A Love Letter to the 2015 NBA Shortlist
Hi Y’all! Glad you’re here—
The 2015 National Book Award short-list is the one I most often cite as my favorite. If you’re not the type to keep up with book awards, your familiarity with the list might surprise you—we have (my queen) Lauren Groff’s first appearance, with Fates and Furies, which Obama selected as his book of the year. Then there’s the bestselling tome that broke a million tear ducts, A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. After that, we have The Turner House by Angela Flourney, which is an underrated gem that reads like sunlight pouring into your soul. Karen E Bender’s Refund was the quiet, understated book we see every award year, which I always liken to the ‘Helen Hunt in The Sessions’ slot at the Academy Awards. Finally, we have the winner, Fortune Smiles by Adam Johnson, which has continued to be the most polarizing NBA winner among myself and myself.
When I first read these books, I was a completely different reader. My late teens and early twenties were spent studying books of supposed brilliance in the hopes that I could write something brilliant myself. I also wanted to learn from them, to educate myself and become more cultured like all of those smarmy boys I tried to talk to at parties, who, when they found out I hadn’t gone to college, tossed back their beers and walked away. It was those boys who recommended I read David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon, authors I had a hard time connecting to and no real interest in. When I eventually discovered the 2015 short list, it was at a turning point in my reading, and I think that plays into my own reception of the books as much as the quality of the books themselves.
The first one I came into contact with was A Little Life. It was gifted to me by my best friend, Madison, on my 23rd birthday, nearly a month after it had been long-listed for the Booker prize. I had no idea it had been so critically lauded, just that me and my bestie hadn’t been on good terms, and that this was an olive branch. It immediately endeared me to the blue-tinted ‘O’-faced cover, without even knowing about the contents inside.
That night, I sat in bed and flipped through the first twenty-eight pages. If you’ve ever read Hanya Yanagihara, you’ll know she’s an extraordinarily gifted writer. She’s daring, exploring taboo subjects with a keen psychological insight, and her prose are both sharp and indulgent. Her books are brilliant, well structured, and almost impossible to put down. But at the time, I thought every book needed to have prose like those of Karen Russell or Janet Fitch; I expected sentences like Pop Rocks candy that crackled on the tongue. My limited understanding of language had me immediately disregarding this books quality. After those twenty-eight pages, I marked the book, sat it on the floor next to my bed, and thought, maybe later.
Looking back, I know that my ambivalence to the opening pages, my total lack of awareness to this book’s blockbuster appeal, is important to my overall reception of it later on. When people read the book now, they go in with so many preconceived notions, and there’s almost a communal feeling once a book reaches a certain number of people—I don’t want to say that the intimacy of reading such a book is gone, but it sometimes feels like everyone else you know who has read it is now breathing down your neck with every turn of the page, waiting to see if you love or despise it. I had the luxury of not knowing, of a lack of expectation.
Three weeks went by, the book left untouched.
In mid-September, there was a new book on my horizon. I’d been scrolling through Goodreads one day when I discovered a beautiful cover with a title that intrigued me—Fates and Furies. I had never heard of Lauren Groff, didn’t know what her books were about. I saw it was being released the following Tuesday, and when it dropped, I rushed to my local bookstore, The Bookshelf, and bought a copy.
When I got home, I pulled off the dust jacket and flipped through. The book itself is beautifully made, with a two-toned blue binding and Groff’s initials embossed in silver—something about the physical book made its contents feel important. Groff writes the kind of sentences I have always loved—there’s a striking musicality, and they’re so full, carrying a history of previous iterations and the weight of the world she has created. I knew I wasn’t smart enough to understand everything she was saying, but I couldn’t help but be entranced.
Two days after I bought Fates and Furies, the National Book foundation dropped the long list for fiction. I was thrilled to see that I already owned two of the books, even though I hadn’t finished either of them. I looked down at my copy of A Little Life and moved it from its indented spot on the carpet and back up to my nightstand. I was almost finished with the first half of Fates & Furies, ready to forge ahead.
