…And He Said: More on the NBA

Let the record show that my right ear is still ringing from when my co-correspondent shouted “Oh my God!” at the announcement of William T. Vollmann’s victory at the National Book Awards… and while most of the room was taken by surprised, Vollmann’s editor at Viking, Paul Slovak, actually called it during the halftime intermission. We were chatting outside the men’s room (me on the way out, he on the way in) and he asked who I was favoring; I supposed (not very imaginatively) Doctorow if they were feeling conventional, Gaitskill if they wanted to look edgy. “No, look at this panel of judges,” he said. “They’re not going to pick Doctorow. I think it’s going to be between Gaitskill and Bill.” And sure enough…

I knew we were destined to have a fun evening when the first person I ran into in the hotel lobby was Christopher Sorrentino, and by the time I found Sarah and we walked into the opening reception, we were chatting with nonfiction nominee Leo Damrosch, with whom I’d been emailing for a Beatrice feature. Then Carol Fitzgerald of BookReporter.com came by and we traded notes on the AOL Coaches luncheon we’d been to earlier that day. I introduced Sarah to Christopher, who started to tell us a story about his friend, Sam Lipsyte, and Norman Mailer, but then somebody came over and, well, we have no idea what that story is, so we’re just going to have to take Christopher out for drinks sometime soon and force him to tell us. Then Miriam Berkley, who did the author photo for my ’70s film book, came over and started snapping a whole bunch of photos of Sarah before we were hustled off to our seats.

From up in the press balcony, the whole tone of the first half came off as rather pessimistic, starting with Garrison Keillor’s wisecracks about the obscurity of last year’s fiction nominees to his nostalgic yearning for the days when authors were known as authors, not content providers. (Also, the jabs at the Quills: sharp, but not especially funny.) Then Lawrence Ferlinghetti accepted the National Book Foundation’s first “Literarian” Award by declaring, “Faced with the dumbing down of America, the literarian is an endangered species,” after which he got even more apocalyptic, and then Norman Mailer gets up and pretty much echoes the eulogy for serious literature, tossing off advance congratulations to the night’s winners (“let there be a Dreiser or Melville among them”) before leaving the stage. In fairness, observed New School graduate writing director Robert Polito during the intermission, Ferlinghetti and Mailer “came out of a time when a book could really change the culture,” and what they were lamenting seemed to be more of a shift in the nature of readers than in the quality of great literature, which continues to excel.

The Vollmann nod certainly seems to support that argument. “I’m impressed with the choice,” said Kirkus editor Elaine Szewczyk outside the ballroom while the winners were facing the (small) press gauntlet. “It’s a real statement by the judges to recognize a book that’s so ambitious, maybe even overambitious in some parts.” I probably got that quote a little wrong, as I was somewhat distracted by the fact that some vulture had just made off with the small stack of books I’d collected and set down on a side table so I could chat with nonfiction panel chair Brenda Wineapple—including one that Brendan Galvin had inscribed to my wife. Luckily, I was able to find another copy of Habitat, and he was more than happy to make the same friendly joke about knitting when he signed that one. But for whoever took that last copy of Alan Burdick’s Out of Eden, I am currently filled with a pure blue flame of loathing. Although I’ll probably feel better by the time you read this…

Other than that, I did find it mildly amusing when the head of the poetry committee, Carl Phillips, mentioned in his introduction to the nominees that the face of American poetry (and here I know I’m paraphrasing) had no fixed gender, no fixed race, when, as I pointed out to Sarah, the actual shortlist was five white men eligible for Social Security. But you know what? You can’t really knock any one of those five nominees, and you certainly can’t knock Merwin’s victory. (His stepson, John Burnham Schwartz, who accepted the award on his behalf, let Sarah hold the statuette out in the lobby, though, and boy does that sucker look heavy.)

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