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Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Booker Fever

Posted by on August 16 at 15:38 PM

I am a fool for the Booker Prize. (Excuse me, the Man Booker Prize.) I realize that prizes are dumb, that lots of good books never get the awards they deserve, that lots of so-so books win awards undeservedly (Vernon God Little, anyone?), that Martin Amis has never won a Booker Prize, that Zadie Smith doesn’t have one, etc. (The list of great English writers who don’t have one is actually a bit damning: J. G. Ballard, Beryl Bainbridge, Julian Barnes, David Mitchell, Jonathan Raban, William Trevor—nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. And William Trevor’s been nominated four times.) But what are you gonna do? No one ever said awards mean anything. Except, you know, they completely alter an author’s career.

And the thing about the Booker Prize is that it’s not as full-of-crap an institution as, say, our Pulitzer Prize for fiction. (Cunningham’s The Hours? Were they joking?) The Booker’s U.S. equivalent is the National Book Award (small panel of smart people read a bunch of books, go to lunch, fight, decide on a winner). But, unlike in America, where most people don’t even know what a book is, the English papers get all worked up, and the betting houses in London sweat over it, and they broadcast the boozy awards ceremony on television, and the after-parties are legendary. It’s insane. It’s reason enough to move to London.

A couple of years ago in The Stranger’s book section, we went overboard on the Booker Prize—I wrote a Nightstand about Jonathan Raban being on the longlist, followed by a Nightstand about Monica Ali pondering her chances at winning, followed by a round-up of reviews of books that had been on the longlist but didn’t make it to the shortlist. The last couple years we gave the Booker madness a rest… but… I dunno… I seem to be coming down with a case of Booker Fever again…

All you MFA students who want to break into reviewing books for The Stranger? You would be wise to draw your article pitches from the just-announced-yesterday 2006 Booker longlist. Jen Graves has already come out against Peter Carey’s Theft. Annie Wagner has written Sarah Waters’s The Night Watch “never quite pays off.” Paul Constant didn’t like David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green. The rest of these books? Anyone have opinions? (Some of them you can’t buy in the U.S. yet—but you can buy them at www.amazon.co.uk and have them shipped to you.)

Meanwhile, some extra-curricular bringing-up-to-speed: here’s a helpful overview of this year’s longlist; here’s a short piece about which writers the Daily Telegraph, the Independent, and the London Times think deserve to win, respectively; here’s an article about the judges’ bias toward seriousness; here’s the article about Peter Carey that Graves linked to yesterday…


CommentsRSS icon

Yeah I know that the booker prize is awarded for books, but having written books like Yellow Dog and The Information will not help Amis's chance.

What I meant to say is that the "booker prize is awarded to books, not authors"

I can't be the only one tired of Sarah Waters' prose by now. I know that she's quite the favorite in England, however it continues to sicken me that's she's such a huge writer merely because of her 'hark! There were lesbians in Victorian times!' plots rather than any actual talent on her part. At least in this book she has moved her time line up half a century.

Not only is Black Swan Green excellent, but David Mitchell should've won for Cloud Atlas, and I wouldn't be surprised if the jury takes that latter fact into consideration, even if they're not supposed to.

Black Swan Green is dull, dull, dull. I'm sorry, but name-dropping '80s bands and video games to situate your book in Thatcher's England is a cheap form of scene-setting.

And re the Amis-bashing going on above ... I'd rather read Amis-written promotional copy on a box of hemorrhoid ointment than Mitchell's wafting prose -- at least Mart's precise and sharp.

Adrian Slatcher, editor of Lamport Court lit mag, keeps a decent blog on contemporary English lit at artoffiction.blogspot.com/ -- Though, the best blog source on the Booker is the aggregator at www.britlitblogs.com

Martin's a piker compared to his dad, a REAL writer, who did manage to win a Booker once.

I challenge you to an Amis-off, FNARF! Oh, wait. We did that already.

pitch: if Black Swan Green wins, it will really be a belated award for Cloud Atlas.


That is to say, I haven't read any of the other longlisters. Before discovering the English language bookstore on Kalverstraat, I went through a few Booker nominees in Amsterdam because they were much easier to find. Vernon God Little was the most disappointing, but this strategy resulted in my reading the Sea; so I can't complain too loudly.

placing bets--

i totally agree that sarah waters shouldn't win this year. but her lesbitoriana plots were deliciously styled ripoffs of wilkie collins and charles dickens and various gothic novels. the night watch is just boring.

Re: the Amis-off:

It is clear that he should have won for his 1982 book "Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines."

yes, that Martin Amis:

http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0539,essay,68210,10.html

Chris:

I gave a paper at a conference dedicated to literary prizes back in '03 at Oxford-Brooks University (the low-rent former polytech in Oxford, where, rest assured none of the buildings were used for filming Harry Potter movies, though we still got hammered after at the Turf Tavern). The occasion for the conference was the school getting the Booker Prize archives, and several former BP judges discussed the dirty ins and outs of it all.

James English from Penn has written a great book about literary prizes, which I recommend highly, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards and the Circulation of Cultural Values.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0674018842/sr=8-2/qid=1155840601/ref=sr_1_2/104-9106278-6323956?ie=UTF8

Bill Savage

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