You're on page two of "Michael Cunningham's Fascinating—And Completely Unsatisfying—Pulitzer Defense." Click here for page one, here for page two.
Cunningham wrote less of the other two texts. Here's his say on Train Dreams:
Denis Johnson's "Train Dreams" had been written ten years earlier and been published as a long short story in The Paris Review. It was, however, magnificently written, stylistically innovative, and—in its exhilarating, magical depiction of ordinary life in the much romanticized Wild West—a profoundly American book.
[...] "Train Dreams" had only been published as a novel in 2012, which made it eligible, for the first time, for a Pulitzer. We checked with the Pulitzer administrator about that. He gave us the O.K.
That's permission, not an explanation. I'm 100% with the committee that Train Dreams is excellent. I also thought so in 2002, when I first read it in the Paris Review, and again when it was anthologized in The O. Henry Story Collection in 2003. But as I wrote at the time of the Pulitzer announcement, a child born when Train Dreams was first published has a cell phone by now. Why, when one is looking for a single qualified text out of 300, was deference not given to "magnificent" and "innovative" and "American" texts not 10 years old?
Cunningham doesn't explain; he merely tells us that the text technically qualified. In the wake of what followed, who cares? No one's here to indict Cunningham et al; we don't care that it was technically permissable for one book or another to be considered, but why it was considered despite an obvious deficiency according to the nature of the prize. Cunningham gives us nothing to this end.
The selection of Russell's novel was not without its equivocations, either:
Karen Russell’s “Swamplandia!” was a first novel, and, like many first novels, it contained among its wonders certain narrative miscalculations—the occasional overreliance on endearingly quirky characters, certain scenes that should have been subtler. Was a Pulitzer a slightly excessive response to a fledgling effort?
However, it seemed very much like the initial appearance of an important writer, and its wonders were wonderful indeed. Other first novels, among them Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces,” have won the Pulitzer. One is not necessarily looking for perfection in a novel, or for the level of control that generally comes with more practice. One is looking, more than anything, for originality, authority, and verve, all of which “Swamplandia!” possessed in abundance.
In short, it sounds as if the judges, or at least Cunningham, liked The Pale King the best, with a runner up as Train Dreams, and Swamplandia as a spunky bronze medal. Cunningham writes on the largely-pointless second page that the jury was looking for The One, which
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.
[...] 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.
Cunningham clearly thought that The Pale King was as close to The One as this batch of 300 novels came. He also seems congizant that Wallace, who never received a major prize in his lifetime, wouldn't have another chance at literature's most prominent prize. Cunningham even runs down, as if out of guilty conscience, the list of writers who were honored far too late in their careers by similar juries who bestowed the Pulitzer more as a lifetime achievement award than a verdict of a single novel:
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)...leave "The Sound and the Fury" and "Absalom, Absalom!" in the Mississippi dust.
Clearly, the Pulitzer committee didn't buy any of this, or they would have given the award to Wallace. We have no idea why the committee decided the way it did, but perhaps they didn't want one more book included on the list of the type Cunningham just gave, one more book that obviously didn't belong. It's too bad that they didn't reconvene the jury: for as much as Cunningham goes to bat for Wallace in this essay, he is not palpably convinced that The Pale King was the best of the bunch. If the committee had asked Cunningham to choose again, would he have looked back into the pile of books he'd so agonizingly turned down and selected another? Or would he have stuck by Wallace's fragment, in deference to Wallace's career or reputation, or, most likely, the idea that future generations would look back in judgment at our inability to recongize Wallace's genius? In worrying so much about the opinion of the future, did he commit himself a book that didn't even survive the judgement of the present?
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