Lost in a Sea of Book Awards: Man Booker, Pulitzer, Whiting

Book awards season began in earnest this week for fiction -- the Man Booker Prize and the American Book Award on Tuesday, the Nobel on Thursday -- and once again, we are completely lost.

The American Book Awards are different from the National Book Awards . . . how? Is it like a National League/American League type of thing? Which is the one that Philip Roth is always nominated for? Don't tell anyone, but before this week we did not know that the Booker was named for a corporation. We assumed it was a dude, or an affectionate British-y version of "bookworm."

Clearly, assistance is needed. Bring in the lesson plan. Bring in the Tweed Brigade.

Let's start with the Nobel, the wizened Swedish aristocrat of the bunch, the first modern literary prize, founded in 1901 and now coming with buckets of cash that writers either keep or reinvest in other writers, in the manner of William Faulkner, for whom the PEN/Faulkner Award would later be named.

"The Nobel itself is very weird," says Alan Cheuse, a writer and George Mason professor who has served on juries for the National Book Awards and the PEN/Faulkner. "It's gone to some wonderful writers and some complete nonentities, for who knows what office or geographical politics. It's gone to some Swedish writers that you ain't never heard of." (Eyvind Johnson? Carl Gustaf Verner von Heidenstam?)

Americans have always whined that the Nobel, despite awards to Third World writers, is too Eurocentric. Then, last year, a Nobel judge said publicly that Europe was "the center of the literary world" and Americans went Ah-HA! and felt justified.

Nonetheless, the Nobels are astronomically prestigious. "If you say to a writer, 'What do you want to win,' they wouldn't say the Nobel because that would suggest they're kind of insane," Cheuse says. "It's like saying they want to be immortal."

Much better to shoot for a Pulitzer. Coveting the Pulitzer is like saying you only need to live to be 112.

The Pulitzers go to epic, fat, sweeping American novels, like "A Thousand Acres" and "Empire Falls." American experiences. American themes. Judges are always describing the finalists as "haunting" or emotionally walloping, or downright painful. (That's the one Philip Roth is always up for; he won in 1998. He's also won three PEN/Faulkners. And two National Book Awards.)

The Pulitzer is particularly good for book recognition in the United States, because everyone here knows the name. It's announced in the spring, which means it can catch the deserving books that have slipped through fall awards' fingers.

"I do think there's a feeling of compensation," says Carla Cohen, co-owner of Washington's Politics and Prose. "If something doesn't win a National Book Award, there's a feeling that it deserves a Pulitzer. . . . I remember one of the judges for the Pulitzer told me he was outraged that Toni Morrison didn't win a National Book Award [for 'Beloved'] and he was going to make sure she won a Pulitzer." She did.

None of it can be scientific. There's always vote-swapping and bargaining and some judge stubbornly sticking with some nomination no one else likes because it reminds him of his boyhood at Exeter. "We got well over 500 applicants" for the National Book Awards, says novelist Marianne Wiggins, who has served as an NBA judge and was herself a Pulitzer finalist, and Salman Rushdie's second wife. "There's no triage. You basically get down to 20 or 30 and then the arguments start." Sometimes, "you're not going to get a signature of excellence. You're going to get a signature of democratic decision."