Magical Night: Joan Didion Wins National Book Award

NEW YORK, Nov. 16 -- Joan Didion won the National Book Award for nonfiction Wednesday night for "The Year of Magical Thinking." Didion's book is an intensely felt re-creation of the disorienting mental and emotional turmoil she underwent after her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly and their only daughter fell deathly ill.

"There's hardly anything I can say about this but thank you," the writer said from the stage in the Marriott Marquis ballroom as the crowd rose to applaud her. Didion also thanked those at her publisher, Knopf, "who accepted my idea that I could sit down and write a book that was not anything but personal -- and that it would work."

The strong nonfiction field also included Leo Damrosch's biography "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius"; Adam Hochschild's "Bury the Chains," about the drive to abolish slavery in the British Empire; Alan Burdick's "Out of Eden," an inquiry into the new science that studies how the spread of non-native species affects ecosystems; and Jim Dwyer and Kevin Flynn's intensely reported 9/11 narrative, "102 Minutes."

William T. Vollmann was a surprise winner in the fiction category for his novel of Nazi Germany and the former Soviet Union, "Europe Central." Pre-ceremony speculation had focused on E.L. Doctorow's Civil War novel, "The March."

"I thought I would lose, so I didn't prepare a speech," said Vollmann, an intense and prolific novelist and journalist who has never been able to shake a reputation as a cult writer.

He went on to describe the genesis of his 800-page book, which a Washington Post reviewer described as "a grimly magnificent dramatization of the impossible moral choices forced on individuals by those totalitarian regimes."

In elementary school, Vollmann had seen "a film of burned corpses being pulled out of ovens." Later, understanding that he himself was partly German, he began "to read myself into this horrible event," questioning how anyone could have done it, and whether he could have done it himself.

The other fiction finalists were Mary Gaitskill for "Veronica," Rene Steinke for "Holy Skirts" and Christopher Sorrentino for "Trance."

The award for young people's literature went to "The Penderwicks," a lighthearted debut novel by Jeanne Birdsall. In her acceptance speech, Birdsall quoted a young fan who said: "This book is about being a good listener even if you're a grown-up."

The poetry award went to W.S. Merwin for "Migration: New and Selected Poems." This year's National Book Award nomination was the eighth for Merwin, who could not attend the ceremony.

At a cocktail reception earlier in the evening, the publishing clan gathered and chatted. There was the usual concern about the place of books in American culture, the usual complaint about shorter and shorter attention spans.

A clutch of poets were communing by themselves along one wall. What makes poetry different, they were asked?