National Book Award 2012!

In which we look at the five books shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Towards the end of last year, I took a little hiatus from my National Book Award reading project so I could focus on packing up our house (for our eventual move to Philadelphia) and finish the latest draft of my novel. Now that the house is almost packed and the latest draft is complete, I figured it was time to dive back in. If you’ve been following along for a while, you’ll know I read through the 50s and the 60s, and also read all of the longlisted books from the last decade. While I’m still getting back into the swing of things, I managed to finish the 2012 shortlist recently and I’m excited to discuss!

While I had already read two of the books from this shortlist before, I was pretty unfamiliar with the list as a whole. Maybe it’s because I was 18 at the time these came out and oblivious to all of the goings on of the world, but the conversation around all of these books was that they perfectly captured the contemporary moment—and I didn’t realize this was what the world was like at the time.

I started with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain—a book whose title I always mess up. All I knew about this book before going into it was that Ang Lee directed the film adaptation that was notorious for its high frame rate and the introduction of Taylor Swift’s questionable ex-boyfriend, Joe Alwyn. While I went into this novel with a bit of skepticism—I’ve read so many war novels over the last two years, what else can possibly be said?—I still found myself captivated. The novel clearly pulls a lot from Heller’s Catch 22—possibly my favorite war novel ever longlisted for the NBA—but mostly in style, not really in narrative approach. Most of what this book deals with is the aftermath of war. This group of young men (boys, really) have survived the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal, and now they’re back home, being recognized for their service. In many ways, this book does feel current in its dialogue around the ways we exploit people’s trauma, glamorize and sanitize certain experiences, see everything as a way to make money. There’s a conversation around turning the story of the “Bravo squad” into a film, because devastation makes money. It’s a war book in that it looks at the devastation of war, but in a lot of ways, the book is more in line with Virginia Woolf than Joseph Heller, James Jones, or Herman Wouk. Woolf explored the impact of war in the domestic setting, of the damage it did off the battlefield, and I think this book does a lot of the same.

The first fifty pages or so are captivating enough to hold a readers interest, but these early pages often feel the slightest bit overworked, too many pretty sentences not doing enough heavy lifting, and it isn’t until we are deeper into the story that it begins to come together with more clarity and precision on the sentence level. That said, Fountain does beautiful things with the language here, and it’s impressive how evocative the work is—there’s a certain music to the language, something about how it plays to the ear. By the end, I knew I’d read anything Fountain wrote, just to enjoy more of his prose.

Immediately upon finishing, I moved right along to The Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers, which I will confess wasn’t fair to this novel—I always find it difficult to follow up a romance with a romance or a war novel with another war novel, suffering from a readerly fatigue. Even still, I recognize how striking and well crafted this novel is.

Where Fountain captured the aftermath of war in a domestic setting, Powers yanks us onto the field, following these two friends serving in Iraq. What’s interesting is how this book and Fountain’s feel so in conversation while being such different works. While both have immaculate prose, Powers creates splinters throughout to mimic the splintered mindset of being out there, dealing with such harrowing things. It gives the work a nervous energy. That, and the fact that Powers keeps us so “in” these moments that we almost feel a little too active as readers—there were times I was almost overwhelmed by the anxiety of what these characters were doing or going through and also their almost cavalier attitudes at times. You have to have an emotional remove to keep going day to day, and this book shows that.

As I said before, I did have a little “war novel” fatigue by this point, but it was still a stellar read and one I think was worthy of recognition here.

The third book I picked up was A Hologram For The King by Dave Eggers. I think this was a good book on a technical level—about an American Salesman trying to get a contract with a king in some futuristic Saudi Arabian city—but it was…not really for me. At least not right now. I don’t have much to say about this one except that I think it was well written and I appreciated the narrative structure, but I found it hard to get invested and I also wasn’t entirely sure if certain elements landed—it’s one I’ll have to revisit at some point, maybe read with others so I can discuss more. Not my favorite here.

