An Idiot Walks In The Distance to see Less…

Let’s discuss the winner and two finalists of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Somehow, despite my brain no longer functioning at any real capacity, I still remember everything that happened leading up to the day that the 2018 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. Everyone thought this would be Jesmyn Ward’s year—she’d just come off her second National Book Award win, for Sing, Unburied, Sing, and because of its universal acclaim and her being previously overlooked by the Pulitzer for Salvage The Bones, it just seemed like her time. (For those more inclined to Oscar talk, she was the Amy Adams, the Glenn Close of this season). Other books people had on their prediction lists were Lincoln In The Bardo by George Saunders, Pachinko by Min Jin Lee, and Future Home of The Living God by Louise Erdrich. Each of these books had their own possible narratives for why they could be up for the award, but really, if you asked anyone, it was only ever Sing, Unburied, Sing. It’s because of this that, on April 16th, 2018, the literary world was gagged over the announcement that the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was Less by Andrew Sean Greer, with the finalists being The Idiot by Elif Batuman and In The Distance by Hernan Diaz.

[A quick piece of information, for anyone who doesn’t know: unlike the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize considers books from the previous calendar year. So, while Sing, Unburied, Sing won the 2017 NBA, it was in contention for the 2018 Pulitzer. Just wanted to add, in case!]

As I’ve mentioned before, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is looking for the best novel “preferably dealing with American life”—at one point, they described it as looking for the next “Great American Novel”, but I believe it was changed because of several winners being set in other places, and also possibly because some books were set in America but attempted to consider it through a a less American-centric lens. Either way, it’s still a more American-centric award in itself than something like the National Book Award. But this also brings up a point that I don’t think we always consider—what does it mean for a book to deal with American life? The American experience looks different to everyone, and depending on the conversations at a national level, it could mean that at certain times, one book may seem more “American” than another.

In almost every review, Sing, Unburied, Sing was described as a critique of US History, or a look into the experience of being black in America. This southern gothic road novel highlights Ward’s skillful approach to these themes and this subject matter, allowing for a more fully realized depiction of lives often only seen through a lens that’s been heavily filtered to cater to the white gaze. Ward’s poetic prose, her ability to create lively characters and a complex narrative, and her clarity of vision are just some of the reasons she is considered one of the best writers of today. Sing, Unburied, Sing was released during Trump’s first year in office, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was gaining significant traction, and there was a greater awareness of police brutality. Because of this, many publications also described Sing, Unburied, Sing as timely—that descriptor is a bit problematic in that police brutality and systemic racism have always been prevalent—but because the subject matter of Ward’s novel worked as a parallel to what was going on, and because it was so skillfully done, it just seemed like this perfect storm that was leading Ward to a Pulitzer victory.

On the other hand, we had the Man Booker winner of 2017, Lincoln In The Bardo—a novel about Abraham Lincoln and the death of his young son, Willie. If Sing, Unburied, Sing was a modern day exploration of the black experience, Lincoln In The Bardo was an exploration of our nation’s grief following the civil war. This was also heavily marketed for being the first novel from famed short story writer George Saunders. I’ve always enjoyed Saunders’s weirdness, the way he plays with structure and how his work resonates on an emotional level, and Lincoln In The Bardo isn’t any different. This novel was smart, innovative, and devastating. While the subject matter didn’t have the same sense of urgency as other books of the year, I think everyone had been feeling a collective grief during this time.

Some other books felt a bit “timely” in their subject matter—books like A Book of American Martyrs by Joyce Carol Oates and Future Home of The Living God by Louise Erdrich, both of which discussed issues relating to women’s rights and abortion. Both Oates and Erdrich had been finalist at this time, with neither of them seeing a win (Erdrich only won very recently, with her novel The Night Watchman.) and I think they both could have carried that narrative to a possible victory.

One book that many people predicted, despite it not being set in America or being about America, was Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. I loved this historical novel about a Korean family who immigrate to Japan, and I felt that with its sweeping story and understated prose, it would have at least been a finalist for the prize.

