Letter from the Pulitzer Fiction Jury, Part II: How To Define Greatness?

Yesterday, I wrote about the remarkable if agonizing experience of selecting three Pulitzer Prize nominees in fiction from over three hundred books by American writers. Today, I’d like to reflect a bit on the search for an unassailably great contemporary work of fiction, which, as I’ve learned, resembles an attempt to appreciate an entire train while you’re a passenger in one of its cars.

You can read Part One here.

We kept waiting for the Big Book.

Every few weeks, as a new shipment of books arrived at each of our different addresses, Susan, Maureen, and I slit open the carton and said to ourselves, Please, let this box contain the One.

The One would be the novel so monumental, so original and vast and funny and tragic, so clearly important, that only an idiot would deny it the Pulitzer Prize.

We wanted a foolproof book, a book about which we could be absolutely certain. Or two such books. Maybe even three.

We were glad to have been asked to be judges, but we were nervous as well. Because any jury that awards an important prize is trying to second-guess the future; to honor a book that will endure. Jury members are, or should be, trying to use their own particular passions and acumen to catch a whiff of greatness rising up off the page. Jury members aren’t just selecting their favorite books, they’re trying to stare down their personal biases, to let the books speak as themselves, and not as the books the jurors generally tend to prefer. You don’t like family sagas? Too bad, this is a great one, get over it. You think of science fiction as frivolous? Consider the possibility that this particular work of science fiction transcends what you’ve always believed to be the limits of the genre.

Jury members also, naturally, know that they’re carrying on a long-established, impossible project: the attempt to name a “best” book, as if books were cucumbers at a county fair. Even at the grandest possible level, it’s a doomed proposition. Is “The Sound and the Fury” better than “The Great Gatsby,” or vice versa? They’re both great. But is one better than the other? It depends on whom you ask.

Add in the fact that significant works of literature don’t appear on a reliable, annual basis. Some years are unusually fertile. In 1985, for instance, we saw the publication of Don DeLillo’s “White Noise,” Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” and Paul Auster’s “City of Glass.”

So. It’s 1985, and you’re a Pulitzer juror. Which of the above four titles is clearly better than the other three?

“Lonesome Dove” won the prize that year, a choice with which I have no quarrel. But the other three didn’t win. Couldn’t win. The Pulitzer board is obliged to acknowledge only a single book and declare it the best.

And, finally, one must confront the most nervous-making aspect of all the jurists’ and board’s duties: those who award prizes are wrong at least as often as they’re right. There is, for instance, the fact that Pearl S. Buck went to her grave with a Nobel Prize and Nabokov did not. That Dario Fo got one but Borges didn’t. The list of past Nobel winners is formidable—those Swedish prize-givers are sharp—but a list of non-winners would be surprising and not entirely reassuring.

Among the books that have not won the Pulitzer (which was established in 1917): “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sun Also Rises,” “The Sound and the Fury,” “Absalom, Absalom!,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Invisible Man,” “The Adventures of Augie March,” “On the Road,” “Catch-22,” “The Moviegoer,” “Revolutionary Road,” “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Deliverance,” “The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor,” “Ragtime,” “J R,” “The Collected Stories of Grace Paley,” and “Underworld.”

The list of past prizewinners, it should be noted, also includes many significant and enduring books. Still. Although it feels unseemly to name any of the less-than-stellar books that triumphed over the ones that proved to be classics, look up the list if you’re so inclined. There are some shockers. It’s true as well that a number of the authors of all those great but unselected books got the prize eventually, though most of us would agree that the prizes, when finally awarded, gave off a hint of redress, unless we believe that Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea” (which won in 1953) outshines “The Sun Also Rises” and “A Farewell to Arms,” or that Faulkner’s “A Fable” (1955) and “The Reivers” (1963) (only Faulkner, Booth Tarkington, and John Updike have won twice) leave “The Sound and the Fury” and “Absalom, Absalom!” in the Mississippi dust.

The Pulitzer board has denied a prize in fiction nine times before, most recently in 1977, when Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs Through It” was one of the candidates. The prizeless year 1974 was the year that “Gravity’s Rainbow” was eligible.

It’s shortsighted. It’s offensive. And yet…

As Maureen, Susan, and I opened box after box, cracked book after book, we found a certain number of them that we liked very much and, among those, a smaller number that contained one or more actual marvels: a great character, a powerful and original style, a remarkable theme, a few scenes that raised the hairs on our arms, or some other accomplishment that approached the miraculous.

But none of them was unquestionable, none so flawlessly and obviously great as to quell all doubts. Juries are assigned, in part, to doubt. To weigh and question, to wonder over the balance between virtue and lapse.

We were not—at least I like to believe we weren’t—saps, prigs, or pedants. We were not looking for the safe, if ever so slightly bland, option. We were looking for the new “Great Gatsby,” the “Sound and the Fury” of 2012, the book that could stand unembarrassed alongside “Invisible Man.”

