Tag: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction project

Review 2617: James

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I read James for both my Booker Prize project and my Pulitzer Prize project, which it won. As most people know by now, it is a retelling of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of the slave Jim.

Aside from generally following the plot of the original novel about halfway, James lives in a world that is much more violent than Huck Finn ever had a clue about. Everett has taken a liberty and placed the novel in the 1860s instead of the 1830s or 40s, when the original is set. He also uses a striking conceit: when among themselves the black characters speak more correctly—and sometimes with erudition—than most of the white characters.

Jim—or James, as he prefers to be called—hears that Judge Thatcher is going to sell him away from his wife and daughter, so he escapes and hides on a small island on the Mississippi. Unfortunately for him, Huck Finn has heard that his dreaded father is in town, so he fakes his own death and runs away, ending up on the same island. James realizes right away that he will be blamed for Huck’s “death.”

The two stick together and encounter what Huck thinks of as adventures and James knows to be deadly peril. After all, a slave is lynched later in the book for being suspected of stealing the nub of a pencil from his master. That he did steal it to give to James is beside the point.

The book follows the same basic outlines as Huckleberry Finn until James gets away from the Duke and the Dauphin, but all of the situations are much more deadly. Eventually, James’s inner anger is set aflame.

Everett’s books are witty, but they are also very angry. And he has some surprises for us.

This novel is fast moving and really interesting. It shows facets of the “institution” of slavery in all its ugliness.

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If I Gave the Award

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Now that I have posted my review of the last of the shortlist for the 2020 Pulitizer Prize for Fiction, it’s time for my feature in which I decide whether the judges got it right. The Pulitzer Prize tends to choose only three books for its shortlist, so in some ways the choice is easier, in some ways more difficult. In this case, two of the choices were ones I really liked.

Let’s start with the one I didn’t like as much, The Topeka School by Ben Lerner. Now, there is nothing intrinsically unlikable about Lerner’s books, it’s just that they’re all about himself, as evidenced by his alter ego, Adam Gordon, being the protagonist for all and having a biography very similar to his own. I’m saying this on the basis of two books, but I think it’s true. The novels are somewhat funny, poking subtle fun at himself, and he is obviously into wordplay, but I guess I just don’t like him very much. In this case, the novel focuses on Adam’s high school years, his relationships with his friends and girlfriend, and his prowess on the debating team.

The choice between the other two novels is difficult for me. The Dutch House was my favorite Ann Patchett novel until she wrote Tom Lake, and frankly, they’re pretty much a tie for me. It’s about the disastrous effects on his children of a father’s lack of understanding, almost a willful blindness, of both his first wife, the children’s mother, and his second. It’s about the consequent loss of his children’s inheritance, the Dutch house, and their fascination with it. And it’s about the closeness of siblings who only had each other to rely on. I really love this book.

I was gripped, though, by The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, the winning book. It’s a historical novel about the mistreatment and even murder of black boys in a Florida school for boys, aka, a detention center, based on the true history of the Dozier School for Boys. Its protagonist, Elwood Curtis, is a right-minded boy who makes the mistake of accepting a ride from a stranger in what turns out to be a stolen car. Once incarcerated in the school, he begins collecting a record of the abuses he sees.

It’s not hard to see why the judges picked The Nickel Boys over The Dutch House, a more personal novel. But that’s what I like about it. Both novels touched me emotionally, so I guess this time I declare a tie. I didn’t love The Nickel Boys as I loved The Dutch House, but it is extremely powerful. They are both very good novels.

Review 2470: The Topeka School

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It’s unfortunate for me that Ben Lerner’s books seem to be devoted mostly to exploring his own psyche, as evidenced by his main character’s biographical details matching his own, because I’m not much interested in his psyche. Sadly, his books keep ending up on the shortlists of the projects I’m pursuing. This one is from the shortlist for the 2020 Pulitzer prize.