It would be another five years of reading and re-reading Fates & Furies to fully understand its brilliance. The novel could be compared to the famous Collier Hindou Cartier necklace; both are impeccably structured and nothing but jewels. From the first chapter, Groff is in total command. If you look at the last paragraph of that chapter, it tells you exactly what this novel is:
“Between his skin and hers, there was the smallest of spaces, barely enough for air, for this slick of sweat now chilling. Even still, a third person, their marriage, had slid in.”
This is a novel that explores the institution of marriage and how it shapes those involved—and that one line tells it to us from the beginning. Groff was heavily inspired by Greek myths here, and you can see that in her approach to storytelling—much like how Homer tells us exactly what to expect in The Iliad in the opening lines, so does Groff. She achieves so much in this novel, and I barely understood any of it on my first read. It was polarizing with general readers, with some calling it pretentious, hard to read, and a little jarring, while others praised it for all of its brilliance and beauty. It’s not an easy book, and I can understand why some didn’t enjoy it. But the truth is, the very reasons I didn’t understand it became what I loved about it most.
Fates & Furies might explore the complicated nature of marriage, but it also depicts a marriage filled with love and passion. Lotto and Mathilde love each other deeply, if for entirely different reasons. Groff showcases this in the smallest, most intimate acts throughout the novel, which in many ways echoed the things my husband and I did for each other. It felt like reassurance that we were headed in the right direction.
Eventually, three books later, I went back to A Little Life. My husband (then fiancé) was gone for the evening, so I settled into his side of the bed, turned on the lamp, and started from the beginning. Re-reading the first twenty-eight pages helped me find the rhythm of the voice and the story. Then I was reading about Willem, who was working to be an actor, which was something I had dreamed of, and I became deeply invested. These four male friends fascinated me. I had always dreamed of being friends with boys—a fantasy I developed after watching Stand By Me with one of my Momma’s boyfriends, when I was a ten—and they all seemed to love each other in such complicated and intimate ways.
The character of Jude wasn’t necessarily on my radar in the beginning. I knew that he was a mystery to the other characters, even though they were friends, but I didn’t question his unknowability. Yanagihara mentioned in a Vulture article that she wanted the reader to initially think of the book as a ‘post-college New York novel’, which I did. Those were books I loved, because it was a life I dreamed of. It wasn’t until I was already fully invested that this story moved into the shadows, filling the reader with a sense of dread.
Part of what makes A Little Life so divisive is the way it depicts Jude’s trauma. Some have even questioned if anyone could possibly survive so many terrible things, which I think is part of what the book is trying to say. If you haven’t read A Little Life, this one character suffers from countless acts of physical and sexual abuse; he seems to be a magnet for abusers, and frequently self-harms to cope. I can understand why it’s off-putting to some readers, especially those who are triggered by some of the subject matter. But this was the first time I felt seen in a book. Before this, I had only found similarities with books about young girls going through similar things. It almost seemed off limits to depict the abuse of young boys.
In recent years, I have discovered other books that grapple with this, of course—Edinburgh by Alexander Chee comes to mind, which is truly brilliant, and then there are more recent publications. It’s only because A Little Life was my first discovery that it felt so revelatory. I remember finishing the book five days later, after much sobbing and rolling around on the bed, and begging all of my closest friends to read it. I told my husband to read it, and talked about it with my Granny. I had spent years trying to explain to people the things I was feeling, the things I had gone through, and for the first time, I didn’t have to articulate it myself, because someone else had done it for me.
There’s a danger, in so closely identifying with a text—we should know this, given the acts of violence committed against people who go against holy texts by those so passionately aligned with them, but I hadn’t considered any of that. Several years later, when posting about my deep love for A Little Life, there were several people who said it was trash and that they hated it, that it was offensive, all sorts of things—some of the criticisms were valid, some ignorant. But I was biased in my love for A Little Life because when I looked at it, I only saw the most wounded parts of myself. When people gave their negative opinions on the book, it felt like a personal attack on me and my experiences. I knew it wasn’t, but my emotions couldn’t discern that.
