The 2004 National Book Award Hissy Fit

My book group has decided to read the winner and some of the finalists of last year's National Book Award stink. For those of you who missed the controversy, it goes something like this:

The winner was Lily Tuck for her historical novel The News From Paraguay. The other finalists were Sarah Shun-lien Bynum for her first novel Madeleine Is Sleeping; Christine Schutt for Florida; Joan Silber for Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories; and Kate Walbert for Our Kind: A Novel in Stories.

Do you notice anything unusual about the 5 authors listed above? Ah yes, they are all women and none is well-known.

This fact caused many in the publishing/reviewing/critical world to have a big old hissy fit, especially since a number of well-known white men were not in the running (the name that I heard mentioned most often was Philip Roth whose book The Plot Against America came out last year to good reviews. Personally, I think he's a good writer, but I haven't been able to finish even one of his books. Not my type.)

Granted, I'm a big fan of women writers and a sucker for lyrical prose, so I'm inclined to like the list based on the descriptions of the books. But it was the reactions and things said by major reviewers/publishers/critics that got the feminist in me supremely pissed off and made me want to defend the winner and finalists to the death (despite the fact that I haven't read them yet.) Read the following comments and see what your reaction is:

1). After the finalists were announced, novelist Tom McGuane (whose prose is often described as "muscular" and who hadn't read any of the novels) was quoted in The New Yorker as saying the award was "apparently tanking."

2) In the NYTimes Book Review, Laura Miller wrote that none of the finalists "could be reasonably expected to please more than a small audience." She implied that their low sales was an indication of low quality (when we all know that marketing is a big part of any book's sales). She also suggested the panelists had deliberately thumbed their noses at the "literary establishment" by selecting previously unnoticed books.

3) NYTimes book critic Caryn James said: "It defies logic to think that five such similar books just happen to be the best of the year."

4) Former co-chairman of the National Book Foundation, Herman Gollob, said he had didn't know any of the fiction finalists and wasn't asked to read them. "It's supposed to be an achievement award for the best that's been done, not a feel good award for aspiring writers."

5) The chairman of the fiction panel, Rick Moody, was accused of selecting the 5 authors as revenge for a lousy review of his own work in 2002. Here's what the Christian Science Monitor published:
In 2002, literary pugilist Dale Peck began his most infamous review by claiming, "Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation." The book world gasped and snickered in faux alarm, aroused by the eruption of controversy in the dusty arena of critical debate. But now, as chairman of this year's fiction committee for the National Book Award, Mr. Moody has taken his revenge.

I don't know about you, but reading that kind of crap makes me want to come to the defense of these authors. Not surprisingly, a number of the nominated authors commented on the controversy: Lily Tuck said that the NBA is supposed "to recognize good writing." She added: "The idea that the quality of a book should be judged by sales figures is ridiculous." And here is Christine Schutt in an interview in the NYTimes Magazine with Deborah Solomon:

What is it like to be attacked by your fellow novelists for having written a novel that reportedly sold only 100 copies? Thomas McGuane said publicly that the National Book Awards underwent a ''meltdown'' by selecting finalists as obscure as you.

It surprises me very much. It surprises me that Tom McGuane could damn my book without having read it. And by the way, ''Florida'' has actually sold at least 1,099 copies.

The critic John Leonard suggested that a prize winner should be someone who has put in time and paid his dues.

I am 56. I have taught literature at a girls' school in Manhattan, Nightingale-Bamford, for more than 20 years. My first collection of short stories was titled ''Nightwork'' because I wrote it at night while I was divorced and raising two sons. How else can I pay my dues?

All the finalists in fiction this year are women. Do you think this has anything to do with the response you're getting?

Would they be doing this if we were five unknown men?

What do you think the award should stand for besides, obviously, literary excellence?

I do think you should honor some work that is trying to be a clean, hard object.

That could describe a washing machine.

True, it could. But what I mean is that a piece of writing should be hard and clean in the sense that there is nothing extraneous about it, no feathery adjectives.

I think that what strikes me the most is that concept of "paying one's dues." Why should suffering be a requirement for recognition? And what kind of suffering counts? Does not having given up everything in order to be a writer disqualify someone? This question seems particularly pertinent to me now after reading Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries. She was the mother of 5 children and didn't give up her family, move to a garret and starve. She said of her writing that it was her "knitting" when she was raising her kids. Does that mean that she isn't worthy of recognition because her beautiful prose wasn't excruciating to the author in its creation? (Of course, the Pulitzer Committee answered that in 1995 by giving her the prize for fiction.)

Time to take a deep breath since I am working myself into an equivalent hissy fit.

I noticed that all the 2004 NBA finalists are now out in paperback, so next month my book group will read The News From Paraguay and in August Madeleine Is Sleeping. And then I'll be able to write an informed rant about the controversy.

Not a good start....

Before my caffeine had even kicked in this morning Fiona had pooped on the floor. To her defense she was trying to get her underwear off and get on the potty but didn't make it in time. While I was cleaning up that charming gift she went upstairs and took a tube of toothpaste and smeared it all over herself. No excuse for that! I managed to refrain from yelling at her for her first offense, but the second one? Nope. I lost it, chucked her in the tub and used the word "naughty" about 50 times in 2 minutes.

Now I am searching through my 4 obsessions to figure out some way to turn this damn day around. Yarn shopping therapy ain't gonna cut it today and it doesn't look like I'll get the time to do any therapeutic reading. So I'm going to pack the two entropy kids in the van and head to the market to buy a load of strawberries and some whipping cream; I think another big batch of those terrific cream puffs is on the horizon and I also believe that after this morning, I deserve to eat as many of them as I want.

