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William H. Gass On The Pulitzers
The Pulitzer Prize in fiction takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses; the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill–not a sturdy mountain flower but a little wilted lily of the valley.
The essay from which that comes (collected in Finding a Form)is actually a lot kinder to the Pulitzer than the above might indicate (Gass has always been great at starting essays), although Gass remains steadfast in his mediocrity charge and backs it up fairly well.
Looking at the Pulitzer winners since Gass wrote this (1988, I believe), the prize's aim seems to have improved a tiny bit, albeit only by a tactic that Gass calls out in his essay: retrospectively anointing a known superstar. If you pull out the obvious picks, it is a fairly mediocre assemblage.
More from Conversational Reading: - Pulitzers I’m honestly puzzled about the Pulitzer for fiction going to Oscar Wao. (We’re got a review of it here.) Not that the book sounds bad...
- William Gass Wow, an interview with William Gass in The Believer. ...
- Gass v. Doctorow Over at The Millions, Garth Risk Hallberg turns in a nice post comparing the two recent books of criticism by Gass and Doctorow. The title...
- Gass Interview Linked to by various places, William Gass gives an interview to the Boston Globe. ...
- The Quarterly Conversation Winter 2008 Contest Winners And now to reveal the winners of our Winter 2008 contest from Issue 14 of The Quarterly Conversation. If you don’t pull one of the...
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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