As had originally been anticipated before all the fuss over the Oprah rejection, Jonathan Franzen won the Fiction award for The Corrections at the National Book Awards ceremony, held at New York's Marriott Marquis Hotel on November 14. Simon & Schuster was the other big winner—two of its authors came away with NBA prizes and S&S holds audio rights to The Corrections.
Franzen's prize was the climax to an evening that also saw the award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters go to veteran playwright Arthur Miller, who offered a long speech on the nature of dramaturgy and its significance on the American cultural scene, enlivened by a quotation from comic Fred Allen on the nature of creativity. Allen is supposed to have said to a group of TV executives criticizing his script: "Where were you when the pages were blank?"
Other attempts at lightness in an evening that was predominantly low-key came from master of ceremonies Steve Martin, who couldn't resist a few jokes at Franzen's expense. The novelist had been seen, he said, trying to put an Oprah sticker on a copy of NBA rival Jennifer Egan's Look at Me in a Borders store, and would soon be appearing on Martha Stewart's Good Morning, Wisconsin.
The occasion seemed significantly less well-attended than usual, with fewer tables on the floor and therefore greater ease of access for the inevitable table-hopping; this was probably a reflection of a wish to cut expenses at a time of industry anxiety.
According to judges' chair Stanley Plumly, the decision in Poetry had been a difficult one, but poetry is particularly important at a time like the present. The winner was veteran Alan Dugan for Poems Seven: New and Complete Poetry (Seven Stories Press). The elderly Dugan remained at his table and received the award there from NBA executive director Neal Baldwin.
The winner in Young People's Literature, Virginia Euwer Wolff for True Believer (Atheneum) was one of several speakers who referred to the events of September 11, saying she had been wondering since then whether she would be able to write again. Then she considered how the gravity of the times had brought out in us "love, honor, pity, pride and compassion—and that's what Faulkner tells us we should be writing about."
The winner in Nonfiction was Andrew Solomon for The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Scribner), and he also had words about the current crisis. "The mental health of the entire nation is being challenged," he said, adding that his experiences with depression had shown him ways of recovery in "forms of love."
Jonathan Franzen's award for Fiction really came as no surprise once it became clear, in talking beforehand to one of the close-mouthed judges, that their decision had not been influenced by the controversy over the novelist's sometimes awkward public behavior concerning his book's success. Franzen himself confessed he was nervous, and that it had been "a bad couple of months"—at which the audience laughed, thinking he was referring to his own problems rather than the nation's, until he made it clear he was taking the wider view. He still could not resist one swipe, however, expressing gratification "that I have provided some blood sport entertainment for the literary community in a time of trouble." His thanks included his longtime agent, Susan Golomb; his editor, Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux—and also Oprah Winfrey for her "enthusiasm and advocacy."
It was a conciliatory ending to a somewhat poignant evening.
