Changing My Mind on The 2016 NBA List

In which I consider the five books shortlisted for the National Book Award back in 2016.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Much like the title of Zadie Smith’s first essay collection, when it comes to my opinions regarding the 2016 National Book Award Fiction longlist, I’m Changing My Mind. When the list first dropped six years ago, I remember feeling a certain frustration that most of the books that I had already read and loved up to that point hadn’t made it. There were books like The Girls by Emma Cline, My Name Is Lucy Barton by Elizabeth Strout, The Mothers by Brit Bennett, The Nix by Nathan Hill, Homegoing by Yao Gyasi, Commonwealth by Ann Hatchett, and whichever other ones I was obsessed with at the time. I had only read the eventual winner, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which I believe came out that January, moved up from its original publishing date due to its selection for Oprah’s Book Club. Otherwise, none of the other books had really been on my radar. I think I might have also predicted Another Brooklyn by Jaqueline Woodson, but only because she’d recently won the NBA for Young People’s Literature with Brown Girl Dreaming. I saw this longlist full of books I hadn’t read or even heard of and told myself that they had just overlooked all of these other great books and that I was the better reader. (I was much more dramatic and clueless back then, believe it or not).

To be clear, I did end up loving all of the books on this list, to varying degrees, but because my first impression of this list was so strong, that’s what I first thought of whenever I thought about this particular award year. When I first started working on this newsletter, that was the tone I set. It wasn’t until writing out the entire letter that I realized what I had written was based on that first impression, which I felt wasn’t fair to the books, and that I needed to really consider my thoughts on the list now, so that I could discuss it in a more…nuanced way.

This week we’ll be looking at the shortlist, which included the winner, The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, Another Brooklyn by Jaqueline Woodson, The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan, News Of The World by Paulette Jiles, and The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelor. The other five will be covered next week—I know I typically do the longlist books first and then the short list, but I actually have more to say about the longlist that i’ll explain next week. For now, let’s get on with the show!

Let’s start with Another Brooklyn! It’s a novel about a woman named August who, after running into a long-ago friend, begins to reflect on her girlhood and the friends she had growing up in 70’s Brooklyn. When the book first came out, Roxane Gay posted a simple review on her Goodreads, saying, “This gorgeous novel is a poem. It is a love letter to black girlhood.” Woodson is a poet, and I think that shows up in all of her fiction, but especially here. The prose is lyrical, but there’s an economy of language that’s impressive and commanding. When I first read the book, I wasn’t the kind of reader who was drawn to spare prose, and I didn’t understand how to pick up on the things left unsaid. I didn’t appreciate it in the way I did when re-reading the book for this newsletter. Woodson’s writing is truly immaculate. I also often talk about how I think many great novels have a first paragraph/chapter that captures something about the entire book, and I think she does that here. The opening line is “For a long time, my mother wasn’t dead yet.” and the paragraph ends with, “I know now that what is tragic isn’t the moment. It is the memory.” And this is a book that explores ideas around grief and memory, in such profound and surprising ways. It’s tender and moving, and it holds that feeling until the very end.

The next book I read on the shortlist was The Association of Small Bombs. The novel begins with these two brothers, Delhi schoolboys, who pick up their family’s television set at a repair shop one day in 1996 and a bomb goes off, taking both of their lives. The novel explores the aftermath of this attack from different vantage points in the years that follow. When I first read this book, I made note that I was deeply invested in the first half but that I lost interest about halfway through. On a re-read, I see why this happened. The style of the prose mirrors the coldness that overtakes the story as it goes through time. I actually really appreciate this style choice on a re-read, but it was something that I didn’t fully understand initially. While this book isn’t quite as well constructed as some of the other books on this list, I think what it attempts to do is new and exciting, and I’d rather someone take a big leap and maybe stumble than sit in what becomes the boring usual. Also, to be clear, the book mostly succeeds. Mahajan writes with such empathy for all of his characters, they’re all fully realized, and whatever disconnect happens in the book, he makes up for it by the ending. It’s definitely a book I would enjoy reading with a group, I think.

One of the books I thought I would hate ended up being one that made my top ten of that year, The Throwback Special by Chris Bachelder. This slim novel is about a group of middle aged men who meet up every year to reenact this specific moment in football history. I didn’t get much of the football stuff, but I loved the way Bachelder explored the inner workings of these men. This book was so funny, I cackled out loud many times, and I think this book managed to consider the softer, more tender side of men that we don’t really see, and to really consider the insecurities in a way that I hadn’t seen explored before. In some ways, this book felt like a companion piece to the midnight football scenes in Tom Perrotta’s Little Children, but whereas that book showcased the ridiculous need to hold onto your youth, I think The Throwback Special made me consider the ways that a group of people all coming together to reminisce about a moment that brought them joy could be beautiful, even if it didn’t make sense to me.

Now, this next book, I must confess to only having read for the first time just this month. News Of The World by Paulette Jiles didn’t initially seem like a book that I would have any interest in. It’s a western set in post-Civl War Texas, about a man who has to deliver an orphan to her relatives—it initially gave me flashes to True Grit, but only a little. It’s beautifully, tightly written. It’s a surprising page turner, given the subject matter. I found myself feeling swallowed up into this place and time, and was able to read the whole thing in one morning. It’s moments like this where I have to remind myself that, despite a book’s subject matter, if it’s good, i’ll probably like it.

Moving onto the winner of this year, Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. I remember being so shook by the twist here, that Whitehead utilized his genre-bending skills to create a tale of magical realism in which the Underground Railroad was an actual Underground Railroad—I was immediately captivated. This book feels so expansive and lively, there’s something about Whitehead’s approach down to the sentence that’s always unexpected. I think out of all of the books on this shortlist, The Underground Railroad is the one that’s taking the most risks and that has the most payoff. There is a reason why Whitehead has had so much praise over the years. I think the way Whitehead approached the narrative through this slightly skewed lens helped us to reconsider the realities of our past in new ways.

It’s interesting when I look back at this shortlist, the longlist as a whole, because it’s actually one of the most daring lists, probably, over the last couple of years. There are several books that are straight up comedy, many of these are structurally innovative, books that consider lives and worlds that haven’t been as fully explored. Many of these take place years ago or in alternate realities, or in other places outside of the U.S. I would love to know what the judges of this year were thinking about as they selected these books. Jesmyn Ward and Julie Otsuka (two favorite authors) were actually on the jury for this year, and I feel like that’s really apparent in this selection. Other judges included Karen Joy Fowler and T. Geronimo Johnson, two authors you all might be familiar with. The chair was James English, who has written extensively about literary prizes. Like…what a group!

Anyway, we’ll cover more of this next week with the five longlist books, but could this year actually end up being my favorite award year of all time? Who can say!

Until next time,

XOXO