Is an “award-winning book” necessarily the best book club book? Our three-part series on book prizes for book clubs helps you decode what prizes mean.
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Why prizes matter:
There’s nothing more intimidating than making an unaided choice. Think of how many systems have appeared and spread like lightning to help you figure out what you want. Netflix tells you what to watch with an algorithm. Five star reviews can point you where to have dinner in a strange city as easily as they can tell you what paper towels to buy on Amazon.
There’s one place, however, where ranking choices remains more difficult than almost anywhere else: books.
Books, compared to movies and TV, are notoriously hard for algorithms to get a hold of: too complex for code to say, “if you liked this, then you’ll like that.” Sites like Goodreads and Storygraph claim to offer “surprisingly insightful recommendations,” but the phrasing of “surprisingly insightful” in Goodreads’ marketing copy says it all. “You’ll be amazed! The robots might actually sort of understand your taste!”
That’s why, in publishing more than any other industry, prizes still sell. (Although not all best-sellers win them).
What is a book prize?
Prizes are judgments of quality by experts. But each prize has an origin story. Specific people founded it to reward certain types of writing. Specific donors endowed it. A key thing to realize is that no prize is just about quality. It's not just a five-star review. It represents the interests of a certain group of people.
So, reader, let’s fill you in on some background. You have to know what the judges like to see if a book is the best book club book. That’s why we’re writing this insider’s perspective on literary prizes, driven by research into who and what gets awards. The first up, below, is the National Book Award for fiction.
What actually is the National Book Award? Part One: Origins
The first obvious thing to say about the National Book Award is that it is national. You’re welcome. It exists to celebrate an artist fit to represent all the literature in America published that year in a particular category. There are actually five National Book Awards per year: in fiction, non-fiction, poetry, translated literature, and children’s literature.
It began its life, like all good things do, as a reflex reaction to a horrendous national embarrassment. This occurred when William Faulkner received a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 without ever winning any major American awards. We looked like idiots.
Three years later, the Pulitzer was given to Hemingway for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 precisely because they were afraid he was going to win a Nobel for it in 1954. He did.
The National Book Award was created a few months after Faulkner walked the stage. Keep that in mind: unlike the Nobel, which is international in scope, the NBA is an attempt to define what’s important in American art. It favors novels that deal with widespread contemporary issues, with large-scale American problems, rather than those isolated in smaller-scale orders like the family, or in a character’s mind.
What actually is the National Book Award? Part Two: Scandals!
Like many of us, the National Book Award started noticing some aches and pains in its thirties. First, it tried an awkward rebrand as the American Book Awards from 1980 to 1986, with a televised awards ceremony in the style of the Oscars (!) and awards for things like Best Dust Jacket. On TV.
Surprisingly, that idea failed. The event planners neglected to notice that many of the people involved in book making are, in fact, not as attractive or personable as movie stars. Moreover, the show was dismissed as a cheap bid to call as many books “award-winning” as possible to boost sales. Forty previous winners ended up leading a boycott.
Then, in 1987, the year after they thought they'd gotten things back to normal and reverted back to the National Book Award name that stands today, a jury decided to honor the most universally celebrated American novel of our time with the fiction prize--Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann.
I’m sorry, I’m getting my cue cards mixed up. I meant Beloved by Toni Morrison. But they really did give the prize to Heinemann. Paco’s Story was out of print by 2005, by the way.
How to understand what a National Book Award means: Conclusions
The Morrison scandal wasn’t simply about racism. Gloria Naylor, one of the three 1987 judges and a 1983 recipient, was an African American novelist and intellectual. No one has to like Beloved.
James F. English, a historian of literary prizes (and one of my former professors) observes that the events that came after she lost--forty-eight of the most prestigious African American critics in America wrote an open letter questioning the decision, and Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988--show the stakes of jurying a prize.