In The Topeka School, we encounter Adam Gordon, the protagonist of Leaving the Atocha Station. In this novel, he is sometimes older, sometimes younger than in the other, but the bulk of the novel is set in 1997, when Adam is a senior in high school.

Adam is the son of two psychoanalysts who work at the Foundation, a prestigious psychiatric hospital. His mother Jane has become famous by publishing a popular book about the relationships between men and women, and his father Jonathan works mostly with disturbed teenage boys. Adam is navigating relationships with friends, sex with his girlfriend Amber, and preparations for debating competitions.

Lerner has a fascination with words, and words play an important part in the novel. For example, Adam’s high school group includes a boy named Darren he’s grown up with who is behind developmentally. Although the group has been taught not to leave Darren out, inclusion involves submitting him to indignities, like leaving him to walk home from the lake after a party. But mostly, he is called names. Names are what hurts him most.

Aside from being a champion debater, Adam likes to participate in rapping with his friends (I’m probably using the wrong words) even while realizing that he and his upper-middle-class friends have little in common with the people they’re imitating and no true understanding of the idioms they’re using.

We also periodically check in with Darren, who has feelings he can’t express. And there’s Jane, who begins receiving abusive phone calls from men after her book is published. She responds by pretending that the phone connection is poor, so she can’t hear, which eventually makes them hang up.

One of the funniest scenes in the book is the first one, where Adam is in a boat with his girlfriend at night. He is pontificating about something only to realize that his girlfriend has left the boat and swum to shore. Later, when he finds her again, she tells a story about sneaking out of the room while her stepfather is talking, and he doesn’t notice that no one is there. Adam does not at this point understand what this story has to do with him.

Then there is a type of debating described in great detail, where the object is to present as many points as possible as fast as possible even if they are ridiculous, because the opponent loses points for missing an argument. And at several points, characters speak gibberish .

All the while, there is a tension going on between Adam’s pro-feminist familial upbringing and the hyper-masculine society he’s lived in as a young man. Unfortunately, although Jane is a great character, she isn’t very important in the novel. Nor are the other women. Only Adam is important.

The novel explores the past of the family and how it affects the present, using Jonathan, Jane, and Adam as narrators. But really, almost all of it is about Adam.

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If I Gave the Award

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Since I just reviewed the last book on the shortlist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, it’s time for me to evaluate whether I think the judges got it right. That year was an unusual one, because they awarded it to two of the three novels on the shortlist, Trust by Hernan Diaz and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I felt that there were flaws in all three novels.

I think I’ll start where I often do, with the book I liked the least. That is with The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara. It may be that I’ve just read too many dystopian novels this season, and they are not my favorite. But I also thought Vara tried to tackle too many subjects. This impressed some of the newspaper and magazine reviewers, but it made me feel the novel was too all over the place. It hits runaway technology, social networking dangers, climate change, the disintegration of national governments, not to mention dysfunctional families.

It’s harder for me to evaluate the other two. Although I am not a fan of novel rewrites, Demon Copperhead was a clever rewrite of David Copperfield, placing the old classic in a modern framework. However, Barbara Kingsolver is not really good at funny, which is one of Dickens’s hallmarks, and I missed the innocence of the original character. The story is gripping, however.

I think I’m going to go with Trust as the most ambitious of the three novels in terms of structure. Trust presents the story of a wealthy early 20th century tycoon and his wife three times. Although the first time, a novel about the couple, was commonplace, and the second retelling, an “autobiography,” by the tycoon, was so megalomaniacal that it was hard to read, the third section by the tycoon’s ghost writer is where the meat and the surprise of the novel lie. I likened this novel to Russian nesting dolls, and it’s the one that has stuck with me longest.

Review 2435: The Immortal King Rao

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Just a note before I begin my review. I finally took up WordPress on their offer of my own domain, which came with the plan I was using. So, if you have a bookmark set to my blog, please change it to https://whatmeread.com. If you have subscribed to my blog by email, I’m sure your email links to the blog will be automatically redirected, and I suspect there are redirects for anyone who types in my old URL.

