So, the National Book Awards for 2007 have finally been decided on, giving us now very little time to scour through reviews of the winners in order to pretend as though we’ve read them (one has to have some conversational gambit, besides the price of Manhattan real estate and whether to donate to Clinton or Obama, to fall back on at all those fabulous cocktail soirees cluttering up the evening calendar, doesn’t one?). There are four winners — fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and kids’ stuff — and I can only honestly speak to two of them.
The winner for fiction was Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke, which I considered recently in a review elsewhere in the PopMatters voluminous book reviews section. According to myself, “This is a novel drunk on the power of language, which is a critic’s way of saying that it’s self-indulgent, madly so.” It’s also a critic’s way of having it both ways. For a real laceration of the book’s sloppy pretensions, read B.R. Myers’ contrarian review in the new Atlantic; he’s not entirely right but when he says about Johnson that “He is often called “a writer’s writer,” with the customary implication that this is far better than being a reader’s writer”, he’s far from wrong.
As for non-fiction, Tim Weiner’s massive, horrific CIA history Legacy of Ashes took home the gold, and it damn sure deserves it. I spent far too many words arguing just that in a PopMatters feature here. There were winners for poetry and books for kids, as well, but honestly, who has time for such things?
All of this is a way of skirting the biggest issue which seemed to arise from the festivities the other night, as reported by New York‘s Boris Kachka — in other words, why was that editor supposedly feeling up Christopher Hitchens?