Every fall, the National Book Awards releases a list of books that’ve been selected as finalists for the award, and maybe every other year the list will cause a stir because there is a single book on it that isn’t one of the usual suspects—a book that wasn’t published by a big New York press or the subject of a serious marketing campaign designed to generate pre-release buzz. One year, Carmen Maria Machado’s story collection made this list, and that seemed to play a large part in spurring that book’s commercial success. Another year, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain made the list, with similar results (it also made the Booker short list around the same time).
Neither of those books won the National Book Award, but they got attention precisely because industry insiders knew these books had sold for small advances, and had small printings, and weren’t necessarily in serious contention for awards like this. This year, there’s a similar surprise: Sam Sax has a novel out from McSweeney’s Press, Yr Dead, which made the prize’s “long list” (it didn’t make the short list of finalists, so won’t be in contention at the awards ceremony Wednesday night). Sam is a well known poet, and fiction awards tend to love poets, so it’s less of a shock, but it’s still definitely a surprise!
However, these books are exceptions. Most of the finalists are big releases with large marketing campaigns behind them. On one level, this makes sense. If an author is truly good, then why wouldn’t they get a great agent, get lots of awards and fellowships, sell the book to a publisher for lots of money, get great reviews in the right outlets, and then duly rack up awards nominations?
It’s only when you take a step back and think about the process by which the National Book Awards are decided that you realize, Wait a second, something doesn’t add up here! Like, how is it that these five people on the awards jury—usually eminent writers and critics themselves—can be handed five hundred books, including a bunch that haven’t even come out yet, and at the end of the day, they produce an awards short list that’s basically composed of … books that had big marketing campaigns.
Remember, the National Book Awards are a juried award. It’s not like the Oscars! The MPAA has thousands of members; it makes sense that they’d be swayed by marketing (Academy Award lobbying is, famously, a very prolonged and expensive process). Similarly, I began my career as a sci-fi writer, and the two major SF awards, the Hugos and Nebulas, are popular-vote awards that are determined by pools of several hundred people, voting in their spare time. If these awards could be swayed by marketing, that would make sense.
But how is it that the National Book Award’s panel of five people, chosen anew each year for their wisdom and taste, still tend, year after year after year after year, to pick basically the books they’re supposed to pick! This occurs so frequently with juried awards that when they don’t do it, as when the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 went to Joshua Cohen’s The Netanyahus, it actually becomes a story in itself.
The fact is, when a book wins the Hugo Award, which is given out by the members of each year’s World Science Fiction Convention, I usually think, “Oh, this author is popular with the community.” Sometimes it’s because they’re a big name, like Neil Gaiman, or someone with a large online following, like John Scalzi. But oftentimes it’s a person who’s genuinely just been around for a long time, and people are excited for them. That was the case with Ann Leckie. Her book, Ancillary Justice, was good and readable, but she was also a very nice person, who’d been around for years and people really wished her well (this interview describes some of her history with fandom and this post accurately describes how rapturously fandom received her debut at the time). That’s the secret history behind a lot of Hugo Award winners. Robert Silverberg is another example (here’s his Fancyclopedia entry). I don’t know if he was a nice person or not, but he was an assiduous convention-goer from the age of seventeen, and he was well-known in fan circles, and as a result his stories got more awards attention.
The Nebulas are a little more high-brow, since voting is only open to members of the Science Fiction Writers Association of America (which requires you to have sold stories to certain journals or sold a book to certain publishers in order to enter). But it’s a similar story: writers who are well-liked by other writers tend to win. Since it’s a smaller voting pool, there’s also some backseat campaigning and log-rolling for the Nebulas that I, personally, find to be very unsavory, but it’s an accepted part of how the award is conducted these days.
Still, there’s a basic integrity to these awards. They’re given out by a certain community. They’re not necessarily something that can be gamed by corporations. The books that win both the Hugo and the Nebula tend to be very accessible books, and oftentimes you wonder if they have lasting literary merit, but they’re almost always enjoyable to read.