The timing for me in reading this novel was unfortunate, because I’m not much of a dystopian fiction fan and I had unfortunately read two others recently, accidentally but also because there are so many coming out recently. One of these novels was excellent, though. I read The Immortal King Rao for my Pulitzer Prize project.

In a prison in near-future Seattle, Athena Rao is writing her social profile as proof that she didn’t commit the crime she’s accused of. Athena is the daughter of the disgraced King Rao, a Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg type guy who invented the Coconut—the first computer designed for the general public—and apparently the whole idea of social networking. He was disgraced and adopted a solitary life on an island in Puget Sound until he decided on a further achievement—to create a daughter from his deceased wife’s frozen embryos who is connected from birth to the Internet.

If you’re thinking mad scientist, this isn’t really the emphasis of the novel. Instead, we learn about King Rao’s early life in India and later life in America, we hear what happens when Athena decides to leave home, but we also learn of the disintegration of the world’s governments toward a planet run by an algorithm that is supposed to be fair, and of the immanent threat to the planet of climate change.

There is a lot going on in this novel, a fact that seems to have impressed critics. Personally, I was at first taken by the descriptions of Rao’s childhood in India, but tired of it once it became involved in family disagreements. I wasn’t very interested at all in Rao’s life as a student and then entrepreneur in America. I was most interested in Athena’s story and her attempts for her life to mean something. Although Vara handles everything very well, I think there is too much going on here for me.

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WWW Wednesday

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You might be wondering why I’m not posting as often as I used to. Well, the answer is that I got caught up with myself in reading, and instead of being several months of books ahead of myself, I’m only about two weeks ahead, so I decided first not to post on Wednesdays except for special reasons, and then a little later, when the situation did not improve, not to post on Fridays. This situation will be fluid, like it has been since I started blogging. If I get way ahead of myself again, I’ll start posting on Fridays. I like being ahead on my reading, because it allows me to choose more carefully the order of books instead of having to review the next book I read.

Anyway, the Chocolate Lady is always doing bloggy type activities where she joins with other folks, and I don’t usually have time. Plus some of them take some planning. But she is occasionally doing WWW Wednesdays (I don’t know what WWW stands for, and she doesn’t explain), which seemed like an easy thing to take part in. If you want to take part, you just have to answer three questions: What are you reading now? What did you recently finish reading? What will you read next?

What am I reading now?

Right now, I am reading a Dean Street book from their Furrowed Middlebrow imprint, Family Ties by Celia Buckmaster. This gives me an opportunity to lobby for Dean Street publishing more Furrowed Middlebrow books. I know they are tied up in estate issues now, but I hope they will reconsider closing down this imprint. If you want them to continue with Furrowed Middlebrow maybe send them a message on their Facebook page, and please comment here! I am only a few pages into this book, and so far it seems to be about eccentric family life in a village. I always enjoy relaxing with a Furrowed Middlebrow book!

Technically speaking, I am also reading Ferdydurke by Witold Gombrowicz. I chose this book to read for the 1937 Club (coming up next week), but so far I just haven’t been able to hack it. It is supposed to be his masterpiece, and it is about a grown man who gets turned into an 11-year-old boy and put back in school. If that sounds juvenile, it is. I got into it about 70 pages and put it aside. Every time I finish another book, I look at it and say “Nah!”

What did I recently finish reading?

The last book I read was The Immortal King Rao by Vauhini Vara, which is part of my Pulitzer Prize project. One of my habits, maybe it’s a foible, is just to check the library periodically to see which books in my projects are available and get them without reading what they’re about. And in fact, I do the same thing with all the books in my stack. At some point I have usually read what they are about but I don’t do that right before I begin reading them. Well, for this book, the timing was unfortunate, because it is a dystopian novel, and not only do I not usually read dystopian novels, but it seems like recently everyone is writing them. And, in fact, I had read three just in the past few weeks. Now, don’t get me wrong, one of them was wonderful, as you’ll find out when I review it. I didn’t have as positive of an experience with The Immortal King Rao, although I didn’t dislike it. You’ll have to wait for my review, which should be coming up in a couple of weeks.

