2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

In which I consider the connections between the 2017 and 2020 Pulitzer Prize fiction books...

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Last week, we discussed the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which saw Colson Whitehead take home the prize for his novel The Underground Railroad. I wanted to consider the reasons why The Underground Railroad and Imagine Me Gone—two books featured on the National Book Award longlist for 2016—made both lists, and how each prize considered these books from different perspectives. While doing my research for that year, I also looked into the 2020 Pulitzer Prize, when Whitehead won his second time, for The Nickel Boys. I was mostly just trying to make sure I didn’t miss any fun facts, but as I looked more into it, I realized that the 2020 award felt deeply in conversation with 2017. While the Pulitzer Prize is always looking for books “preferably dealing with American life”, each panel of judges has to decide what that means exactly, which books feel like they’re capturing where we’re at in America at the time they’re judging. These two years feel parallel for more reasons than Whitehead’s wins alone, and I wanted to talk about that today.

As I’ve stated, the winner of the 2020 prize was Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys, with the two finalists being The Dutch House by Ann Patchett and The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. The books that the judges select each year creates a narrative that speaks to their views on the current landscape of the American experience. These three books all consider toxic masculinity in some way, privilege, whiteness—though Whitehead’s book is the only one that explicitly considers racism, not just peripherally or abstractly, but by examining a very recent historical tragedy and grounding us in that reality. Not only do these three books examine similar themes and ideas as the books from 2017, but I also think the actual narratives and structures feel similar too. And while these books don’t necessarily reconsider the shape of the “Great American Novel” as the 2017 books did, I do think they are in conversation with some surprising novels of the past.

Interestingly, both the 2017 and 2020 prizes have a judge in common—Eric Banks, the Director of the New York Institute for Humanities. He’d served as chair in 2017, and came back as a judge in 2020. I don’t really know how much influence he had on the overall selection each year, but I just think it’s interesting to consider his personal views of the American experience and wonder what the conversations with the other judges would’ve been like. The two years in between showcased books that explored very different aspects of the American experience—I wrote about the 2018 award a few months back, discussing the levity of those books, in comparison to the 2017 books—and I think it also says something that the 2017 and 2020 books have a certain sense of urgency, in comparison, especially since one came out immediately following Trump’s inauguration and the next the beginning of the Pandemic. (To be clear, I’m not saying this in a conspiracy theorist way, like that the Pandemic had an eleventh hour influence over the 2020 books, just that I think it’s interesting to consider these aspects in hindsight.)

Taking a look at one of the two finalists, The Dutch House, I think out of the three, this is the one that feels the most separate from the reality of the American experience as we know it, and more an examination of the fantasy we’d constructed decades before, and then watched crumble. The book itself isn’t this bleak, for those who haven’t read it—in fact, it’s charming and soft, fairytale-like in its execution. It’s mostly about a brother and sister with a mother who’s MIA, a riches to rags to somewhere-in-between story. I liked The Dutch House, though I found it less captivating than her previous novel, Commonwealth. I thought that book, while less technically precise, a little rougher around the edges, was more interesting and complex, and offered a deeper examination on privilege and the complicated dynamics of a blended family. This book’s slot as a finalist feels more like an “honorary” inclusion for me, personally, but I get it.

What I do find interesting about this book is its weird connection to another book, one that’s been long out of print—1954’s The Courts of Memory by Frank Rooney. Both books are about an upper-middle-class white family, with a focus on the brother and sister relationship, narrated from the Brother’s point of view. That book, at the time of its release, was considered to be up for the title of “The Great American Novel”—only to fade into obscurity less than two decades later. In some ways, The Dutch House feels in conversation with The Courts of Memory, and almost like a response to the major flaw with how that book writes about the women in the story. Patchett’s choice to write The Dutch House from the closed off, much less interesting perspective of the brother, when the captivating and clearly more interesting sister, Maeve, is right next to him, actually feels like a very American style choice. A major point of contention surrounding the conversation around the idea of The Great American Novel is that many have argued that the book has to be from the male perspective, that no book narrated by a woman has ever truly been considered up for this title. This conversation has changed in recent years, but I think something that The Dutch House does really well is that it creates a conflict between how this narrator tells us about these women and what we see him actually observe of them. Whether it’s Patchett’s intention or not, I can’t say, but there’s clearly a feeling throughout the novel that this man’s perspective, as good and well-intentioned as he may be, isn't always reliable when it comes to disassociating his male gaze.