While I think all of these would have been great choices, none of them ended up taking one of the three slots, and I think it’s mostly due to the tastes of that year’s Jury. The Jury included three authors, Nancy Pearl, Leah Hager Cohen, and Elizabeth McCracken. I hadn’t previously heard of Pearl, but I have read both Cohen and McCracken. I don’t know much about them as people, but I know that McCracken has appeared on several National Book Award longlists, and I really enjoyed Cohen’s novel, Strangers and Cousins. As far as their work goes, I think they’re both talented. I’d love to know what criteria they were using when considering the many works that were submitted, what discussions they had. As I said before, how the jury sees America has a major impact on which books they would select as the best representation of it, or the best books “preferably dealing with” it.

When it comes to the actual winner and two finalists for the 2018 prize, the only one I had heard of at the time was The Idiot by Elif Batuman. I’d snagged an ARC from my friend Annie B. Jones—owner of The Bookshelf, a beautiful independent bookstore in downtown Thomasville, Georgia—and attempted to make my way through it since I knew she also planned on reading it. I never returned the ARC (sorry, Annie), and despite many attempts, didn’t finish this book until my fifth try, when I picked it up last week.

The Idiot is a charming, aimless novel about a young woman named Selin, who begins her first year at Harvard in the 90’s. Selin is a fascinating character, having the ability to observe the most mundane things in a way that captivates and makes us reconsider something we’ve always known. It’s this character that is the novel’s greatest strength and what makes it work, despite many narrative variables working against it. Batuman has spoken before about how she loves “long, pointless novels”, and has mentioned that that’s what she’s going for here. She resists a more conventional structure, not in a way that we see many people doing with their more fragmented narratives—think the likes of Jenny Offhill, or more recently Patricia Lockwood—but in how she refuses to hold the narrative thread as the book plods along. While this wasn’t always enjoyable for me personally, I do think it means that she was successful in what she wanted to do.

While I don’t really consider this to be in my personal line-up for top novels of 2017, when I think about what the judges were looking for, and when I think about how this book reflects and deals with American life…I get it. This isn’t an experience I am at all familiar with, but it seems to really resonate with many of the people I’ve discussed it with on bookstagram. I don’t really find that surprising that the novel is popular with most readers, either, because it features all of the things that are so ‘in’ right now—the novel has a complicated but likable main character, it’s set at a college, and it’s full of 90’s nostalgia.

I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about the novel as a whole, but I did enjoy her prose and I loved many of the observations made here. Batuman also does a lovely job of letting her inspiration of Russian novels peak through without ever being too overt. She’s got a great sense of restraint. I look forward to checking out this novel’s sequel, Either/Or at some point, to see if she continues with this same approach.

[As an aside: I do find it fascinating that all three of the authors who were on the 2018 list have new novels coming out, with two of them being sequels. Both The Idiot and Less have sequels, and Hernan Diaz’s new book, Trust, recently made the Booker longlist.]

There were two reasons I was hesitant to read In The Distance by Hernan Diaz. Earlier this year, I’d read and loved Trust, his follow up, and was concerned that his debut might not be quite as good. I also knew that someone who I do not like was a big fan of In The Distance, and yes this is petty, but it is very difficult for me to like the things that someone I do not like does. So, I entered into this book with great trepidation.

In The Distance is a striking, meditative bildungsroman set in the great west, pulling from the Western genre, subverting it along the way. I went back and forth between loving and being bored by this novel, but only because it is so opposite to what I have an interest in—I really want to be clear about this, the book is amazing, it’s just that this is not my preferred genre or subject matter. I rarely enjoy books that focus on men—at least, that focus on straight men—and Western’s mostly make me think about watching TV with my stepdad or great grandmother. But even still, I found many moments of absolute beauty, both in how Diaz wrote about life and in his descriptions of the world he’s created. It’s masterful.

When considering how this work operates as an ‘American’ novel, I actually think out of the three, this is the one that best captures both a past and current America—the way it pulls from the Western genre captures a particular kind of nostalgia, explores a certain idea of what America used to be for a certain setting, and the way Diaz threads this narrative of a Swedish boy navigating his way through this terrain captures this feeling of foreignness, of otherness, that many people feel because of the limited ideas relating to what it means to be an American. I’m not sure if I am making sense here, but hopefully you can pick up what I’m putting down.

I do think Trust is a stronger, more cohesive work—though it does borrow a lot from Fates and Furies in some ways—but I am also aware that Trust is just much more my bag, baby, as Austin Powers would say. While most people I’ve talked to were big fans of In The Distance, if you weren’t, I would still recommend giving his second one a try.

