from Knausgård about living an "authentic life," and the "lies" that we must tell in order to live with others. The question "Do individuals own their own life story?" is one question which O’Hagan posed to Knausgård and is also a central question of The Illuminations, O’Hagan’s fifth novel.

Luke Campbell, the grandson of Anne, finds himself rooting about in his grandmother’s history in an attempt to clarify his own life. Recently discharged from the 1st Royal Western Fusiliers serving in Afghanistan, Luke is suffering a crisis of conscience from events that took place before his departure from the war zone. Looking after the affairs of his aging grandmother began a journey of discovery for Luke, revealing long-held secrets and answering the question, "whose story is it?"

The title, The Illuminations, refers most directly to the city of Blackpool and the festival of lights it sponsors each year in September, streamers of bulbs illuminating the seaside promenade until the wee hours. But the title also refers to a young man viewing a firefight in Afghanistan, Anne emerging intermittently from the dark clouds of dementia, and Luke’s mother Alice experiencing flashes of insight: "It’s the hallucinations, as I call them…My mother always behaved as if the truth was the biggest thing. The photographs she took when she was young were all about that." Alice’s mother Anne, a once-famous documentary photographer, had stopped taking photographs long ago and no one knew why.

Luke Campbell had joined the Fusiliers to "look for his father" who had died patrolling Belfast during The Troubles in Northern Ireland. Sean Campbell had been in the Western Fusiliers, the same regiment that Luke joined. Luke knew his father had died but he did not know the story of his grandfather who, it was said, had flown reconnaissance planes in WWII. Without consciously setting out to uncover the whole story, Luke offers himself as a means by which Anne could return to Blackpool and her past.

Luke is close with Anne, and though his grandmother "always made too much of the men" in her life, she "spoke [to him] as a person not only ready to invest in you but ready to bear the costs to the end." On the other hand, Luke's mother Alice was always taken up with practicalities and resentments for being "sacrificed" growing up. "I didn’t ever think it would be so hard. So hard to face it," Alice tells her doctor. "I didn’t get to ask about my father or get a grip on the past...I would love to spend half an hour with the woman who made those pictures." Alice faces the truth with no filters, and feels the cut.

O’Hagan is a spokesperson for The Scottish Trust and he takes seriously the responsibility for following in the footsteps of great literary figures: "some of what we understand to be literary values come from Scotland in the first place." O’Hagan points to Rudyard Kipling at least twice in this novel and the poem "If" almost charts Luke’s personal journey to manhood. Kim, Kipling’s book about the great power struggles in an India that included parts of Afghanistan, sits comfortably in parallel with a young soldier’s disillusionment: the military affair in which Luke was involved in Afghanistan illustrated for him the ways that men and nations can be crushed under the weight of their experiences.

This novel is not the seamless piece one associates with "great novels," but it is packed with the insights of a work three times its length. One might even say that the work is at the service of big ideas. O’Hagan, like his central character Luke, is "a bit of a thinker," and strives to touch on important themes that we face today in the world. I admit to wanting to look at whatever O’Hagan has written "and test it all against reality."


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Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay

I don’t exactly recall when I first came upon the name of Roxane Gay, but it may have been when I was looking over the book made from blogposts by the essayist and thinker Rebecca Solnit, called Men Explain Things to Me. A critic of that book mentioned Gay and then I came across her name a couple more times in different contexts in quick succession. Intrigued by the opportunity to hear a literate black woman’s take on popular culture, and having recently been made especially aware of my lack of overlap, knowledge of, and understanding of the lives of black citizens in the United States, I ordered this book. I am keenly aware, too, that one literate black woman, articulate though she might be, is simply that: one literate black woman and not the voice of a generation, a culture, or a sex.

