BOB GARFIELD: For a literary fiction industry in free fall, one reliable source of good news is always the announcement of the Pulitzer Prize. That’s because the Pulitzer has developed a reputation for finding a balance between the critics’ darlings and popular fiction. So this year, it came as a shock when the Pulitzer winners were announced and the prize for fiction went to – nobody. After all, it’s been 35 years since the last time the Pulitzer Board declined to award the fiction prize.
Author, Salon senior writer, and past Pulitzer judge Laura Miller says that it’s a shame because no other award cuts through a balkanized literary world that can find precious little to agree on.
LAURA MILLER: That’s a great thing to have, a yearly reminder that literary fiction is not this completely impenetrable art form.
BOB GARFIELD: Tell me, please, about the process.
LAURA MILLER: Well, there’s a jury of three people. Usually it’s a critic, an academic and a novelist of some kind, and they read the vast majority of the submissions. I mean, anybody can send in their book with, I think, it’s 50 dollars, and really, anybody does. And then they come up with three finalists.
Ultimately, the board decides who the final winner is.
BOB GARFIELD: They do have that power to discard the recommendations of the poor schnooks who each read 300 books [LAUGHS] -
LAURA MILLER: [LAUGHS] They do.
BOB GARFIELD: - to choose one of their own liking, but they clearly didn’t avail themselves of that option this time.
LAURA MILLER: No, and they haven’t for a while, though they did do it three times in the seventies, which will give you a sense of how contested the idea of literary quality was in that particular era.
BOB GARFIELD: So, maybe the explanation really is just in the procedures of the Pulitzer Board, but is it possible that there’s a larger explanation? You mentioned balkanization.
LAURA MILLER: Yes. The reason why I use the term “balkanization” is because that is fragmentation, plus acrimony. And so, even when you have a book, as in the year before last, with Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom,” that a lot of people are saying, okay, this is the big unifying novel, there is actually a substantial fragment of the literary fiction-reading world that automatically hates any novel [LAUGHS] that’s declared “the great American novel.”
BOB GARFIELD: [LAUGHS] Does literary fiction as a genre recover from this? Is it getting close to being - irrelevant?
LAURA MILLER: [LAUGHS] We are coming out of a mid-20th century period, where every educated person felt that it was expected of them to at least have read some of the most celebrated literary novels of the year. And people just don’t feel that way anymore, and we can see this award as symptomatic of that.
BOB GARFIELD: Laura, thanks so much.
LAURA MILLER: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD: Laura Miller is a senior writer at Salon.
[PAPA RAZZI AND THE PHOTOGS SINGING]:
Oh Jane Austen, I like your books.
It is so fun to read them.
They teach me all about what it was like
For a woman in 18th century England.
