2023 NBA Longlist, Reviewed - Part One

In which we take a look at the first three books on the NBA Fiction longlist…

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

On Monday, I had a follow-up with my new psychiatrist, so she could tell if I was still unhinged. After spending seven minutes straight venting about my frustration with this year’s National Book Award longlist, she prescribed me with a mood stabilizer and said to call if I had any problems. No, it is not entirely the NBA’s fault that I am emotionally and mentally unstable—we have childhood trauma and a Floridian location to thank for that—but I am still a bit perplexed at the lack of Lauren Groff on this year’s list. Even still, I told myself I had to get over that and make sure I wasn’t comparing every other book to that masterpiece (though, honestly, how could I not?) and just judge each of these books on their own merit. So far, I have read four of the books—one of which I will be re-reading, since the audiobook didn’t work for me—and I am almost done with a fifth one. Today, I will be covering three of these books—Blackouts by Justin Torres, Loot by Tania James, and Ponyboy by Eliot Duncan. While I’m still perplexed about what this list is trying to say about the state of literature today, I do have thoughts about each of these books individually, and wanted to share those now.

The first book I read was Blackouts, which I started a few weeks ago, while flying up to Montreal. If you’ve read some of the reviews of this book, it might sound like this wouldn’t be the best airplane book. Many have described it as challenging and brainy and weird. But honestly, I had the hardest time putting it down. Torres writes with such clarity, juxtaposing the cloudy mystery behind the story itself, creating a propulsive and engaging read. I’ve seen some reviews that compared this book to Kiss of The Spider-Woman, a book I have not read, but the premises do have some similarities. Blackouts follows an unnamed narrator and his elderly companion, Juan, as they recount various memories and stories, leading up to Juan’s final days. Much of the book deals with queer history, erasure, identity—what I personally find most fascinating about this book is the way that Torres plays with reader expectation and assumption in autobiographical detail. His first book, We The Animals had certain autobiographical elements, and I think he knew people might have been curious to see if he’d deploy certain elements of his life into his next work. This creates an element of mystery and a question around what’s real and what’s imagined, which only emphasizes many of the questions and considerations happening throughout the novel. We’ve seen a lot of writer’s navigating this in interesting ways over the last few years, especially books like The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, Florida by Lauren Groff, and How To Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee (and the way that essay collection specifically operates alongside his debut novel, Edinburgh.) I think what Torres does in pulling this question from the reader makes it even more exciting in some ways. I’ve spent years thinking about the elasticity of truth, the subjective truth, how history has been shaped by the lens with which we’ve viewed it in, and how different our lives would be if we’d engaged in a more truthful understanding of history. This book brings up a lot of those ideas, but I feel like the way it does it never feels too convoluted or contrived. Torres feels totally in control in what he’s doing with this novel.

I did think Blackouts would be a Booker book—it’s stylistically more challenging, I think, which seems more in the style with the Booker books I’ve read. But I know there’s always one or two weirder books on the NBA longlist, so I’ll take it! This is one of the books I’m excited made the list. I think it’s more than deserving. My friend Bernie (@bernie.lombardi on instagram) wrote a stellar review of Blackouts over on his instagram, so I highly recommend checking that out if you get a chance. He’s also the reason I read the book as quickly as I did.

Anyway, the next book I read was Ponyboy. I actually read this one in a single sitting, after taking a day off work to commit to catching up on my reading. This is a short little book, a debut, and I think there’s a lot of good stuff going on here. The book follows a transmasc narrator, nicknamed Ponyboy, as he tries to navigate gender and drug use while living abroad. This honestly sounds like a perfect book for me—I love queer stories, I love stories set abroad, I love bad queer characters, I love poetic prose, I love weird structural things; everything this book has seemed like a recipe for my top book of the year. But where this book lost me was in how overworked its sentences were, at least in the first two thirds of the book, and how repetitive it became, too. I’m assuming that the point behind these style choices was to show that the narrator was a poet and so had a specific type of language, and that the repetitiveness was supposed to simulate the spiral of excessive drug use, maybe, but it just left me feeling frustrated as a reader. And who knows, maybe that means it was successful. But I just felt like the prose could’ve been a little smoother, a little less try-hard, and that there could’ve been more happening. Typically, if a book has some overworked areas, but the story is good, I can vibe, but there just wasn’t enough story for me to cling to to overlook some of these sentences. I know it sounds like I’m being harsh. Most every review I’ve read has praised this book, said it’s stellar, and it seems like I’m the odd one out, so I still think you should read it and decide for yourself. I just don’t really know that this one worked for me.

I will say, out of the ones I’ve read, Ponyboy is the one that left me scratching my head as to how it made the longlist. It’s not a bad book, and I think if I wasn’t reading it through the lens of it being an award contender, I probably wouldn’t even have pointed out most of these issues. But it’s hard to figure out why this book got in over so many other, stronger books from this year. And honestly, there’s always at least one book that leaves me scratching my head every year. Last year, it was Shutter, in 2018 it was The Boatbuilder—I guess there’s always going to be a book selected that I don’t understand how it fits in. Ah well.

The third book I read was Loot, which might have been the most fun one I’ve read so far. It has a really great story, smooth prose, not overworked, great pacing, good characters, an all around solid book and another one I am glad made the NBA list. The book is about this 17-year-old woodworker named Abbas, who is commissioned to build a tiger automaton for the Indian ruler Tipu Sultan. It’s inspired by a real-life sculpture of a tiger mauling a soldier, and if you google it, you can see what it looks like. The book explores ideas around love and art and colonization, and James handles it all so deftly. It never feels essayistic—my biggest complaint about most novels now. Interestingly enough, I do think this book has some in common with my current read, This Other Eden, which is also on this longlist, but I’ll loop back to that next week. Out of books I’ve read so far, this one feels the most like an NBA book to me. I think it fits into the Pachinko type of book, that sweeping style, but surprisingly, James is able to capture that feeling in nearly half the page count. It’s well written and smart and engaging, and I can see it making the short list, easy.

Looking at these three books, I’m not really sure I see too much commonality—I mean, I guess one could say that Loot and Blackouts both explore history and truth in interesting ways, but I also think elements of these conversations partly happen off the page, which for me means the commonalities don’t actually trace back to the books but our conversations around them. I should also clarify that there’s no need for these books to have anything in common or be about any certain thing—but usually, you can always end up seeing the common interests of the judges of any given year, when taking in the longlist as a whole.

I’m still skeptical of this longlist, but not as much as last year’s, so at least there’s that. I’m excited to see what I think of the next crop of books, so stay tuned as I get ready to report back on those. In the mean time, I would love to hear what any of y’all think of these NBA books y’all have read so far! Comment here for just respond in the email, or instagram, whatever is easiest for you.

Until next time,

XOXO