What will I read next?

When I troll the libraries for my project books (online, of course), I usually try to get one for each of my projects, although often I cannot find the Walter Scott Historical Fiction project books there and have to buy them. (That means they go into my pile and I get to them a lot later. I should do something about that. The Bee Sting has been there for quite a while.) Last time I trolled, I ended up with The Immortal King Rao for my Pulitzer project and Real Life by Brandon Taylor and Prophet Song by Paul Lynch for my Booker Prize project. (I am still waiting for After Sappho by Shelby Wynn Schwartz to arrive for my James Tait Black Project.) I have read Prophet Song, so after I finish my current book, I’ll read Real Life. As usual, I have no idea what it is about. I hope it’s not dystopian.

Have you read any of these books? What did you think?

Review 2319: Trust

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Trust is like a stack of nesting dolls. It is the story of a fabulously wealthy couple set in New York of the 1920s and 30s. First, it is written in the form of a novel published in 1937, Bonds by Harold Vanner, in which the couple are called Benjamin and Helen Rask. While the husband makes money, the wife is a patroness of the arts who dies in an insane asylum.

The second section of the novel consists of chapters and notes from Andrew Bevel’s unfinished “autobiography.” Bevel is the actual tycoon depicted in Bonds, and his biography reveals a controlling and almost megalomaniacal personality. In this section, the biggest difference is how unequal the couple are, with Mildred Bevel being treated as the little wife who has the harmless hobby of loving music and encouraging a few musicians. There are also sections about what a financial genius the husband is. This section was so overbearing that I could barely stand to read it.

Patience is needed for this novel, because more is revealed at each level. In the third section, we meet Ida Partenza, the ghost writer of Bevel’s biography. Her narrative is split between two time frames, the “present” of 1985 in which she is an older lady who has just heard of Mildred Bevel’s papers being available for study at Bevel House, and her memoir of working with Bevel on his book as a 20-year-old woman just after World War II. Bevel’s main concern seems to be to refute the novel Bonds, especially in regard to how it depicts his wife, and it’s true that it depicts her as dying in an insane asylum instead of a health clinic. However, to Ida’s confusion, instead of sharing with her memories of his wife or letting her interview Mildred’s friends, he seems to want her to invent things. It is in this section that the novel begins to be really interesting. Who was Mildred Bevel? What are Bevel’s secrets?

The final section is Mildred Bevel’s journal, brief passages written when she was dying in Switzerland.

This is the kind of novel that unfolds more in each succeeding section. It is about money, power, and control but especially about control. It is like glimpsing an image in a sliver of mirror that reflects differently as it moves.

I read this novel for my Pulitzer project. Trust was a cowinner for 2023 with Demon Copperhead.

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Winding Up a Project and Starting a New One

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On thinking about the books I have read the last few years, I realized that I was reading far more British than American books, not that there is anything wrong with that, but it seemed odd because I am American. One of the reasons, I think, is that most of my projects are based in Great Britain even if the prizes accept entries from other countries. So, I decided to wrap up one of those projects and start a new one for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Even though I have enjoyed reading many of the shortlisted books for the James Tait Black Fiction Prize, I decided to wrap up that one, as the Booker Prize is a little more mainstream. I will continue to read the shortlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, because I enjoy historical fiction so much.

One advantage of picking the Pulitzer Prize is that I have already read several of the finalists and winners, and several of them were favorites. I will continue to read the books in the James Tait Black list until I have finished all of them from 2010-2023. I have nine more to read and eleven to review.

Those who have been following my Angela Thirkell project might remember that we only have three more books to go before we finish the entire Barsetshire series (29 books). One of those reviews will appear tomorrow. So, that’s another project that’s winding up.