Arts Booker Fever
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…
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.