Alexie, Hass, Johnson and Weiner Win 2007 National Book Awards — Women Shut Out in Sweep for Male Authors

A tidal wave of testosterone at the National Book Awards ceremonyOne-Minute Book Reviews normally doesn’t cover breaking news. But the National Book Award winners announced tonight have been slow enough to appear on the Web that the policy is bending today. Here’s a complete list of the winners and finalists for the awards from the National Book Foundation site www.nationalbook.org. SNAP preview is always enabled on One-Minute Book Reviews, so you can put your cursor on aLiny of the links below and see an image of the page you’ll reach by clicking on it.FICTION WINNER: Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – Interview Mischa Berlinski, Fieldwork (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – Interview Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – Interview Joshua Ferris, Then We Came to the End (Little, Brown & Company) – Interview Denis Johnson, Tree of Smoke (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) – Interview Jim Shepard, Like You’d Understand, Anyway (Alfred A. Knopf) – Interview Fiction judges: Francine Prose (chair), Andrew Sean Greer, Walter Kirn, David Means, and Joy Williams.NONFICTION

WINNER: Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (Doubleday) – Interview Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Alfred A. Knopf) – Interview Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (Twelve/Hachette Book Group USA) – Interview Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – Interview Arnold Rampersad, Ralph Ellison: A Biography (Alfred A. Knopf) – Interview Nonfiction judges: David Shields (chair), Deborah Blum, Caroline Elkins, Annette Gordon-Reed, and James Shapiro.

POETRY

WINNER: Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins) – Interview Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company) – Interview David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press) – Interview Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company) – Interview Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company) – Interview Poetry Judges: Charles Simic (chair), Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey.

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

WINNER: Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (Little, Brown & Company) – Interview Kathleen Duey, Skin Hunger: A Resurrection of Magic, Book One (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) – Interview M. Sindy Felin, Touching Snow (Atheneum Books for Young Readers) – Interview Brian Selznick, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic Press) – Interview Sara Zarr, Story of a Girl (Little, Brown & Company) – Interview Young People’s Literature Judges: Elizabeth Partridge (chair), Pete Hautman, James Howe, Patricia McCormick, and Scott Westerfeld

Is Alice Sebold Turning Into the Howard Stern of Popular Fiction?

Charlotte Moore says that the first line of The Almost Moon is there “purely to grab attention,” and she doesn’t think much of what follows, either

By Janice Harayda

Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, sold million of copies, but I read only a few pages before being put off partly by the tabloid-worthy premise: MURDERED CHILD TELLS STORY FROM HEAVEN! And I haven’t been able to get her second, The Almost Moon (Little, Brown, $24.95), from the library, because a lot of people here are reading it for one of those one-size-fits-all programs designed to get everybody in town to read the same book.

Until I can track down a copy, you might like to read the comments of a critic for a British weekly who raised points that I haven’t seen mentioned in the American reviews. Charlotte Moore wrote of The Almost Moon (“Deadened by Shock”) in the Oct. 31 issue of The Spectator:

“Its essential flaw is contained in its opening sentence: ‘When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.’ This is eye-catching … But like the rest of the novel it doesn’t withstand scrutiny.

“‘When all is said and done’ evokes a folksy storytelling style, but does it mean anything? Who is ‘saying and doing’, exactly? It’s just padding; the second half of the sentence could stand alone. Except it couldn’t because, unpadded, we might notice that the opening is contradicted by what actually happens. The narrator, Helen Knightly, takes ages to decide what to do with her demented, incontinent mother; when at last she smothers her with towels, it’s not easy at all. It’s a struggle, as you’d expect. And the remaining 277 pages go into minute detail about just how difficult it is to know what to do with yourself while you’re waiting for the cops to discover that you have murdered your mother. Nothing easy about it.

“The justification of that opening sentence, then, is purely to grab attention. This speciousness infects the prose throughout. Nasty revelations occur about once every ten pages, like the sex scenes in the Harold Robbins novels we used to pass round at boarding school.”

I don’t know if I’ll agree with these comments. But I love the force and clarity of Moore’s writing in this review — especially in contrast to how so many American critics have danced around the flaws they saw in the novel. Awfully persuasive in just a few paragraphs, isn’t it?

You can read the rest of the review at www.spectator.co.uk.

© 2007 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com