There were some surprise winners at the annual awards of the National Book Critics Circle, given at New York University's Law School March 12, with favorites in both Criticism and Fiction beaten by comparatively dark horses.
The Fiction award went to Britain's Jim Crace, whose Being Dead (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) was lauded as "a novel of character and ideas blessed with wonderful writing." It trumped Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Random), and Crace, "at home in bed in Birmingham," sent an amusing acceptance, read by his editor, John Glusman. He hoped, he said, that his win would lead to "a fatter advance next time around," and noted that there was nothing critics liked better than "making a winner out of a loser—and short books."
Cynthia Ozick, who won in Criticism for her latest collection of critical essays, Quarrel & Quandary (Knopf), over Jacques Barzun's huge From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (HarperCollins), was visibly startled at the announcement of her victory for what the citation called "her playful and pugnacious prose." It was, she declared, "extraordinarily unexpected," and she was "radically amazed and unintelligible." She added what she called "a terrible triteness: My heart is pounding."
Ted Conover was the winner in General Nonfiction for his Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing (Random), for which he hired on for a year as a prison guard to investigate conditions at the upstate New York jail. His citation praised "an eye-opening piece in the best tradition of immersion journalism," and Conover had praise for his "strong support team": agent Kathy Robbins, editor Dan Menaker and his wife. He added, "I hope more writers will be able to penetrate the inexcusable wall of secrecy that has been allowed to grow around our prison system."
The popular winner in Poetry was Judy Jordan, for her Carolina Ghost Woods (Louisiana State University Press). Praised for the "beautiful and precise language" in which she dealt with her often violent subject matter, Jordan said she hadn't expected to win so had nothing prepared; but as a touching example of the way in which beauty was sought and perceived in unexpected places, she told of her brother, a dump-truck driver, who would go out of his way after a hard day's driving to see his truck reflected in a city skyscraper's glass walls.
In Biography and Autobiography the prize went to Herbert P. Bix for his monumental Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (Houghton Mifflin), lauded for the endless research that had enabled the author to show how the Japanese emperor, far from being the puppet figure indicated in much popular history, had in fact been an active leader, responsible for his country's wartime actions from Pearl Harbor onward. His HM editor, Tim Dugan, received the award in his absence, reading a brief acceptance in which Bix described himself as "deeply honored" and said his work had been driven by resentment at the way "Americans had been lied to about the emperor."
Daniel Mendelsohn of New York magazine received the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing and said that "giving awards to critics is like canonizing the lions along with the Christians." Criticism, contrary to much popular belief, was never personal, he said, and all good criticism was "always constructive."
Editor Steve Wasserman of the Los Angeles Times Book Review cited veteran Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, winner of the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, for his "huge contribution to 20th-century literature in the last 50 years, confounding puritans and philistines of every stripe, and fighting the battles that made publishing more secure and more free." Rosset, who received a standing ovation, said, typically, that he had just returned from a meeting with the Zapatista revolutionaries in Mexico. He paid tribute to the various editors, including Richard Seaver and Fred Jordan, who had worked with him, and to a previous Sandrof winner, James Laughlin of New Directions, then concluded with an anecdote from the '60s when Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary (both of whom he published) had wanted to "turn him on" and had described him as "the Mickey Mantle of the publishing world."
