On the Pulitzer Prize.

So, in all its wisdom, the Pulitzer committee has decided not to award a prize in fiction this year. Not that anybody gives a shit what I think, but that strikes me as … how about “weak sauce”? I haven’t used the phrase “weak sauce” in a long time. That’s totally weak sauce.

Why? I mean, there’s a level on which I don’t actually give a shit about these prizes, except inasmuch as they confer money on deserving people who may or may not need it. Thomas Pynchon never won a Pulitzer Prize (though not because he lacked support). Neal Stephenson never won one and he never will. I can give you a 99.9999% guarantee that I never will. (Do like to hold out that .00001% hope, though.) There are a lot of legitimately great writers who will never sniff a Pulitzer Prize.

So, does that mean that the thing is meaningless? Oh, I suppose that, on some grand level, the answer to that question is unequivocally yes. A lot of shitty books have won the Pulitzer Prize, and a lot of really great ones have been ignored. (To wit, and in order: “Empire Falls”; “Motherless Brooklyn”.*) But there’s another level on which the failure to award a Pulitzer Prize indicates an utter failure of imagination and interest that just strikes me as so ludicrous I can hardly believe that it continues to happen. Can it possibly be true that there is not a single American novel or book of short stories from the year 2011 that was worthy of the committee’s attention? Is the totality of their snobbery that oppressive?

*Technical note: why the fuck does Tumblr make it so goddamned difficult to italicize shit? Jesus. 

Well. I suspect the answer is actually “no”: what I suspect is that a goodly proportion of the committee read three novels this year — the finalists, Denis Johnson’s ”Train Dreams”, DFW’s “Pale King”, and Karen Russel’s “Swamplandia!”. Near as I can tell, the only person with any particular expertise in fiction on this year’s board is past winner Junot Diaz, whose “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” won the award a few years back, with a reasonable amount of deservedness.  One can understand why these three selections might not inspire a winner: one of them is a decade old, one of them is an incomplete novel by a dead man, and the other … well, I haven’t read “Swamplandia!”, so I can’t pass judgement, but the reviews certainly indicated that it had a certain amount of gimmickiness that may have been hard on non-critics/artists.

But good God, they couldn’t come up with ONE novel they felt worthy of the Pulitzer, even if these three weren’t necessarily the right three? It wouldn’t have been that hard. There’s past winner Jeffrey Eugenides’ “The Marriage Plot”, to start with, which is exactly the kind of book that just screams for a Pulitzer (big, famous, high-selling, ambitious but not overly adventurous). There’s Dana Spiotta’s “Stone Arabia”, which takes all of five hours to read, even for a slow reader like me, and engages deeply with quintessentially American pop culture and is gently postmodern in kind of the same way as last year’s winner, Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit from the Goon Squad”. There is (ahem) Charles Baxter’s “Gryphon”, which collects the short fiction of America’s post-Carver master of the form. I mean, seriously. Those are just the ones I came up with without thinking hard.

The Pulitzer committee is in a position in which it could make pretty much any kind of statement it wants. I know a lot of people who might prefer no award to an aesthetically conservative one, though that strikes me as stupid. I realize that all prizes are kind of a bookselling boondoggle (it’s significant that a lot of the bitching in the press is from editors and execs at Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, for instance), but so the fuck what? Writers and writing deserve as much goddamned publicity as we can get, whether or not it’s really for the benefit of our publishers. And it would be so easy. It’s not as though there aren’t a million options. And the people who swing such heavy axes should be troubled to read more than three novels in one year … cripes.