In 1988, by English’s account, the NBAs looked inept on two counts: being “unable to distinguish a truly great work of literature from a run-of-the-mill war novel,” and seeming less “culturally and politically progressive” than its chief American prize rival. Since then, I’d say, they’ve tried to make up for both.
Their judging pool is still much smaller than that of the Pulitzer at five people, and its academic and artistic background lend it to more idiosyncratic, “literary” choices. The Pulitzer skews more towards popular and accessible titles, since their judges only make recommendations to a pool of twenty-four journalists with the ultimate say.
What this means: a typical National Book Award finalist or recipient is an experimental, wide-ranging book writing about something distinctly American, engaged with the larger issues of its time and likely to touch on social justice or human rights--but not necessarily in an obvious way.
It’s time to meet our contestants.
The 2021 National Book Award Finalists, Ranked
Let’s meet our contestants. If we can pick a likely winner, based on those criteria above, then we can all go bet the farm on it at a casino on the outskirts of town. This is not gambling advice.
But just to repeat: the choices below are ranked not in terms of quality, but in terms of how likely they are to win the fiction award.
Let's begin.
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Fifth Place: Cloud Cuckoo Land, by Anthony Doerr (New York: Scribner, 2021)
“‘Whatever happens, we’ll keep the story going, right?’”
Albert Einstein said that imagination was more important than knowledge. Einstein fled the Nazi regime Doerr made the subject of his 2014 smash hit All the Light We Cannot See. “The light you cannot see” partially refers to radio waves. Now Doerr is back writing about the fragility of the imagination, and how it depends on other technologies--clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, public libraries, and quantum computers--to keep its words alive.
A handful of characters leave messages for one another from lifetimes flung apart over the course of human history. They translate and retranslate a fictitional Ancient Greek text about a peasant who builds a utopian city in the sky. Each arduously learns to read Greek, often with the help of patient teachers who seem like the real heroes of the book. Literacy itself, against all barbarism, might be one too.
NBA Potential: 3 out of 10. Doerr has already won a lot, including a Pulitzer for All the Light. That book was a finalist for the 2014 NBA, but lost, rightfully in my opinion, to Phil Klay’s Redeployment.
Additionally, this book charts an extremely universal course, from the Byzantine empire to Ottoman Bulgaria to Idaho to outer space. Its topic isn’t the United States as much as an idea of world literature: of people writing, no matter what, across space and time and history, and the urgent need to preserve their work.
It’s the kind of book more apt to get Doerr a Nobel in a few decades, if he continues to improve.
Fourth Place: Zorrie, by Laird Hunt (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021)
“The fragile film of the present must be buttressed against the past.”
A quote from a literature-loving character in Zorrie who inscribes it on the flyleaf of his volume of Montaigne: there is nothing truer to me than the above. Memories have a tendency to overwhelm our present. Another literary hero of Zorrie, the Ancient Greek poet Aeschylus, wrote that "there is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief." The passage between the two is the beauty, and sorrow, of the titular character Zorrie’s life.
She is born shortly before the Great Depression in Indiana. She travels to find work, and soon becomes a farmer in the heartland, strong and mostly self-sufficient. This is a still and quiet book that takes on the character of the nearly pre-industrial rural landscapes it’s set in. It writes the ache of the passage of time without ever lapsing into sentimentality. It’s extraordinarily well-made.
NBA potential: I’d say 4.5 out of 10. The relevance of Zorrie’s life to the greater social and historical currents around her is never truly explored. Far more present are the natural rhythms of planting the farm and creaturely birth and death, which don’t belong to any one particular country or social class.
Third Place: Hell of a Book, by Jason Mott (New York: Dutton, 2021)
“When you see yourself in the mirror, do you like what you see?”
Authors like Oscar Wilde and Jason Mott remind you of something: being funny is either the easiest thing you can do when you write, or absolutely the most awe-inspiring. Why? Because humor at its worst is pure cliché (“it’s funny because it’s true!”) and at its best it is the rejection of every boring, stupid, stuffy and outdated thing that people believe.