So, for argument’s sake, let’s imagine that the juries and Pulitzer boards of the past were not necessarily saps, prigs, or pedants. That includes the ones that didn’t acknowledge “The Great Gatsby,” “The Sound and the Fury,” or “Invisible Man.” It includes the people who, in 1974, believed it was better to withhold the prize entirely than to give it to “Gravity’s Rainbow.”

It’s easy to attribute past oversights to some imaginary band of the cowardly and nearsighted (one pictures them in dowdily sensible outfits, owl-eyed, prim, and self-righteous, speaking to one another in carefully rehearsed boarding-school accents). And, yes, the cowardly and nearsighted do exist in the realm of literature. They sometimes thrive.

It’s more interesting, though, to think about how elusive greatness can be before history delivers its verdict, even to those who are neither prim nor self-righteous.

Among the more infamous critical and popular failures in its time is, of course, “Moby-Dick” (which was published before the Pulitzers were established). “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sound and the Fury” fell like Icarus immediately upon publication. Time magazine called “On the Road” “a barbaric yawp of a book.” The New Yorker declared “Catch-22” “a debris of sour jokes.”

As we jurors continued to find books we loved but failed to find the One, the Great Invincible, I confess (I can’t indict Maureen or Susan along with me) that I wanted not only to recognize genius but also to escape going down in history as one of the people who failed to recognize it. Someone who missed the Northern Lights because they were fussing with a lapdog; who proved unable to see beyond their readerly peccadillos and prejudices or their flat-out limitations.

This ongoing state of agitation was not helped by the knowledge that a great new book, more or less by definition, doesn’t much resemble the great books of the past. Nor was it helped by my suspicion that many of the long-forgotten critics and prize-givers who decimated “Moby-Dick” or ignored “The Sound and the Fury” failed to understand that the future wouldn’t mind Melville’s insistence on all those longish chapters devoted to whaling arcana, or Faulkner’s devotion to a lexicon that could seem simultaneously oracular and impenetrable, that sometimes barely resembled the English most of us had spoken, with relative confidence, since childhood.

It’s partly a question of what future generations will and will not overlook. What seem fatal flaws to one generation strike the next as displays of artistic courage. Who cares that Henry James went on sometimes at questionable length because he was being paid by the word? Who cares, for that matter, that Marconi merely invented radio transmission when his actual goal was to pick up the voices of the dead?

Finally, there was the question of shifting sensibilities. When Maureen, Susan, and I talked Big Book, we were thinking almost literally—a book that was, if not over five hundred pages long, vast in its scope, enormous in its concerns.

But as I scanned the cartons for Big Ones, I found myself thinking more and more of the Impressionists. I wondered over the fact that, in the course of several centuries, “serious” painting ceased to favor great historical or religious subjects, which tended to incorporate at least two dozen figures, facial and bodily expressions that ranged from despair to ecstasy, a landscape, a horse or two, symbolic vestments, symbolic gestures, and (optional, but recommended) various saints and angels, approving or angered, up among the roil and brilliance of the clouds.

And then, a mere minute later in historical time, a “serious” painting could be a Monet haystack. It could be a Cezanne portrait of a local farmer in overalls. It could be an empty Van Gogh field under an empty sky.

The Impressionists don’t strike us (don’t strike me, anyway) as lesser artists simply because they worked on an outwardly more modest scale. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, do I hurry past the paintings by Monet and Cezanne and Van Gogh to get to those by Tintoretto and the Delacroix? I do not. I’m happy to see all of them, but the Monets and Cezannes and Van Goghs don’t look small compared to the Tintorettos and Delacroixes. They’re just big in different ways.

As are “The Great Gatsby” and “The Sound and the Fury.” As are “On the Road” and “Catch-22.”

The search for a significant new book, an enduring book, is, in short, a crapshoot, and, as is true of all gambles, the odds favor the house over the player. I like to think that history will vindicate all three of our choices; that someone like me will someday be appalled to learn that “The Pale King,” “Train Dreams,” and “Swamplandia!” were all passed over in 2012. There is, however, no telling. We may be castigated by future generations for failing to nominate a book we dismissed early on, because it struck us as trivial or overwritten or sentimental.

Which is probably one of the reasons those of us who love contemporary fiction love it as we do. We’re alone with it. It arrives without references, without credentials we can trust. Givers of prizes (not to mention critics) do the best they can, but they may—they probably will—be scoffed at by their children’s children. We, the living readers, whether or not we’re members of juries, decide, all on our own, if we suspect ourselves to be in the presence of greatness. We’re compelled to let future generations make the more final decisions, which will, in all likelihood, seem to them so clear as to produce a sense of bafflement over what was valued by their ancestors; what was garlanded and paraded, what carried to the temple on the shoulders of the wise.

A literary prize is, at best, one way of drawing readers to a book that deserves more serious attention than it might have gotten without a prize. A faulty track record doesn’t invalidate the attempt to say, annually, to anyone who might be listening, “You really should read this one.”

Which is why the committee’s decision to withhold the prize entirely is so unfortunate. An American writer has been ill served and underestimated. Readers have been deprived of what might have been a great literary discovery or might have offered them the bittersweet but genuine satisfaction of saying, “Really? That book? What were those people thinking of?”

Illustration by Maximilian Bode.