Gay’s writing reflects the contradictions and confusion of a real person. That may be her appeal, and her strength. Gay is almost unfiltered, giving herself permission to be humorless about rape, slavery, use of the ‘N’ word. Her opinions on everything from reality television to unlikeable central characters in novels and movies add to a fruitful debate about what really informs our culture. She thinks, and takes the time to tell us what she thinks. She has permission to change her thinking—would relish it, I trust—if someone had a better, more convincing, more nuanced argument.

Best of all, I liked the short blogposts at the end of this book in the section called “Politics, Gender & Race.” In these, Gay discusses “The Racism We All Carry,” acknowledging we all have beliefs formed on impressions of race. In “A Tale of Two Profiles,” Gay compares the investigative reporting of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, with that of Trayvon Martin, the black teen murdered in Florida. She asks if it is queer that in-depth “looking for the good” reportage had been done for Tsarnaev while “looking for bad” had been done for Martin. In “The Alienable Rights of Women,” Gay explains again to those that “still don’t get it” that the burdens of reproduction fall on the woman in the pair, and therefore she should have some say in how it all comes down. Finally, in “The Politics of Respectability,” Gay insists we stop pointing to the exceptions who have managed to penetrate the color bar but look at the teeming masses who are having trouble making that leap from the lowest level to the highest.

Gay’s pronouncements on matters of culture do not have the stamp or weight of convention. She does not constrain herself to write only about the best literature, the finest examples of music or TV, or what will become our classics in film. She talks about what is spilling out of media machines every day…those things we actually watch, or wade through helplessly to find “the good stuff.” For this reason I sometimes found the arguments aimed elsewhere, at an audience with whom I share a world but not a culture. I have a limited appetite for arguments about the relative merits of reality television shows, though I can see how this may inform some.

Opinionated bloggers, myself included, are sometimes best in small doses, when they can prick the conscience by criticizing (both good and bad) things they see, thus arming readers with support for their own views or by challenging long-held but not sufficiently-examined positions. I applaud Roxane Gay for thinking and writing and know she is learning as much as we are by taking the time to do it out loud. Brava!


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Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop

A friend of mine recently divulged his personal favorite among Bishop’s poems, "The End of March," which I immediately sought out, the end of March bearing some significance to me, now. I’d always thought of Elizabeth Bishop as a short story writer, and having sought out the Library of America edition of her collected poems, prose, and letters, I discover that I like best of all her essays, which read to me like her poems must read to others. Her essays are the real thing—life--in color, with context, in language as carefully chosen as any of her poems. She manages to pick among the all the true things in an experience for particular words which tell us volumes…she was a careful curator of the authentic, one with a true artist’s eye.

Bishop has a fearful darkness at the core of her writing. I don’t know why—it almost seems as though she must have an illness that tired her and reminded her how close nothingness is. I did not read any biography of her; perhaps I should. Why it is that poets can make blackness blacker than any other artists, I could not say. But even in her short stories, for instance "The Last Animal," there is an air of menace, a whiff of death. In the essay, "Gregorio Valdes, 1879-1939" we know right from the title that the character we read about is dead, or will die, as it happened. We had forgotten that at the promising start, all hot sun and bright flowers, the shade of palms and the act of creation (paintings) make us forget that death is waiting, and not patiently.

The poem "The End of March," it shouldn’t surprise us, is also about death. Walking along the beach with a cold biting wind freezing one side of the face, two walkers come upon a splayed "man-sized" tangle of kite string "but no kite" washed up on the shore. At the same time, one walker glimpses a boarded-up beach house tethered by a wire (electricity?) to something off beyond the dunes. The walker imagines a retirement there,

"....doing nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light."

Robert Pinsky was asked in this week's The New Yorker poetry podcast to choose a poem to read from the New Yorker archives and he chose a Bishop poem first published in that magazine in 1947. Called “At the Fishhouses,” the poem Pinsky calls "plain" has something of the “cold dark deep and absolutely clear” description that she reprises more than once.

"…I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
Slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
Icily free above the stones…

…It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
Dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
Drawn from the cold hard mouth
Of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
Forever, flowing and drawn, and since
Our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown."