Having to argue my perspective on why the book was brilliant led me to re-reading the book a second, third, and even fourth time. While it tore me to shreds emotionally with every read, it also clarified for me what made the book so great. The prose, the propulsive nature of a book with such little plot, the way she explores memory and friendship and love—this is a flawed book, and it doesn’t always handle its subject matter well (Yanagihara even said in an interview that she wanted it to be almost vulgar), but it is an absolute marvel.
Reading Fates & Furies felt like confronting my future—my impending nuptials, my hopeful future as a writer and an artist—but reading A Little Life felt like confronting all of the traumas of my past. Experiencing these two books in such close proximity felt like an act of divinity. I know had I read them later on, at some point in the future, they would have blown me away by their technical brilliance—but I know that so much of what I loved about them was that they found me at just the right time.
After finishing A Little Life, I wasn’t sure what to read next. When you love a book that passionately, it almost feels like nothing else could ever measure up. I decided to take a look at the recently dropped short list and pick from there—after very little research, mostly based on my liking of the covers, I went with The Turner House.
The opening pages of The Turner House give the feeling of being invited to that one friend’s house that has a huge family, full of big personalities, and enough love to make you feel wanted—even when you overstay your welcome. Angela Flourney has such a strong narrative voice, but without it ever coming across as show-y. The characters are alive and complicated, and even when they do something despicable, you can’t help but feel that your love for them is so great, it can’t be conditioned on good behavior. These were people I recognized, a family I recognized, and I was immediately pulled in.
Flourney did a great amount of research for this novel. It’s not something she flaunts, never randomly throwing out facts just to show she’s done the work, but it does give us a deeper sense of Detroit as a place, specifically the state it was in just before the 2008 election. She also writes about addiction in its many forms, and it felt so spot on to the things I witnessed in my own family—specifically the addiction to gambling. There’s just so much depth here, to the world, the characters, and in the language. You can feel the time and effort put into this book.
Out of all of the books on the short list, The Turner House is the one that won me over most quickly. While I was unsure about the prose in A Little Life, and didn’t always comprehend the complex themes in Fates and Furies, The Turner House had something that made me fall in love on the first page. Even later, when I read the stories in Refund and Fortune Smiles, none of them had quite the same immediate pull.
When I finished, I felt full.
I didn’t even bother reading the collections, initially. As I waited for the announcement of the winner to drop, I knew that nothing could beat any of these three brilliant books I had just read. Of course this wasn’t fair to the other two books on the list, to dismiss them without first giving them a chance, but as I mentioned earlier, I was a different reader.
I was bitter when none of these books won. I debated not even reading Fortune Smiles, but I just had to know why people thought it was so much better than the other books on the list. I remember calling my husband and demanding he stop by the bookstore to grab me a copy before they slapped one of those heinous stickers on top, refusing to confess that I hadn’t read the book before it won the prize. I was deeply competitive with myself and my own intellectualism. I didn’t even bother getting a copy of Refund, yet.
Four days after I bought it, I started Fortune Smiles. The first story has a dying wife and holograms of presidents and rock stars—it was weird, and I wasn’t sure where it could go in such a short page count. I told myself this story was saying nothing, because there was nothing about the experiences of the characters that was familiar to me. But then, as the story masterfully came together, I couldn’t help but leave my jaw hanging wide open.