I guess what I’m saying is that the Hugos and Nebulas still have a little credibility with me. They’re far from perfect. The Hugos in particular have been tarnished by scandals associated with having the World Science Fiction Convention in Chengdu and allegations that there was political interference by the Chinese government. And there’s also a portion of sci-fi fandom that has thought for the last decade that the Hugos are too woke and only reward politically-correct fiction. But … that’s always been true! A book with controversial political views is likely to be divisive, and, thus, it won’t get the popular support it needs to win. There are exceptions—The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is a sci-fi novel about a libertarian utopia on the moon, and it won the Hugo in 1967—but they do strike me as exceptions.
However, if a book wins the Hugo or Nebula it still means something to me. Somebody actually liked this book. Somebody enjoyed reading it.
I understand the process by which the Hugos and Nebulas are awarded, and I understand why that process produces the results that it does.
But when it comes to National Book Award winners, there seems to be no element of genuine popularity or affection involved in the nominations. Books get nominated because they’re the kind of books that get nominated. For instance, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which is the only book on this year’s National Book Award longlist that I’ve read: its publisher, William Morrow, paid $350,000 for it, and the author is well-known and well-established in New York literary circles. The book is definitely okay. I’m glad it exists, but it’s not a book for the ages, in my opinion. It’s one of these books whose selling point is that it’s telling us about a group of people not normally portrayed in fiction. In this case, that group of people are mostly-online incels and losers. The interest is still more sociological than literary. And that’s true of a lot of American awards picks, not just now, but throughout history. You can call it wokeness, but oftentimes you look at the book and you’re like, “Oh I guess it was time for X type of person to have an award.” The same dynamics motivated the Pulitzer committee to pick Grapes of Wrath in 1940. It’s a great book, but it got picked because it was about a group of people—the Okies—whose plight was often in the news.
American literary awards tend to go to books that seem important for some reason, usually because they’re about an underrepresented group or a hot-button issue. This means that the books often age quite poorly and come, after thirty or forty years, to seem like monuments to the previous generation’s conventional wisdom. Publishers, for their part, have learned about these dynamics, and they’re able to put large amounts of money into marketing the kinds of books that seem like they might win these awards.
What I don’t understand is why the jurors fall into line so readily! Aren’t they at all rebellious?
The National Book Award’s jury doesn’t even have to worry about being overruled! It’s not like with the Pulitzers, where there’s a history of the general committee overruling jury picks they think are too out-there. Like in 1976, the general committee refused to give the award to Gravity’s Rainbow. They thought the book was too long, too obscure—that the jury was just having fun, picking something they liked, instead of something that was of interest to the general reader.
What I don’t understand is why the jurors fall into line so readily! Aren’t they at all rebellious?
Similarly, in 2012, the exact same thing happened. The Pulitzer Prize three-member fiction jury offered up Karen Russell’s Swamplandia, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The fifteen-member general committee declined to give the award to any of these books, instead opting to give no award. They didn’t give a reason, but presumably they thought the books weren’t very good. It is a bit funny that whenever the Pulitzer Prize committee does choose to exercise its discretion, it does so in order to refuse recognition to authors who are actually good, like David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. I haven’t read The Pale King, but I’ve read most of his other work—it’s quite difficult, but it’s stuck with me and influenced me in a way most Pulitzer winners haven’t.
Anyway, that doesn’t happen for the National Book Awards, but the jury still operates as if it could. They seem so afraid of exercising their discretion and offering up a genuine surprise! Why? Whom would it hurt? The Nobel Committee is so much more august and important, and yet sometimes they still give Nobels to oddballs like Bob Dylan or Svetlana Alexievich! Are these people really producing great literature? Meh … probably not, but at least it’s interesting. With U.S. awards, this almost never happens.
You might say: “Hold up, this whole article is just about awards politics. Aren’t you going to say anything about the actual books?”
