One of Us, One of Us

You might have seen the WaPo article on literary prize committees, which I certainly looked carefully at given my recent involvement in the litblog co-op. One passage that stood out was when Book Babe Margo Hammond undermined the reputation of the late Penelope Fitzgerald by declaring her National Book Critics Circle award for The Blue Flower a compromise brokered when nobody could agree on whether to give the prize to Don DeLillo or Philip Roth. One of the other members of the NBCC panel that year, my former co-worker James Marcus, has launched a blog to dispute the contention:

"To make my own preferences clear at the outset, I admire The Blue Flower more than DeLillo's loose-and-baggy monster, and would certainly put it on par with the Roth (which alternates sublime passages with particle-board contrivance)... Some may have felt that The Blue Flower was a merely acceptable compromise. If so, they voted for the right book for the wrong reasons. It's a masterpiece, and deserved the prize as richly as any novel in the organization's history."

Okay, that's not the only reason he started a blog, but he's here, and that's what counts!