Sweeping Stories and Expanding Narratives on the 2017 NBA Longlist

In which we consider the other five books on the 2017 NBA Fiction list.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

Recently, I wrote about the books shortlisted for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction. This was the year where Jesmyn Ward became the first woman to win twice—this time for her third novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing. I loved the short list of this year, but I never actually read the entire longlist. I’ve talked a lot before about how, sometimes, you just have to wait until it’s the right time to appreciate ce

At the beginning of 2018, something compelled me to read A Kind of Freedom by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton. I knew it had been longlisted for the National Book Award but knew very little else before pulling it off my bookshelf—I’ve said this before, but I rarely read what books are about before I start them. Now, it’s a book I think of often and with great love and admiration. The novel is set in New Orleans, where Sexton is from, and spans three generations: there’s Evelyn and Renard, living in the 40’s, Jackie, their daughter, in the 80’s, and T.C., their grandson, living through the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Sexton is an immense talent, showcasing this remarkable ability to balance the sweep of this story with an economy of language, so the book never feels bloated and is so short, it could be finished in one sitting. I loved all of the characters. There’s this thing that sometimes happens with writers where characters will be less human than just a stand-in for all of the ideas the writer has for the audience, but it never feels like that here. They felt fully realized and real the entire time. While Sexton is covering a lot of topics that demand nuance, she never lets her consideration of these ideas overcome the narrative. It’s truly such an impressive work that I can only say good things about it.

After finishing Sexton’s novel, I made the assumption that I had been the one person to miss out on its brilliance—it was longlisted for the NBA, after all. But while writing this newsletter, I went over to Goodreads to see how many people marked it as “read” and saw that it was just over 5000 people. Considering the fact that the book had such critical acclaim, has been out for several years now, and her latest was selected for the Reese Witherspoon Book Club, one would think it would have a higher number of readers. I’m thrilled to see her newest book, On The Rooftop get some notice, but I would love it even more if people recognized her as the talent she is.

I didn’t end up reading another book from this longlist until the end of last year when I picked up Jennifer Egan’s Manhattan Beach. I have a weird relationship with Egan’s work in that I always appreciate it but always associate it with a pretentious man who first suggested her to me a decade ago. Any time I’ve read her work in the past, I’ve just heard his voice explaining all of the ways that her unconventional approach to structure and narrative is so revolutionary and all that jazz. I think returning to her work with Manhattan Beach ended up being a blessing in disguise, because this book feels so different from all of her work that I’ve read. It’s a much more traditional novel, almost reading like a lot of the novels from the fifties I’d read in the first half of last year. The novel, set during the Depression and WWII, is about a girl named Anna Kerrigan and the disappearance of her father, Eddie. Egan does a beautiful job evoking this particular period and the New York setting. While there’s a modern eye to the consideration of how this story is told, it never alters the reality of what such a story would realistically look like. It feels well researched and believable. I do think there are times that people could get bogged down in the details of it all, but I found it so immersive and evocative.

There were some readers who preferred her more experimental work to this one, but I think for a writer whose greatest strength is unconventional structures, this would be more experimental and challenging for her. I also feel like these types of novels, the ones that are so intentionally excessive and baroque, are harder and harder to come by. Sure, we see books like Great Circle and The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois popping up every now and then, but it’s a thrill to see novelists really tackle these doorstoppers and with such a skilled hand.

Speaking of sweeping novels, the next book I read on the list was the book Miss Burma by Charmaine Craig. I remember seeing a more mixed reception to this, back when it first came out—not with critics so much as other readers. I think some of that has to do with the fact that this book isn’t necessarily as commercial as some of the others. The writing is less conversational, and the story itself is intricate and at times rather harrowing. It opens with a memorable scene at a beauty pageant before pulling us backward in time and into the narrative, and there’s something about how Craig manages the fluidity of time that’s impressive here. She does the thing that most sweeping, large novels do in that they have long scenes of intimate moments tethered together by quick brushes of time. It’s a formula that typically works well, including here, where Craig focuses on moments of intimacy that feel new and surprising. You can tell that Craig was previously an actress in how she works her characters throughout the story. They feel contradictory and nuanced in a really authentic way that can be challenging to some writers.