Except isn’t that the whole point? We usually have no idea if the books are good or not—all we know is they’ve won an award. So the question becomes: if a book gets an award, will I actually pick it up and read it?
Generally speaking, the answer is no.
The most popular charge for a literary critic to level against a writer is that she is middlebrow. The idea, popularized by Dwight Macdonald in his 1960 essay “Masscult and Midcult,” is that publishers have made a science of putting out books that seem highbrow, but actually they’re very digestible and don’t challenge the reader’s pre-existing worldview. Macdonald named The Old Man and The Sea as an example (Old Man won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1952).
If you look fifty or a hundred years in the past, many winners seem to have this middlebrow quality. For instance, Herman Wouk is a mid-century Pulitzer Prize winner who gets little critical attention these days. I’ve read a number of his books. They are entertaining and easy to read. The Caine Mutiny is a combo war-story and legal thriller, about a lieutenant who mutinies against his captain, because he believes the man’s actions are endangering the ship during a storm. The lieutenant then gets put on trial, and the people prosecuting him make some very thoughtful and convincing arguments that the lieutenant actually acted poorly! This latter part of the book is an astonishing performance, because we’ve already read the mutiny. The mutiny is the whole first half of the book, while the courtroom drama is the second half. In the first half, I was one hundred percent convinced that this lieutenant was in the right when he mutinied—by the end, I wasn’t so sure.
At the same time … nobody today is reading The Caine Mutiny, and it’s hard to argue that they should. It’s better than 99 percent of the books that are published today, including most award winners, but if you’re going to read a twentieth-century war novel, Slaughterhouse Five or Catch-22 or A Farewell to Arms has a lot more merit. But … none of the latter three novels won awards. The Caine Mutiny did.
I guess what I’m saying is that the Hugos and Nebulas still have a little credibility with me.
Right now, a lot of people’s livelihoods are tied up in these awards, which means we have to pretend like they’re in the business of discovering literary merit. This year’s Pulitzer Prize winner gets treated and written about as if she’s a Heller, a Vonnegut, a Hemingway. But, in reality, we’re lucky if she’s a Wouk. In fact, we thank God if she’s a Wouk. Most of them, sadly, are not even that readable (The Caine Mutiny is exceptional amongst mid-century Pulitzer Prize winners in its complexity and entertainment value). Sometimes novels with durable literary merit actually do win awards, as with Invisible Man winning the National Book Award in 1953, but it’s rare enough, looking at the history of these awards, that it seems like an exception.
Is it possible to have an award that can consistently pick books that will last longer than a generation? I don’t know. Probably not. And that’s exactly why most people with good taste don’t rush to read award-winning books.
But I will say that a far greater percentage of Hugo and Nebula winning novels are still read today, as compared to literary-award winners. Even Hugo winners that, in retrospect, seem like minor efforts, like Speaker For The Dead (1987) or Gateway (1978) or Double Star (1956)—all of which I’ve read—are still more often read than the same year’s National Book Award winners: Paco’s Story, Blood Tie, or Ten North Frederick (I have actually read and enjoyed Ten North Frederick and a number of John O’Hara novels, but surely I am almost alone in that). Because Hugo Award winners begin with a stronger base of genuine enthusiasm, I think they’re more likely to last. Reading through the list, I was surprised by how many Hugo Award winners I’d actually read, in comparison to the National Book Awards, most of which I hadn’t even heard of.
By the way, out of that trio of war novels I mentioned, the only one that came close to winning an award was Slaugherhouse Five, which was nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula awards in 1961. That mostly happened because sci-fi fans thought of Vonnegut as “one of us,” and we tend to be very chuffed when one of us writes a book that gets broader attention (Michael Chabon won the Nebula for The Yiddish Policeman’s Union for a similar reason). But still, it shows the value of having a naked popularity contest. Because at least popularity is something genuine. It might be fleeting or tasteless, but the fondness that sci-fi voters feel for certain authors is real, whereas the rote obedience evinced by literary awards jurors is a much more baffling and terrifying phenomenon.