PW: National Book Awards Surprises

It was a night of surprises at the National Book Awards on November 18. Not only did Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain beat Don DeLillo's heavily favored Underworld for the Fiction award, but the occasion, in a new and surprisingly workable venue, brought a record turnout of nearly 800 people-and a mention from the podium of two authors who had not even been nominated.

The black-tie affair, the 48th since the NBA's launching in 1950, took place at New York's Marriott Marquis in Times Square, a location that produced some initial grumbling but worked out well in terms of a spacious and well-ventilated ballroom for the awards ceremony, and a more edible than usual meal.

Deborah Wiley, chairman of the National Book Foundation, said the event was the best attended in NBA history, and executive director Neil Baldwin said it had raised nearly $425,000 toward the work of the foundation, which sponsors readings and tours by the winning authors.

Playwright Wendy Wasserstein was a smart, wisecracking mistress of ceremonies, who promised to move the program along "as fast as one of those two-in-a-row publishing lunches," and described her role as "the Billy Crystal of the world of letters." Attempting an Oscar analogy, she spoke of packs of cameramen pursuing the judges, and "an Irving Thalberg award" for not-nominated novelists Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth.

Katherine Paterson, chair of the Young People's Literature judges, said there was too much of a tendency in the industry not to take writing for children seriously, and she was grateful that the NBF did so. The award went to Han Nolan, who was also nominated last year, for Dancing on the Edge, a story about a psychiatrist and a mentally troubled young girl. Nolan, in the first of a series of notably brief acceptances (shorter even than Oscar speeches), said she "shared the honor" with her agent and Harcourt Brace editor, as well as her "critique groups" at home in Alabama and in Atlanta.

P try judges chair Michael Harper, a formidable presence, turned the normally quiet P try award into quite an event with his citation and speech, in which he paid tribute to two recently deceased p ts, James Laughlin and William Matthews, and, in witty praise of both critics and p ts, quoted Dorothy Parker: "I'll never see-and don't I know 'em!-/ A critic lovely as a p m."

The P try winner was William Meredith, one of the older generation of American p ts still active (he was a contemporary of John Berryman and Robert Lowell), for his Efforts at Speech: New &Selected P ms (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern Univ. Press). The title turned out to be apt, for Meredith himself had some difficulty in speaking, the result of a stroke. He told the audience that he was "better now," and movingly read one of his own brief p ms. He admitted to reporters later he had been "utterly surprised" to win, and that though his health had much improved, he still was unable to "visualize" new p ms.

The Nonfiction award, said judges chair Suzannah Lessard, had been particularly difficult to decide because of the vast volume of entries in so many forms and genres; it had even been difficult to choose the final five on the short list, though she mentioned Earl Shorris's New American Blues (Norton) as a book that had been reluctantly left out. The winner was Joseph J. Ellis, for American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (Knopf). Ellis joked that "the politics of the judges is what counts," and said that if an author was looking for words, "Jefferson is not a bad person to fall back on." He paid warm tribute to Ashbel Green, his Knopf editor, and concluded by joking that Mrs. Ellis had told him he had no affinity for his subject. "My dear...," Ellis said, holding up his award.

Fiction chair Nicholas Delbanco declared prose fiction to be "alive and well," adding that there was an extravagance rather than a scarcity of "uncommon work" to consider. The judges had chosen Charles Frazier's first novel Cold Mountain (Atlantic Monthly Press), an announcement that was greeted with some astonishment (the heavy betting had been on DeLillo), though it was clearly a popular choice. (Interestingly, in a poll PW conducted online, Frazier also won, by 77 votes to DeLillo's 68, and Ellis's book tied with Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother in Nonfiction. Neither they nor PW's review staff [News, Nov. 10] called the other winners.)

Frazier, clearly astonished and delighted, paid tribute to the team at Atlantic Monthly, where "everyone loves books, and we all should be happy there is a house like that." He told reporters later he had uncovered the story on which the novel was based-the account of a Civil War survivor's long return home after the war-by researching his family history, and had quit a teaching job to work on the novel full-time. Ironically, one of his idols as a writer is DeLillo; he was "amazed," he said, to be sharing an award shortlist with him.

Don Logan, president and CEO of Time Inc., presented the NBF Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to veteran oral historian Studs Terkel, who had rendered, he said, "an unparalleled account of recent history" in his series of bestselling books for Pantheon and the New Press. Terkel, spry and vigorous at 85, paid tribute to his only publisher, Andre Schiffrin, and quipped: "If you wait long enough, anything is possible." Ever since the first shaman, he said, oral history had been practiced. It was different from history as written by historians because "nobody ever thinks ordinary people think such thoughts." They are the real her s of history, Terkel asserted, and once, under the old WPA, they were encouraged to talk until "a sort of national Alzheimer's disease" set in with the rise of politicians like Richard Nixon. The importance of his books, Terkel said, is "that they are about people who changed their lives. I tape, therefore they are." He was greeted with a prolonged ovation. -john f. baker

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