The last two books I picked up were books I had previously read and loved. I started with This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz, partly because I was so curious of what I would think about it, now that public perception of him has changed so much. I knew there would come a point where I would cover books by problematic authors, and I wasn’t entirely sure of the best way to handle it. Diaz has published three highly acclaimed books, won a Pulitzer Prize, and—obviously, since we’re discussing it—been shortlisted for the NBA. This short story collection, the last book of his to be published, was considered a masterwork at the time of its release. Now, in the wake of MeToo, it’s found a different reception.

I first read this collection back in 2015, and I loved it. I was a big fan of Diaz and thought his work was exciting, funny and smart, uncomfortable and complicated, necessary in every way. These stories are all so perfectly crafted, and there’s something thrilling about his voice, how unrelenting it is, how—at this point in his career—he flipped off any reader begging for handholding and demanded that they meet him where he stood. While 2012 wasn’t that long ago, it was far enough back that publishing was still struggling to showcase the diverse array of voices out there, and when it did, it was often reshaped to fit for a white audience. While Diaz’s first book, Drown, fell into this trap in some moments, by the time we reached this, his third book, he’d rebuked any of that.

While a lot of this book explores relationships and infidelity, the parts I loved the most were the explorations of family dynamics. Diaz writes so lovingly about Yunior and his family, and there is such a tenderness beneath all of the humor and bravado.

I still loved these stories. I’ve noticed a trend in dissing works by artists who we eventually discover are bad, but I don’t actually think that’s how it works. It’s like with Flannery O’Connor—if you read her work, it shows a complicated, but often realistic, look at racism in the south. It doesn’t always get it right, but it’s more nuanced than just good or bad. And her work has an undeniable energy and strong voice and brilliant approach to narrative. Like how O’Connor’s ignorant, racist ideas often led to more complicated fiction, I think a similar thing could be said about Diaz and how he explores sexism and how men disrespect women. I can’t say if this is the right way to frame it—I don’t want to be supporting people who abuse their power or hurt others. But I also don’t want to pretend that people’s talent is no longer there or that their influence wasn’t important if it was. I don’t know…it’s all a bit messy. I don’t have the answers. But I do think, strictly considering this book and this award year, I think it was deserving, and that it had a strong shot of winning.

Once I finished this one, I moved on to the eventual winner, Louise Erdrich’s The Round House. Erdrich’s work used to take me time to settle into, when I first started reading her—this happens a lot, where someone will have a distinct voice, especially people who wrote books before 1990 (why do so many books now sound the same?) and it takes me time to learn their rhythm. By the time I got to this novel, I had figured out Erdrich’s style and found myself captivated by this book from page one. The novel follows a 13-year-old boy named Joe who decides to avenge his mother after she is raped. There’s a lot of legal stuff happening here relating to the jurisdiction of Tribal Law, State Law, and Federal law—you’d think this could make one’s eyes glaze over, but no, Erdrich knows how to weave together information into the narrative in a way that never feels annoyingly explanatory. It was infuriating, though, watching all of it play out and seeing a lack of justice. The devastation of what happened to Joe’s mom is countered by his own coming of age and attempting to embrace a type of manhood—there’s a clear complication for him, considering the male influences around him, the way he sees certain men abuse other women, knowing what happened to his mother, and trying to grapple with the kind of man he’s meant to be.

This is one of those books that I feel like you could almost miss how brilliant and well constructed it is, because when you’re reading it, it all looks like it was done so effortlessly. Erdrich is in her bag here. I often see problems with the ways people approach a young protagonist, and Erdrich manages to get this perfect balance of capturing Joe’s youth without sacrificing the language or the greater vision. Just very impressive in every way, honestly.

Altogether, I thought this was a really strong list—even the one I didn’t jive with, I still felt like it was worthy of inclusion. There’s a lot I still want to research here, so I can better understand what all was going on politically at the time, I do feel like the work itself captures a very specific time and mindset, which I find really interesting. The second half of this decade felt very different in some ways—I’ll discuss more of this when I eventually do a decade wrap up!

Anyway, that’s all for now. I hope y’all all enjoyed today’s newsletter. Trying to get back to these on a weekly basis as things slow down. If y’all have any thoughts on the books discussed today, comment below!

Until next time,

XOXO