As it often happens in the way of things, Colm Tóibín has recently published a book with Princeton University Press, On Elizabeth Bishop, whom he has been reading for forty years. Tóibín shares his thoughts on Elizabeth Bishop and the poet Thom Gunn in this article in The Guardian. Also in The Guardian, Lavinia Greenlaw reviews Tóibín's new book. Each of these yields great insights into Bishop's life and style.


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Into the Savage Country by Shannon Burke

This old-fashioned western set in the Bighorn Range of the 1820s takes us back to the days when reading a novel was pure entertainment. With this third novel, Shannon Burke exhibits once again his deep curiosity about the world and how it works, and his magnificent talent in writing fiction that makes us notice. His versatility of subject matter is extreme: his first two novels were set in modern-day big city-scapes rather than 19th Century landscapes, though his great talent for making morally ambiguous characters facing difficult choices was as suitable then as it is now.

Burke’s second novel Black Flies featured a rookie paramedic on an ambulance crew that serviced New York City’s Harlem district, Station 18. Reviewed here by Liesl Schillinger in the New York Times, it is described as a reading experience not unlike war reporting. It is a deeply felt, visual, and psychological portrait of a young man learning in the school of hard streets and hard blows.

Now Burke’s third novel is also a psychological novel, though set in big sky country rather than the fast lanes of New York City. The young man narrating, William Wyeth, came from a good family who thought humility important in forming character, and he left home angry and eager to flog what he suspected were his natural gifts in the wide world west of the Mississippi, in unsettled lands. From the first pages when we sink into the muddy streets of a frontier-town St. Louis, we are more than a century away from fifty states and a United States that resembles our own.

The real riches in this novel come from thrilling acts of stupidity and the resulting heroism among the team of men who banded together as trappers. We come to know the men, their faults and their skills, and miss them as they meet their end with a crazy bravery that many of us will never know. Two of the men among the band are artists of a sort: one pens a record of the years together and the other sketches with charcoal the scenes they encounter. Another man is so contrary and full of vinegar that the men consider killing him to keep themselves from aggravation. In the end every man is needed for what they bring, good and bad, and it is Burke’s skill that brings this realization home to us.

This wonderful novel brings with it the scent of cold, fresh air and the color of rocks in the streambed of a fast-moving creek surrounded by tall evergreens shading snow. The work is hard, and though the financial gains aren’t usually great, the pleasure that the men take in working outdoors in a constantly changing landscape is payment in part. Indians of various tribes feature in the story, and the tale wouldn’t be the same without their shifting loyalties to the white intruders on their land.

A strong female character, Alene Chevalier, is the heartthrob that balances the male egos-gone-wild, and she doesn’t seem out of place in this romantic view of the western edge of civilization. All in all, this novel has just about everything one would want for a hot summer weekend or a snowbound winter day. The writing is assured, the story ample, and the author capable of involving us in adventures of long ago. Bravo, Burke!

A final note: this would also make a great teen title that teachers could add to a syllabus reading list or summer reads. It is beautifully and engagingly written and so instructive in observation about personalities that mesh or grate. And of course, it fills the mind with images of Indians and the differences in their lifestyles and culture.


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See Now Then by Jamaica Kincaid

Hardcover, 182 pgs, Pub Feb 5th 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, ISBN13: 9780374180560, Lit Awards: American Book Award (2014), Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Nominee for Fiction (2014)

This memoir/novel is one long loud lament, an agonized and agonizing recall of the dissolution of Kincaid’s marriage to Allen Shawn, son of the famed New Yorker editor, William Shawn, who gave Kincaid her first big break to a career as writer. Every woman, every person wishes someone would love them for who they are, beautiful or not, talented or not, admirable in all things or not. For what is love if there is no flaw…”a flaw being necessary in perfection and in love too.”

