The National Book Award Backlash Begins!

It’s always amusing to watch the would-be literary gatekeepers turn brittle whenever the rest of us refuse to rubber-stamp their pronouncements on what is and is not worthy of attention—we saw it a few months ago with the backlash against franzenfreude (the snotty remarks about Jennifer Weiner’s inability to construct compound German nouns were particularly amusing), and I expect we’ll see some more of it as the reaction to this year’s National Book Awards finalists, particularly those on the fiction shortlist, bubbles to the surface.

The sense of outrage at the NY Times over the National Book Awards fiction shortlist of 2004 was particularly vehement, with multiple articles devoted to explaining to Times readers why the five novelists on the award’s selection committee were out of step with what was truly significant in American letters that year. (Rick Moody, who chaired that jury, wound up writing about the situation for The Believer.) And I expected, when this year’s nominees were announced earlier today, that we’d see similar protests soon enough. I should have taken the growth of social media over the last six years into account: Laura Miller, who wrote one of the putdowns of 2004’s nominees, tweeted within an hour of the National Book Foundation’s announcements that the fiction shortlist was “pretty whacked,” adding: “I rest my case on all-novelist juries.” What, you might ask, did she mean by that?

Allow me to explain.

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13 October 2010 | theory |

Do You Hate Books As Much As Andy Mulligan?

Andy Mullligan’s Trash comes out today—it’s a fast-paced YA story about a boy who ekes out a bare minimum of a living by picking through the giant piles of garbage produced by an unnamed third world city, until one day he finds an item that is valuable not just to the police, but to other people in power as well. He’ll be talking about the novel, and the experiences that inspired him to write it, in a number of places (such as TeenReads.com or Random Buzzers, the Random House Children’s Publishing website) over the next few days; you can find out exactly where and exactly when from RHCP’s Twitter feed. First, though, Mulligan has something to say about the kind of story he set out to write.

Is reading important to you? Is reading important to anyone?

The answer has to be no—not if the books are boring. Being trapped with a boring book is like a long-haul flight, which I’ve been doing a lot of, lately… that ache in the stomach when all you want to do is land! It’s the same with reading—an inner voice screams, ‘Someone cut these tedious passages!’

Being a teacher, occasionally forced to teach awful books, I quite understand a child’s desire to chuck one in a river and run onto the football pitch. So when I was writing Trash I wanted it to be a page-turner. I wanted a plot that would grip by the throat. I wanted characters who spoke fast, and got on with it! The books I hated as a child were the ones where nothing truly dangerous happened, and everyone behaved responsibly. Even in the soft corner of South London I grew up in, I knew there were mean streets, and gangs, and bigger boys who could kick your teeth in. Being a child was, and is, scary—school is scary.

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12 October 2010 | guest authors |