"The Pulitzer Prize in fiction," William Gass once said, "takes dead aim at mediocrity and almost never misses."
Something besides mediocrity was afoot in the non-selection of the 2012 Pulitzer, and we now have our first testimony from someone involved in the inner process of this year's aiming. Michael Cunningham, one of the three fiction jurors and a former Pulitzer winner himself, penned a well-written explanation of the process behind the odd selection of 2012's three finalists, though he is just as much in the dark as the rest of us as to why the Pulitzer committee ultimately did not select any of them.
Quick background, skip if you don't need it: for the first time since 1977, no Pulitzer was awarded this year, a move that surprised and angered a good number of people, not least of which were independent bookstore owners, who rely on the prize to boost sales of the otherwise boutique literary fiction market. Anger at the Pulitzer board soon pivoted to the fiction jurors, who seemed to have presented the board with an idiosyncratic and cumbersome selection of finalists: an uncompleted manuscript by David Foster Wallace, a novella by Denis Johnson that had been published, twice, at the other end of the last decade, and a debut novel by youngster Karen Russell. It was suggested that the board simply didn't know what to do with a group that included at least two works that could arguably be disqualified, and called the whole thing off. This writer wondered why the tie didn't go to Russell, for actual having written a book that could be given the award without an asterisk.
All caught up? On to Cunningham's two-part letter-essay in the New Yorker (where else?), which, though it leaves absolutely no doubt that the three jurors approached their task with supreme gravity, is nonetheless completely unsatisfying—and not only because he ultimately has no more idea why the prize wasn't awarded than we do.
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Cunningham writes on behalf of the jury which also included English professor Maureen Corrigan and former book editor Susan Larson:
We were, all three of us, shocked by the board's decision (non-decision), because we were, in fact, thrilled, not only by the books we'd nominated but also by several other books that came within millimetres of the final cut. We never felt as if we were scraping around for books that were passable enough to slap a prize onto. We agreed, by the end of all our reading and discussion, that contemporary American fiction is diverse, inventive, ambitious, and (maybe most important) still a lively, and therefore living, art form.
But:
The jury does not designate a winner, or even indicate a favorite. The jury provides the board with three equally ranked options. The members of the board can, if they’re unsatisfied with the three nominees, ask the jury for a fourth possibility. No such call was made.
That last sentence is probably the most important in Cunningham's entire missive. Why the board didn't simply ask for another recommendation will probably be the primary unanswered question from this mess. It sounds, at least to this reader, as if the judges would have provided an alternative selection, even if they might not have been thrilled about it.
Cunningham then takes us step by step through the process of winnowing 300+ novels down to 30 or so, and then down to three. The more agonizing part of the process, Cunningham says, is not the early stages of chucking the novels that obviously weren't worthy, but the later rounds in which the judges had to somehow filter the great from the very good. Cunningham struck down novels that were otherwise laudable but contained too many lazy lines (take note, writers); other books were well-written but too obviously derivative; a thinly-veiled Super Sad True Love Story is reluctantly struck for the simplicity of its love story. If you're a writer, even a would-be one, this is fascinating stuff.
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