Magical Night: Joan Didion Wins National Book Award

"More with less," said Brendan Galvin, a finalist for "Habitat: New and Selected Poems, 1965-2005." He gestured as if outlining the shape of a poem. "The way a sentence unfolds down a page -- it's one of the great mysteries of civilization."

Didion arrived with her Knopf editor, Shelley Wanger, just as the guests were being urged to take their seats for dinner. Asked about her chances, she raised both arms in the air and said, "You never know." Photographers converged. A minute later, nonfiction finalist Hochschild walked by and, in response to the same question, made exactly the same arms-in-the-air gesture.

Then he said: "I think I'd put my money on Joan Didion."

The evening's master of ceremonies, Garrison Keillor, got a laugh by describing the experience, presumably shared by many, of leafing through a Harry Potter book at one's local Barnes & Noble and thinking: "I could have written that. Why didn't I?" He got another laugh, perhaps more nervous, when he suggested that the folks giving the night's awards had been "chastened" by criticism of last year's fiction finalists, who were, to put it mildly, not household names.

But Keillor also poked fun at the Quill awards, a newly launched National Book Awards competitor seemingly designed to ensure that the most marketable books get to slap prize labels on their covers.

"Not a great name for a prize," Keillor said. "Makes you think of porcupines."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet and founder of San Francisco's celebrated City Lights Bookstore, accepted the National Book Foundation's first Literarian award, for outstanding service to the American literary community. Eighty-two-year-old literary lion Norman Mailer accepted a lifetime achievement medal from the foundation.

Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison introduced Mailer, praising him despite what she called his "almost cosmic obtuseness regarding women." When he recovered from this, Mailer deplored the fact that the serious novel seems to be "an endangered species."

"Whose sense of compassion has not been deepened by living in Tolstoy's novels?" he asked.