I know the novel itself is inspired by Craig’s mother and grandparents, and there are times when I wonder how difficult it must have been, emotionally, to tackle this subject. But Craig never leans on sentimentality or leaves things unexplained in a way that some people do who use their family as a blueprint. I was more invested in the first half of the book than the second half, but that’s mostly due to my own personal interests in certain narrative elements than anything. Overall, I think this was a really strong and interesting read.

The next book I read was Barren Island by Carol Zoref. It is yet another sweeping novel—I hadn’t realized it until now, but that does seem to be a theme for this list, these sweeping stories. Barren Island is stylistically more in line with Manhattan Beach, though I might say that Barren Island is even more old school, traditional in its style choices throughout. It’s well-researched and engaging—I loved the voice here, a coming of age story narrated by a woman on her 80th birthday. It tells the story of a group of immigrant families living on a sand bar island in Jamaica Bay off the coast of Brooklyn, in the year leading up to WWII. I found this novel so surprising, an addition to the list that I think is deserving but also had major potential to be overlooked. It’s from a very small press and wasn’t really discussed before and I haven’t really heard many people talk about it since. I’m sure part of that has to do with the fact that, from the description, it potentially doesn’t sound as compelling or accessible as it actually is. But I think many readers would enjoy this one, and it was fun to get to hear about a part of this history that I knew nothing about beforehand.

I do think this happens every year, where there’s a book that just doesn’t make as big of a splash, and out of all of the books on the entire longlist, this is the one that was the least read, according to Goodreads. But I think that’s one of the reasons why I still root for awards like this one, because it can bring attention to books that might have otherwise gone under the radar. If you haven’t read this book, I think it’s at least worth checking out. Especially those of you who have followed along with my NBA project this whole time and maybe read some of those, too. This is a fun one to read almost as a companion to those.

Now, on to the last book I read for this list, and one that I think will end up an all time favorite, The King is Always Above The People by Daniel Alarcón. I’ll start by saying that my favorite story from this collection is Abraham Lincoln Has Been Shot—I loved this story, I thought all of them were great, but there was just something about this story that I found so striking and that I can’t get out of my head. If you read no other story, I would definitely recommend this one. But the reality is, this entire collection is beyond brilliant. Alarcón is up there with Alice Munro and Danielle Evans with writers with almost unmatched economy. Out of everything in a writer, the thing I will always find most impressive is when they have the ability to relate entire worlds and people to the reader with less than a dozen pages. Each of these stories was compelling and fluid, and just when I thought I might be ready to set this collection down, I’d start another story and be late to my next destination. I don’t want to overhype this book—I do think people are already weary of short story collections as is—but I think these stories are so well conceived and the collection itself has a certain harmony without ever feeling like some stories repeat themselves or have too similar of structures and such. I don’t know, I just loved it. It’s hard for me to talk about books sometimes, when I love them too much. We’ll see if the hype dies down in a few weeks, but if anything, I’ll probably just re-read this book and bring it up again later.

I’m still not entirely sure what to make of the longlist as a whole. I’ve been fortunate enough to discuss the longlists for the last five years, but 2017 was the year before I joined bookstagram, and so I haven’t really been able to discuss my overall thoughts on the list. But I will say that if nothing else, this is a very strong list of books. All ten of them are well written and captivating and surprising, doing new things. I mentioned in my letter covering the shortlist that the five books on that list all felt like they were reconsidering the American novel, and I guess one could say that these five do a similar thing. They all attempt to expand our idea on what the American novel can be, thematically, stylistically, in regards to subject matter and focus. While this award isn’t looking for the best book about the American experience, it’s still a book recognizing American writers, so it would make sense to see this.

It’s a shame that more people don’t cover and discuss the NBA Lists, but if you have any thoughts on this list, I would love to discuss it with you. I’ll be covering the 1967 and 2016 longlists next, so stay tuned for that. And if you have any ideas for other things you would like me to discuss in the future, I am all ears.

Until next time,

XOXO