There are two stories that are somewhat connected in this collection. One is about a writer who takes a character from one of his dying wife’s failed novels for his own—the character is a pedophile named Mr. Roses, and the story he writes is titled Dark Meadows. Later on in the collection, we come across this very story. It plays with the idea of reader expectation, of fiction and reality. How much of these stories are autobiographical fiction, how many are just lenses in which to view his own life? I found it fascinating and compelling. When I later met Adam Johnson at a signing, I told him these two stories were my favorite. He’d just signed half a dozen books by college kids who confessed to not having read his work, but that they had heard from professors that he was amazing. Maybe it’s just because I was the only one in line who had read it, but he looked at me and said, “You actually enjoy the writing, don’t you?”
I’m still not sure what to make of the final story in the collection, or his previous book, the novel The Orphan Masters Son. While The Orphan Masters Son won the Pulitzer back in 2013, Catherine Chung wrote in as essay for The Rumpus about it, exposing the flaws of writing about another culture for a western audience. She called it a very American story, which makes sense, given that it won the Pulitzer, but in the same way we shouldn’t appropriate cultures as costumes for Halloween, shouldn’t we also have this same respect in the writing, to not use another culture for the framework with which we view greater ideas about our own? These weren’t questions I had upon first engaging with the material, but the more I grow as a reader, the more I try to be aware of these things. I can’t speak for the way he represents North Korea or the people, but I would recommend checking out Chung’s essay, ‘Yellow Peril and The American Dream’—it’s clarifying, well-written, and provides a new lens to view the work.
As a random side note, Lauren Groff actually reviewed Fortune Smiles for the New York Times earlier that year—what I took from it was that while she enjoyed the stories on their own, she wasn’t sure they worked as well when read as a collection. She’s forever kind in all of her reviews, and I appreciated the way she approached it, but it left me wondering what her thoughts were on it winning the National Book Award. (I would also like to clarify, I doubt either one of them is as messy as I am, and my speculation is approaching gossip column level of drama, but let me have this one thing.)
Anyway, I can understand why Fortune Smiles was so critically lauded. It’s still not my favorite of the short list, but I know that it’s well written and thoughtful and heartbreaking. Johnson is a very kind man and I was glad to have met him. I don’t know how to reckon with certain aspects of his work. There are many conversations to be had, and I plan to go into them more fully as I work on my project with this newsletter. For now, I’ll just say that I admire his talents, feel somewhat conflicted about the work, and hope that when I re-read it later on, I will be able to better engage with it and articulate what I think works and what I think doesn’t.
The last book I’m mentioning here is one I actually waited until the writing of this letter to read. I bought a copy of Refund by Karen E. Bender in January of 2016, well after the dust had settled on the NBA. I planned to read it that night, but after only a page, I gave up, set it to the side, and moved on. While I hate that I didn’t give this book any time before now, I am so glad that I came to it with my current lens as a reader. My reading comprehension skills are better, I’m more patient—I have a deeper sense of what makes a work good, and not just good for me. I went in not expecting my favorite style of writing, but with the expectation that Bender had something important to say, and she did.
The stories in Refund are surprising, funny, heartbreaking, insightful, and beautifully understated. I recognized so much of my own flaws in the characters Bender has created. Many of her characters are in a time of downward mobility, and she explores the financial struggles in a way that is authentic and respectful. Her writing isn’t flashy, but it’s restrained and economical—the easy comparison for this would be Alice Munro, but I don’t find them so similar beyond that. Altogether I found this collection very moving and so worth a reader’s time.
I’m still not sure which book I think actually deserved to win for this year. I have such a deep love for three of them, a deep respect for the other two. The books selected each year are considered the best written of that year, but they’re also books that capture where we are in the moment, that grapple with these ideas and sometimes even bring a reckoning. I think that’s why this year means so much to me. I was confronted with the truths about my own life, my past and my future. I was asked to stretch as a reader, to reconsider certain long-held opinions, and figure out my opinions on ideas I’d never considered before. I can’t say if these books captured the cultural zeitgeist, or say what they changed about the landscape of literature—but I can say that they informed so much of how I see the world, both in reality and on the page. When it comes to being a reader, that’s what matters to me.