UPDATE: The New York Times gives us the low down:
“Whenever they make a decision, it’s not meant to be a statement about fiction in general,” Mr. Gissler said. “It’s just a statement that none was able to receive a majority.”
One theory suggested that the Pulitzer board was perplexed by an unconventional group of finalists.
[snip]
Mr. Gissler, the Pulitzer administrator, said he was sorry that people in the book industry were unhappy with the decision.
“Whenever you do not give a prize, you have disappointment, so we understand that,” he said. “We’re sorry for the disappointment. The three books were carefully considered and the process was what it was.”
Well, so long as they're sorry. The NYT article also has an interesting take on the bookstore side of this: indy bookstores count on the Pulitzer to give a boost in sales to an otherwise boutique title; stores are pissed that they're out this year's sales bump.
I still don't understand why the tie didn't go to the completed, current novel, the way a tie in the NFL goes to the team that defeated the other in the regular season. This seems a no-brainer to me.
ORIGINAL: For the first time since 1977, there was no Pulitzer Prize given in fiction. Instead, Denis Johnson's Train Dreams, David Foster Wallace's The Pale King, and Karen Russell's Swamplandia will share a "tie," though it's not clear whether that means all three win, or, under Homer Simpson's logic, "They're all losers." (It appears, according to the Pulitzer's website, that it's the latter.)
But the three-way does raise the question: why?
I love Denis Johnson as much as the next white MFA grad, but Train Dreams was first published in 2002 in the Paris Review, and was anthologized in book form in the 2003 O. Henry Prize Stories. It's awesome, but a child born when it came out has a cell phone already. Meanwhile, The Pale King is an unfinished novel, and for once when talking about Wallace I don't mean in the postmodern sense. Wallace killed himself before completing its composition; it was published posthumously as a fragment. The Pale King was likely only considered because the Pulitzer committee never honored Wallace in his lifetime, and a lot of people think he's the future of writing (he's not) and so we'll all seem really provincial in 20 years if we never gave him an award, and everybody feels legitimately bad about his tragic suicide.
So if one book is almost a decade old, and another is unfinished, why not just give the award to Swamplandia? The Pulitzer committee offered no explanation for the move, and I don't have a theory. If anybody knows, please weigh in.
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