National Book Awards Honor 'Echo Maker,' 'Worst Hard Time'

There were some mutterings at the news that Judith Regan of ReganBooks had signed O.J. Simpson to a contract for a book whose working title is "If I Did It." The essence of those mutterings, as one publisher put it, were: "How low can you go?"

Association of American Publishers President Patricia Schroeder, asked how she felt about it, used her fingers to force her mouth into a grin and said: "Delighted." Then she expressed concern that the Simpson news "takes some of the glitter out of this."

But once the award proceedings got rolling, not a word more was heard about O.J.

Master of ceremonies Fran Lebowitz eschewed Simpson jokes, though she got one off at the expense of the Bush administration's Iraq Study Group that drew a roar of approval. If you were in the third grade and had a math test coming up, she asked, when do you think the best time would be to study -- "before the test? Or three years after the test?"

Adrienne Rich, awarded this year's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, drew a standing ovation as she wheeled her walker toward the lectern. Poetry, she said, has sometimes been accused of aestheticizing human suffering. And yet "if poetry had gone mute after every genocide in history," there wouldn't be much poetry in the world.

It is the poet's job, she added, to give the lie to "that brute dictum: 'There is no alternative.' "

When New Yorker Editor David Remnick took the stage to introduce an award for "outstanding service to the American literary community," he drew a laugh by quoting some advice a Washington Post colleague once gave him when he was whining about changes made in his copy. "Son, stop complaining," sportswriter Shirley Povich said, and remember, "an editor is only a mouse training to be a rat."

Then Remnick called this year's Literarian Award winners, Robert Silvers and the late Barbara Epstein -- founding editors of the New York Review of Books -- the greatest exceptions ever to this rule.