Kincaid expresses her own love, and sadness, and regret in this memoir: love she thought she showed to her husband, to her children, and to herself; sadness that her children, though they loved her as one loves the hand that feeds them, were still embarrassed by her otherness; and regret that she could not relieve herself of the weighty burden of her upbringing, her first family, her otherness.

Children were born before Kincaid married, the name Persephone standing in for her firstborn, a daughter, after which she experienced severe post-partum depression. Her husband-to-be, called Mr. Sweet in this fictional memoir, carried the “beautiful” Persephone in the pocket of his coat on walks they took together, bonding. Kincaid mentioned her son Heracles, born three years and nine months after Persephone, so often and so warmly in the opening pages of this short memoir that I felt for the ignored and discarded daughter. But I came to see that Kincaid felt her daughter’s ire and contempt (“which is a benign form of hatred”) and it pained her. Having myself been the object of contempt (who hasn’t?), I cannot judge her reaction—writing a book about her pain—in the way some men who have reviewed her have done, calling her work “half séance-half ambush” (Dwight Garner writing for the New York Times). Writing is what Kincaid does, and does very well indeed. She made me feel that pain as though it were mine.

This being said, some things Garner says in the review are true: many sentences either read like a child’s book, a phrase repeated with one element changed or added, or run on to such length and convoluted meaning that one must backtrack and refocus. Not such a bad thing since one wants to be done with this horror of a breakup so we try to skim but the backing up forces one to internalize those sentences until we realize that every marriage has these things: “love is accompanied by hatred and contempt, too.” One has to decide if one is worth the other. It sounds like Kincaid came down on the side of wishing it weren’t so, though the pain—she has to realize it was felt on both sides—mayn’t have been worth it.

Kincaid is a kind of force as a writer who has shown us time and again that she has long-held feelings about relationships that she examines in their essential truths again and again. Her decision to marry Shawn was not a path that many of us need to walk: her non-renewable visa was coming up for review and in her pack of New York sophisticate friends one suggested “one of us will have to marry Jamaica.” Shawn, presumably as her longtime paramour and father to her children, stepped up.

Kincaid was adrift and striving when she arrived in the United States “on a banana boat” from Antigua when she was still a teen in 1966. She was first published, writing for magazines, in 1971, and became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1976. She was untethered and maybe a little wild, anxious for every experience and every expression of love.

Kincaid tells us she loved her husband, and we are inclined to believe her. She is eloquent in the ways he did not love her, and each addition to the list hurts us as though it were being said about us. She was not lovely with her naturally black hair coarse as ropes, and her torso like a very old tree, her skin like a piece of old, worn-out fabric, her thick lips “like night mixed up with day”. Kincaid seems almost to relish the bloodthirsty ways her husband loathed her: the sound of her voice “made him want to kill her, take an ax…and chop off her head and then the rest of her body into little pieces” and the sound of her chewing—the sound of “delicately cooked tender flesh parts of cow trapped inside her jaws”—enraged him.

We never hear the ways Kincaid loved her husband, though claims she did. She cooked and cleaned, the chores of loving (and not so loving) housewives. She expressed admiration and delight for his ability to play other people’s music. Mr. Sweet himself created music which “nobody liked,” “no one wanted to hear.” Kincaid was far more popular and financially productive, it is suggested, than he. “Old and the size of a mole” Mr. Sweet had found a younger someone who liked his music, and who coincidentally had the potential to become “the next extraordinary piano genius of the century.” His chance to jump to the next food wagon, it is implied, had come and he grabbed it, tossing insults like firebombs into the wreck of his marriage.

How much of this comes from the battered psyche of a woman scorned? Perhaps all, but while we know that, we know the ways the psyche cannot bear another blow before it needs to lay it down, get it out, scream the house down. And Ms. Kincaid is perfectly able to defend herself in that way. She admits to faults: obsessing over the insults of her youth, endless knitting and purling clothes no one wanted nor could wear, lavishing attention on her large but messy garden, her hundreds of beautiful bulbs eaten close to bloom by the fatted deer. Killed, murdered, eaten at ripeness.

