National Book Award 2011 Shortlist

In which we look at the five books that made the Fiction shortlist in 2011...

Hi Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

For anyone just joining us—since my last newsletter, I’ve gained about two hundred new subscribers (welcome, thanks for being here!)—I’ve spent the last few years working on my National Book Award reading project, where I read every single book ever longlisted for the NBA for Fiction. I’ve read all of the books from the 50s and 60s, as well as all of the books from the 2020s—After my next newsletter, I’ll have covered all of the books from the 2010s! Today, I’m covering the 2011 shortlist, which includes one of the greatest books of the 21st Century (the New York Times agrees). Since time is of the essence, let’s just dive in.

The first book we’re going to look at is The Sojourn by Andrew Krivak. The Sojourn follows Josef Vinich, born in America to an immigrant father. A tragedy forces the two back to Slovakia, and it’s this event at the beginning of the book that had me immediately locked in. Krivak’s prose is so evocative, so rich with texture and feeling, pulling you into this historical setting with such ease that it boggles the mind when you realize this is a debut. It’s the opening of this that reminded me, for some reason, of previous NBA longlister, The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow. Maybe it’s just the historical setting, but I also think it might be this certain tenderness they both have for their characters, and also that they don’t write explosive sentences, but the strength of the quiet prose still demands to be given undivided attention. Later in the book, Josef’s orphaned cousin stays with them, and eventually both enlist in WWI—this is where the book shifts entirely into a war novel (I believe several early reviews compared this novel to For Whom The Bell Tolls), and I think it’s where it is at its strongest, though maybe not as unique. I’ve almost begun to associate the National Book Award with the war novel, mostly due to the fact that a majority of the books featured throughout the fifties and even part of the sixties, were war novels—and even in recent years, the war novel has made an appearance here and there. If anything, I might eventually make a post discussing the various war novels throughout the years. While The Sojourn doesn’t feel like it really does anything new, I did find it beautifully written and engaging. I was surprised by how quickly I became invested in the story. I often tell myself I am a person who doesn’t like historical novels or war novels, but reading all of these NBA books has proven otherwise. Overall, I think this was a worthy addition to the list, and it makes me excited to check out more of Krivak’s work.

The next book I read was The Buddha In The Attic by Julie Otsuka. I was a HUGE fan of her latest novel, The Swimmers, and after having read this one, I can say I’m an Otsuka stan for life. The Buddha In The Attic is told in first person plural about various Japanese girls and women, brides, immigrating to America in the early 1900s. This collective ‘we’ seems to be a reoccurring thing for Otsuka, which could be annoying if she didn’t do it to such great effect and with such variety within her work. Here, it makes sense why she would write a book that merges together every woman’s voice into a collective, since they’re all being treated as almost interchangeable objects for the desire of others. This book is heartbreaking, totally devastating at times, but Otsuka never tries to work at the readers emotions—it all reads at enough of a distance that you’re not overwhelmed by the sadness, yet it still feels palpable. Really impressive honestly. If this book had shown up another year, I feel like Otsuka might have actually taken the award. I don’t think we give enough credit to these slim volumes as we should. The fact that Otsuka managed to do so much in less than 150 pages…how? A genius. I love.

I read the third book, Binocular Vision, intermittently between other books—it’s a short story collection by Edith Pearlman, whose book Honeydew was on the fiction longlist in 2015—and found that breaking it up in this way helped me not have the usual fatigue I find myself with when tackling longer story collections. This collection spans throughout most of Pearlman’s career, and while I found that some stories were less investing than others, overall it’s a really strong collection. Many of the stories are only a few pages long, but that brevity is no indicator of the depth she manages to fit inside the tight container. Writers like Alice Munro are often praised for an ability to fit novel sized works into a short form, but I think Pearlman does just as good of a job in a different way, and she actually has much more variety than most realist short story writers, with many of her stories having different locations, types of characters, and considerations of ideas. The diversity in storytelling is impressive. Also, this might have been the last ‘collected stories’ book featured on the NBA—I can’t think of a more recent one. I hope we see more of these eventually, as this latest crop of short story writers have their works compiled (I’m looking at you, Karen Russell).

The fourth book I read seemed to be pretty divisive, when I mentioned on Instagram that I was starting it—The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht. The book follows a young woman as she considers her relationship with her grandfather and the stories he recounted to her in her youth. For some reason, I spent the whole time reading this book thinking about Water For Elephants, though I feel like they’re hardly anything alike—maybe it’s just tonally similar? Either way, I liked this book fine, and I think my husband would love it. It’s got a lot of fantastical elements and is pretty charming. What I find most impressive about the book is how engaging the narrator is, how well Obreht was able to tie all of her threads together throughout the novel, especially without us seeing all of the underpinning. There’s a lot to admire here. I appreciated it more than loved it, but maybe that also has to do with where I’m at in my reading life. There were many people on old discussion boards that predicted this book to win the 2011 prize, and I can see why—it has a quality to it (and a similar “young author” narrative) like Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies, with both books being ambitious and the authors being quite young during the release. I don’t think it deserved to win, but I am happy I finally read it.

This year’s eventual winner is one of my all-time favorite books, Salvage The Bones by Jesmyn Ward. The book takes place during the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina, following a teenaged girl named Esch, who’s newly pregnant and trying to hide it from her alcoholic father. Ward’s prose is so rich—this book, in particular, was often referred to as ‘Faulknerian’, and I don’t disagree. Her work was clearly influenced, much like Morrison’s, by Faulkner, with this marvelous mix of wandering sentences punctuated by a grounded dialect that’s familiar to anyone who’s spent time down south. Ward and Faulkner are both Mississippi writers, and I’m sure that also plays a part in this comparison. The setting is perfectly rendered. Ward has this ability to write in a way that lets us see everything, feel everything, down to the pressure change in the air. There’s something so alive about this book. And I was so deeply invested in the lives of these characters. I’m a big fan of southern gothic literature, and this does all of the things I look for in a book like that. Ward has such a deep understanding of the story she’s telling here, and while everything she writes is great, I feel like Salvage The Bones is unmatched.

Overall, I thought this was a really good list—not my favorite list, I think the only book that will really have much staying power is Salvage The Bones, which I know has staying power since I first read it six years ago and still think about it all the time. But I’m glad I read these, because it introduced me to two authors I hadn’t read yet, and gave me a reason to read some backlist of two authors I liked, along with revisiting a book I love.

My next newsletter will be covering 2010, so look out for that. I’ve been trying to get back into the swing of writing for this newsletter, but if you’re new here, please feel free to check out my previous posts—I think I have a lot of fun ones that might be worth checking out. Anyway, thanks, as always, for reading, and I will see y’all again real soon!

Until then,

XOXO