Colson Whitehead leads National Book Awards fiction shortlist

Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad led the 2016 National Book Award shortlist on Thursday morning as expected. It is no doubt a favorite to win among the very small number of people who are nerdy enough about contemporary literature to actually think about book awards betting odds. It’s so good it’s hard to praise it without whipping out the cliches: it’s an elegant, devastating powerhouse of a book, following a young black woman all over America as she tries to escape the horrors of slavery. When it was published with Oprah’s imprimatur, in August, it was universally acclaimed. It deserved it. That means anyone who follows the whole march of books in a year will expect Whitehead to walk away with the prize.

But the fiction longlist is otherwise populated with books that made quieter splashes. Although two “literary Jonathans” have books out this year, neither made the shortlist. Nor did Ann Patchett, or Zadie Smith, or TC Boyle, or any of the other big names who published this year. Instead, the National Book Awards foundation has chosen to spotlight a number of quieter books.

The next-best-known writer on the list is Jacqueline Woodson, who released her first adult novel this year, a book called Another Brooklyn. I regret to say I have not read it yet but reviews were rapturous. Then we have three other novels of very obviously lower profile, all well-reviewed, very good books: Karan Mahajan’s The Association of Small Bombs, which follows the victims of a market bombing in Delhi; Paulette Jiles’s News of the World, set in 1870s Texas and following a man taking an orphan home, true grit-style; and Chris Bachelder’s The Throwback Special, about middle age and football.

It’s a diverse list, for sure. Over the last few years the literary and publishing communities of New York have become more and more eager to prove that they are taking diversity seriously. The results of that effort have been, at best, mixed, but awards lists are really starting to reflect that priority.

But let me pause here for another insider-baseball observation about book awards. There has long been an argument in New York about what, exactly, the purpose of book awards ought to be. One model sees them as a celebration of the unquestioned best and brightest, a triumphal parade for marquee authors who have published in a given year. In that model, you would always have a list of recognizable names with perhaps one or two debut authors in the mix, people everyone believes to be the stars of tomorrow. That tends to be the Pulitzer model – it’s also, often enough, the Booker’s, too.

The National Book Awards have often been susceptible to a different view. This camp holds that book awards, with the publicity they can generate, are good occasions to highlight books the public has ignored or forgotten. Under that rubric, a book like Whitehead’s, which has been firmly on the bestseller list since it was published, is the anomaly rather than the juggernaut. The awards committee, therefore, is looking to point readers to a book they might not otherwise have picked up in the store.

Pitfalls abound in that model. In 2010, Jaimy Gordon won the award for her beautiful but rather difficult Lords of Misrule. She had been published by a very small publishing house that didn’t even have enough copies on hand to deal with the win, when it came. Quietly, a lot of people complained that the National Book Award was making itself irrelevant by choosing complex, difficult books that could never resonate with the public.

That won’t be the case here. Each of the fiction nominees is published by a major house, and none of them are high postmodern works, all relatively accessible to a wide readership. Still, as someone who watches these lists go by every year, it seems obvious that the National Book Foundation is asking that readers pay close attention not only to the most hyped books of the year, but also to the releases that might, for one reason or another, have slipped off their radar. May the best book win.

The 2016 National Book Award finalists

Fiction

Chris Bachelder, The Throwback Special
Paulette Jiles, News of the World
Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs
Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
Jacqueline Woodson, Another Brooklyn

Nonfiction

Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Ibram X Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: the Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War
Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America
Heather Ann Thompson, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy

Poetry

Daniel Borzutzky, The Performance of Becoming Human
Rita Dove, Collected Poems 1974 – 2004
Peter Gizzi, Archeophonics
Jay Hopler, The Abridged History of Rainfall
Solmaz Sharif, Look

Young people’s literature

Kate DiCamillo, Raymie Nightingale
John Lewis, Andrew Aydin & Nate Powell, March: Book Three
Grace Lin, When the Sea Turned to Silver
Jason Reynolds, Ghost
Nicola Yoon, The Sun Is Also a Star