Steve Martin riffed, Oprah Winfrey reminisced and voters surprised in a National Book Awards ceremony as notable for its unexpectedness as its shimmer.
The biggest prize of the evening came packaged with the greatest surprise. Ha Jin captured the fiction award for Waiting (Pantheon), his novel about the attempts of a married army doctor in China to divorce his wife and settle with his mistress. The award upstaged Knopf's Plainsong by Kent Haruf but still returned Random House to NBA glory.
The Asian theme ran through the non-fiction category as well -- Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of Wold War II by John Dower, about a post-war country's attempt to redefine itself under American occupation, took top honors. The book was published by the New Press, with some co-publishing help from the house's distributor, W.W. Norton.
Poetry invalidated our own experts' predictions, as Norton's Ai took home the crystal ball for Vice, and young people's literature saw Kimberly Willis Holt win for When Zachary Beaver came to Town (Holt).
Beneath the glitz and twists, the 50th annual National Book Awards, in its own way, also addressed serious issues. Last year, John Updike took a few jabs at an absent Tom Wolfe. This time, with Oprah receiving the gold medal won by Updike in 1998 (the one award, incidentally, that we've called right two years running), the sparring moved from a literary realm to the industry itself. Emcee Martin set the tone when he quipped that the National Book Awards was a significant publishing event, 'second only to the Barnes & Noble author lunch kiss-up.' (We craned our necks but couldn't see Steve Riggio's reaction.) Oprah raised eyebrows when she (inadvertently?) mentioned that she had just purchased $688 worth of books at B&N, a particularly unexpected statement given her recent Amazon plugs.
But the slyest bit of controversy came when Neil Gabler (author of Life: The Movie) introduced the non-fiction awards. He concluded by saying he had come 'not to bury publishing, but to praise it,' but only after he decried booksellers 'obsessed with the hot thing,' critics more concerned with 'dispensing opinion' than good judgement, and publishers who were 'not marketing good books' but instead were publishing books 'that made for good marketing.' Gabler's comments seemed to go unnoticed by the many who were waiting to hear the contents of the non-fiction envelope.
And, finally, it was hard not to squirm at the unintentional but glaring omission of MacMurray & Beck, the unassuming house that took its place beside the Knopf's and Norton's, from the rundown of fiction nominees. (A correction after the presentation only seemed to draw more attention to the blunder.) Many of the publisher's employees had turned out to celebrate Hummingbird House, MacMurray & Beck's first-ever title to make the NBA shortlist.
For most of the evening, the tone oscillated between earnest declarations about the value of books and good-natured jocularity. A short film about the work of the National Book Foundation gave way to Martin's one-liners.
Oprah herself veered between her trademark words of inspiration and comic remembrances of her book club's genesis. She said she was surprised to find Wally Lamb in the middle of a few wash cycles when she first called him ('Authors do laundry!?!'); recalled a comment made to Toni Morrison complaining that some of Morrison's lines required several reads (to which Morrison responded, 'That, my dear, is called reading'); and cited a book-club reader who waits for the talk-show host's latest recommendation as an excuse to buy biographies from the likes of Aretha Franklin. For one night, literature and the business of books co-existed -- and, at least for most houses, got some respect.