That’s Hell of a Book. I am eager to communicate how creative and intelligent this book is. It takes risks: it merges characters and leaves timeframes undefined in a way that may confuse some readers (including me at first) but allows for a powerful, critical message about repetition. About hearing the same news story over and over again in America about the same type of unarmed person dying.
NBA potential: 7 out of 10. In my opinion, it’s not necessary to say something new about racism to protest it. That would be perverse: as if oppressed people needed to pique an audience into wanting to intervene. Yet how amazing it is when something does. There are elements of Hell of a Book that remind me of Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight and of one of the very first National Book Award winners in fiction, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
The only wild card here is the humor. Will judges see some of the book’s less topical throw-away jokes and occasional comedic misfires as lacking in gravitas?
Second Place: Matrix, by Lauren Groff (New York: Riverhead Books, 2021)
"As she moves through the days she imagines her lines of the night."
The award is either this one or the next one on the list, Robert Jones, Jr.’s The Prophets, to win. Matrix, like The Prophets, is a time machine to the past. But it is also a cognitive portal into the mind of an artist, the twelfth-century love poet Marie de France. Love affairs, like poets, endow ordinary objects, small details of places, with immense private significance.
Matrix paints so vividly that you can watch this happen in a world that doesn’t even exist. Banished by the queen she loves, Marie is sent to become a nun. Love is exaltation of the body. Love is humbling of the spirit.
NBA Potential: 8 out of 10. Beyond its obvious merits, it really could be Matrix’s time. Here's why:
Medievalism, meaning an interest in medieval-era or medieval-era-like (Game of Thrones) cultures, is running rampant in 2021. So are other books like Groff’s by Ottesa Mossfegh, Sally Rooney, and others, about autonomous, observant women determining their lives and sexualities. Matrix already has a cult following on several high-profile literary Instagram accounts run/frequented by women like that.
Gender disparity, in fact, has become an issue in NBA selections, as this Tweet by Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal shows. Since 1950, twenty women and fifty men have won the NBA award for fiction. Groff is the only female-identifying person among this year’s finalists.
This is not to say, stupidly, that Groff might win “because she’s a woman.” One of the points of Matrix is that gender and competence are two independent variables. 2021 just might be the year certain prize biases undergo one more stage of demolition.
First Place: The Prophets, Robert Jones, Jr. (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021)
“You do not yet know us. You do not yet understand.”
We come to the justified favorite. Jones is inventive, crafting, in both the large-scale architecture of The Prophets and in the arrangement of every sentence. Seen from the top down, his novel rewrites the books of the Bible in the life of slaves on a plantation in Mississippi. From the bottom up, it is a horrifyingly potent narration of different characters’ struggle to remain happy, if not hopeful.
Jones’ style is layered and gifted, and he’s engaging with an incredible amount of American history. Quite daringly, he attacks the messianic narratives that so often guided black experience for choosing certain souls as more worthy of uplift than others. LGBTQ+ characters in The Prophets are an easy way to see this. It is a challenging portrait of what emancipation actually means.
NBA Potential: 9 out of 10. An award just makes too much sense. Reviewers have already linked The Prophets to work by Toni Morrison and, most often, James Baldwin. (Robert Jones Jr. runs the anti-racist community “Son of Baldwin”). Marlon James, a fairly acclaimed novelist himself, even proclaims on the cover that "The Prophets shakes right down to the bone what the American novel is, should do, and can be."
Robert Jones Jr. is clearly poised to become an important voice, and the National Book Foundation would like to recognize that (and be seen as recognizing that) as early as possible. However, the shaking in this book could just be too hard for a lot of people.
If you enjoyed this article, create a Bookclubz account to stick around for more like it! And make sure you're subscribed to our blog. Also, if you want to know everything possible about how prizes function in society, check out James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Value, an invaluable source for this article. (Any errors are mine, not his.)