One could argue that I’m giving this book too much credit here—I tried to find other reviews that might also argue this point, but to no avail—but I think that Patchett is well read enough and smart enough that, whether intentionally or not, she’s going to be thinking about how her work is in conversation with the greater canon of American literature. In that way, this book feels like it’s doing something structurally similar to The Sport of Kings—both books mirror certain classics of American literature, but apply our current lens, automatically deconstructing the narrative. Both The Sport of Kings and the other 2017 finalist, Imagine Me Gone, offer sweeping stories following one family. Looking at all three of these books together, I think it’s clear that, at least for the judges of the 2017 and 2020 prizes, books that span decades and follow one family feel very much a part of the American literary tradition.

Speaking of, I think it’s important to remember that when it comes to the idea of American literature, it isn’t just the themes and ideas themselves, but also the stylistic choices that reoccur, the narrative elements that come up time and again.

When we move on to the next finalist, The Topeka School, this is the one I find the most interesting in how it was received by general readers. When I first mentioned I was reading this book for the newsletter, I had a flood of messages from people who told me they thought I would hate it, that they hated it, that they didn’t understand the point of it or found it inaccessible, a myriad of other reasons. The book is an erudite, investing interrogation of toxic masculinity, life of the upper-middle-class, and mental illness—it’s loosely inspired by Lerner’s own life, which I think makes his unsentimental interrogation even more fascinating. One of the reasons I think this book does such a good job of writing about whiteness and toxic masculinity is because it doesn’t shy away from actively showing us how normalized so many toxic behaviors are, and also the constant excuses we see people give to it, the rejection of legitimate critique. Both this book and 2017 finalist Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett approach the material in a similar way, as far as the way they write about these acts/behaviors. Part of what I don’t think worked for many readers is that this book came out right as we were entering into a new point of conversation around what was “right” and “wrong” for a writer/book/characters to do. There has been a period of a few years now where a large group of readers have expected books to blatantly point out what is right and wrong, to never explicitly show certain types of behaviors from characters and such, to always make it clear that the author doesn’t agree with their characters—this is an expectation that I think was set by commercial and YA fiction, as they have very clear moral lines—but the very point of a lot of these books is to make us consider the actions themselves, not to tell us what they think but to ask ourselves to interrogate our own ideas about what we’re reading. I think this book suffered from that, as far as the general reception.

The book is, at times, a bit impenetrable, just in how it writes so heavily about science—some of these aspects went over my head, even after doing more research. But generally, I think the overall book is compelling and accessible enough to be enjoyed.

If The Dutch House showcases the classic fantasy of the American dream and its slow crumbling, and The Topeka School is an examination of toxic masculinity, whiteness, and the constant excuses and free passes we gave to men that paved the way for people like Donald Trump, then the winner of this year, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, is a confrontation of the hopelessness felt during the Trump era, and also of the erasure of black history, the way it is treated as an inconvenience, and a demand that we address how we are complicit, still.

Where Whitehead’s previous novel was full of magical realism, existing within a more operatic register, The Nickel Boys is far more grounded and confrontational, pulling from much different inspirations, with many reviewers comparing it to pulp novels. There’s a mystery here, though we don’t know the full extent of this mystery until later in the novel. While some readers argued that the mystery element wasn’t necessary to the novel or that it left them feeling it cheapened the story, I disagree—I think the revelations the mystery provides in the end not only elevate the novel to become more than just dry historical fiction, but to also show the overall impact of the events preceding it. Whitehead somehow manages to take a rather large, gasp inducing twist, and marries it with the devastating reality of the preceding events current impact on the individuals affected by them. It’s pretty genius.

Though The Nickel Boys is smaller in scale than his previous effort, I do think it is equally well written, well crafted, smart and engaging and thought provoking. And I do think it captures the specific energy we all had, leading into 2020. He captured the collective unease, the anger, the hesitancy. It’s all there. And he does it without ever sacrificing the narrative, the art. There’s a reason he’s one of only four people to be a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for Fiction .

In some ways, 2017 and 2020 feel like a duology, capturing the lead up and the end of the Trump era, and also the ways that our views of American life shifted so much just in the last decade. I’m not sure if anyone else would agree with this—my brain just has really weird ways of connecting things sometimes—but for me, I know that when I look back on this period of time, these books will tell me a lot about this bit of history we lived through.

I’m still processing this particular prize year, but I thought it would be really fun to discuss, and I hope you enjoyed it too. If you have any thoughts on this year or 2017, let me know! I would love to discuss. Hoping to cover the rest of the 2015 NBA books next week—you can check out my coverage of the short list in the archives—so stay tuned for that!

Until then,

XOXO