Kincaid mentions several times John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Books I & II, which she had to copy over twice (!) when she was young and misbehaving in school. Milton was nearing 60 years old when Paradise Lost finally published and according to John Leonard, editor and writer of the Introduction to the Penguin edition, that work “is, among other things, a poem about a civil war.” The Fall of Adam and Eve is preordained—a certainty but not necessitated by divine decree. This point has been argued through the ages since the work was published (how could it be both?), and Leonard writes that Milton himself was arguably confused about this point. The Fall was permitted but not forced upon Adam and Eve.

The parallels with Mr. and Mrs. Sweet choosing to destroy themselves in the garden in New England by the River Paran are clear. Mr. Sweet loved Mrs. Sweet’s innocence in the beginning. He taught her things, though Mrs. Sweet often did things with the knowledge he shared that he did not understand. While Mrs. Sweet does not offer an apple to Mr. Sweet, she offers a crab soufflé, which gives her a kind of knowledge that love was gone already.

what if God hath seen,
And death ensue? Then I shall be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct. (Paradise Lost, ix, 826-9)

The end is not the end in this book, but the promise of a new beginning. The Sweets are no more but the garden remains, and springs forth again each season with new growth.


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The Circle by Dave Eggers

As a novel this huge piece of work has almost too many faults to name, but Eggers’ imagination and style makes the experience of reading or listening to it a special kind of pleasure. Filled to the brim with fledgling discussions of privacy, freedom, fairness, democracy, and control, the novel has in its DNA all the previous great works who have posed the questions “What is privacy and is it good?” and “What is democracy and is it good?” and “What is personal freedom and is it good?”

This is a long but easy read because it brings us a glimpse of a world many of us have only heard of and yet cannot help but be intensely curious about: the campuses of the technology giants like Google or Facebook. The company in this novel is called The Circle, based loosely on what is known of the more famous real life companies. We have heard enough, perhaps, to know Eggers is not making all of this up: the campus, company structure, and internal reporting requirements are drawn (and undoubtedly exaggerated) from life. But the mania and mindthink of bright young things anxious to gain approval in a large, successful, innovative, and fast-moving company is perfectly believable.

Eggers creates a character, Mae, who unwittingly is drawn into becoming the “voice” of company philosophy. Her not-well-thought-out responses to carefully posed and invasive questions by the company leadership are too-highly praised and said to exemplify what the human populace really wants. Her soundbites are clipped and pasted to the walls of the media space created by the company as though she had expressed the unfettered will of all the people, when in fact, Mae had been groomed, prodded, bullied, corrected, corralled into making the utterances that became an command that can not be challenged.

I enjoyed Eggers’ imagination and willingness to engage the important subjects of technology, privacy, education, and democracy but grew weary before the end. This may be a great book for teens who may have a larger appetite for the glamour of high technology campuses and need a point hammered home by a thousand blows. Part of the story involves Mae developing a crush on someone she does not really know, as well as instructive incidents ill-considered sex with someone she doesn’t even like. These ring true, as does the celebrity side of Mae’s meteoric rise to stardom at The Circle.

Certainly the questions at the heart of Eggers book are not merely for teens. The pace and direction of our lives leaves little doubt that technology has changed concepts of privacy, celebrity, and participatory democracy. These are issues we need to consider now. Opting out of the whole system is not really a possibility. In Eggers book, the person that tried that did not end well and he ended early. Eggers also points out that our politicians are not going to do this for us, being “bought” as it were by corporate interests. This is up to reasonable people taking reasoned positions and fighting like hell.

I listened to the audio of this title, produced by Random House Audio, read by Dion Graham. Graham did a terrific job, especially with the Human Resources folk at The Circle. The absolute conviction in the right of the company to know all came through in their voices and gave this a very spooky feel.


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