Moving on to the winner of this year, Less by Andrew Sean Greer. I should start by saying that my review of this novel has nothing to do with how sexually attracted I am to Mr. Greer. Yes, I want him to pound me like a sledgehammer, but I also genuinely enjoyed his novel this time around.

The first time I read Less, I actually didn’t finish it. It was back in 2018, soon after it won the Pulitzer, and about 100 pages in, I realized it was not for me and put it back on its shelf. Every once in a while, I’d consider it, pull it off my shelf and read a couple of pages—then think, nope, not yet. It wasn’t until my friend Annie (same one as above) asked if I’d be willing to read it for a podcast episode that I decided now was the time to officially try it again.

This time around, everything that had initially turned me off about this book became the thing I loved. The charming, lighthearted tone, the stream of consciousness, the mysterious unnamed narrator. Between 2018 and now, I’ve read such a wide variety of books, especially the classics that inspired Greer’s novel, and because of that I think I was better able to appreciate this and understand what it was doing. Less is a beautiful and moving story about a middle-aged gay author, trying to avoid his ex-boyfriends wedding. It’s about a lot more than that, obviously, but that’s the big thing. There’s a little bit of meta text about Arthur Less as a writer only writing sad gay stories, and this idea of the sad gay books we see, with this book subverting our expectations and giving us a happy ending.

One of my favorite parts of the book was this scene where Arthur loses his “wedding band” in the grocery store, and how terrified he is that if he doesn’t find it, his boyfriend is going to realize everything that Arthur has been hiding from him, these affairs, his frustrations and other feelings he’s been hiding away. With the help of a friendly band of heterosexuals, he eventually finds the ring and heads back home. He recounts the events to his boyfriend, and with just the tiniest look, Arthur sees that his boyfriend could see right through him anyway. The whole section is using this to describe what it’s like, living with genius, and I know I’m not properly conveying how brilliant the whole section is, but if you read it, you’ll see what I mean. The structure of this section is just brilliant, the anxiety and the tension and everything, it’s *chef’s kiss*.

As far as how this book operates as a novel dealing with American life? I can’t say. I guess it does, in that its writing about what it’s like to be a middle-aged gay writer. But that’s the thing, right? The reason why this award is so complicated is that it’s almost impossible to say which book is the “best written book preferably dealing with American life” because that is going to mean something entirely different, depending on who you ask. We talk a lot about seeing groups of people as monolithic, and how that’s a flawed mentality. The experience of being an American is so different for each person. I think that maybe the argument could be made that there are certain types of books that have a more American lens or that utilize specific forms or storytelling tropes that are associated with American literature. (I always think about how a lot of Pulitzer winners are coming-of-age stories featuring dead moms, which isn’t specifically American, but does seem to be a thing the Pulitzer is obsessed with.) It’s a lot to think about. It makes it interesting, then, to consider why this won over so many others, this book that in some ways feels like it’s saying so little about America.

I know this is an aspect of the judging that I am hung up on, but when I think about which book is most deserving, I have to consider the criteria. But because it’s so muddy, so subjective, I can’t really say. But I did end up loving this book. I’m glad that I went back to it, that I finally read it all the way through.

I’m still a bit mixed on this year overall. I thought that by writing about it, it would help me answer the question of why these specific books were chosen—and while I don’t think I got the answer I expected, I think that questioning what the award is actually looking for in the first place is helpful. These judges seemed to enjoy that all three of these works were trying new things structurally, that they were all referencing classic works, that they were showcasing more optimistic views of life. At least, those are the commonalities I noticed. I wonder who else thinks of this…if you do, please let me know. Also, if you have answers for these questions, if maybe I just didn’t research enough, I would love to discuss more about this. I’ve spent so much time diving into the National Book Awards over the last year that I feel so under-researched in the Pulitzer Prize!

If you have any thoughts on this award year and these books, let me know! This is the first time I’ve covered all of the Pulitzer Fiction books for a year, so if you enjoyed this, let me know and I will do more of them. I figured it would be a nice balance since I already covered a Booker shortlist and it’s nice to break up some of the NBA years here and there. Anyway, thank you all for reading. As always, I appreciate all of your support and the lovely conversations.

Until next time,

XOXO