5 women, 7 bottles...

Ahhhhh. Another lovely evening with the book group. This time both the food and the book were terrific (we haven't had a book that really inspired us in a while--the food, however, is always good). This month we read Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries.

Here is the book posing with Marilyn's beautiful salad with edible flowers.

Savvy photo viewers might also notice an impressive array of bottles in the background of the above photo. Let's see, I spy: Absolute mandarin, Gordon's gin, red wine, Skyy vodka, and hiding from the camera are also the Tanqueray vodka and two bottles of white wine. Quite an impressive quantity of alcohol when you consider that only 5 of our group's members could make it last night! I managed to put away Lea's lemonade/mandarin combos, a gin and tonic and a glass of white wine. Lucky for me we were at Lea's house so I just had to (literally) stumble around the corner to get home.

From left: Sarah, Marilyn, Lea, Juliet, and my over-loaded plate.

The menu consisted of: the beautiful salad (in honor of the main character's gardening skills), a delicious cold ham with garlic- apricot sauce (what the main character realizes she should have served one hot summer day rather than her disastrous jellied veal loaf), a corn relish (the main character's mother serves her husband cold meat and a homemade relish in the first few pages of the book) , a lemon gelatin (Juliet celebrating her Midwest roots and the Indiana setting of a portion of the book), and for desert, the amazing Malvern Pudding that is written about so vividly in the opening pages of the novel:

Raspberries and currants spilling out of the center.

Sarah did some research to make the beautiful pudding and discovered that Malvern Pudding is a bit of a misnomer. All the recipes for Malvern Pudding that she found were for a cooked pudding with apples, while what is being described in the book is clearly a cold summer berry pudding, of the sort shown here.

You can't quite see the flecks of real vanilla bean in the sauce in the photo, but they are there!

While not mentioned in the book, Sarah made the wise decision to accompany the pudding with homemade vanilla custard sauce. One of the few things I miss about my British relatives' cooking is the predominance of custard in the desert repertoire. After taking a few bites of the portion pictured above, I poured another half cup of custard over it.

We haven't decided what book to read next. That topic will buzz about on our e-mail list and I'll post the decision when we come to a consensus.

Disin' your Chick'n

Shoving a beer can up a (dead) chicken's butt is no way to treat a poor fowl with respect. But it sure does result in a tasty chicken.

Look! I'm a chicken and I'm sitting on a beer can!

I realized that I in my last post I let the delicious Beer Can Chicken that Sarah made go un-explained. Beer Can Chicken is the only way I'll roast chicken any more. I used to roast a chicken the normal way, inside the house in my oven. But ever time I did I triggered all the smoke alarms, ended up having to put the oven on cleaning cycle because the chicken spattered fat all over the place, and also had to deal with the smell of roast chicken for the next few days. I like the smell before I've eaten the chicken, but afterwards, and say, the next morning while I'm drinking my coffee, I'd prefer to breathe something else.

So Beer Can Chicken has the outside factor going for it--less clean up, no smoke inside the house, no heat being generated inside in the summer time when it is all you can do to keep the house at a tolerable temperature. But all these benefits would be negligible if it didn't turn out such a damn fine chicken. The beer steams the chicken from the inside and the grill crisps up the skin on the outside: a perfect roast chicken.

For those of you who have never experienced the dining pleasures of supremely undignified poultry allow me to clarify the technique. You take a whole raw chicken, rub in with your favorite dry rub, pop open a can of some cheapish beer, drink half the can of beer and then punch a few more holes in the can. My current favorite dry rub is equal parts kosher salt, black pepper, brown sugar and smoked Spanish paprika. You can get creative, put slivered garlic and lemon under the skin or any wild and wacky herbs and spices you like. Some people put some of the dry rub or garlic in the beer too. Next take hold of that half empty can of cheap beer with your delicate princess hand and shove it up the chicken's butt. Ta da! You made your own little chicken stand! Light half of the burners on a gas grill (or if you are a charcoal griller you heap the coals to one side of the grill). Then you put your perched chicken on the un-lit side of the grill: it'll make a tripod leaning on its drumsticks. Shut the lid to the grill and leave the chicken for a half hour. Then rotate it so the other side is facing the lit part of the grill and close the lid again. If you want, you can turn the lit side of the gas grill down to medium now, or you can leave it on high. I have a pretty cheap gas grill (only two burners) so I usually leave it on high but friends with classier grills turn theirs down. Leave it for another 1-1.5 hours (depending on the size of your chicken). If you are doing this in the middle of winter (as I have done), extend the cooking time to compensate for the temperature of the great outdoors. Do the normal stuff to check if it is done--use a meat thermometer if you have one; if you don't, cut into the thigh where it joins to the body and make sure nothing looks bloody in there.

Now for the only hard part of the recipe--separating the cooked chicken from the can of boiling beer. There are numerous recipes for Beer Can Chicken on the web but I have never found one that explains this important, and potentially dangerous, step. Nor can I say I've ever really figured out a graceful way to do this. I suppose having a pair of beer and grease-proof oven mitts designated just for chicken wrestling would be one way, but I'm too cheap. Instead I use two pairs of tongs, one that I shove down the neck to grasp the chicken from the top and one to hold the beer can from the bottom. Then I try to pull them apart. Sometimes the chicken is an accommodating bird and slides right off. Sometimes it decides to fight like the dickens and stick to its can. One thing you don't want to do is tip the chicken upside down and drench it with the left-over hot beer (though that would be an easy way to get the can out). And whatever you do, don't drop the chicken!

I've never maximized the humor potential when serving Beer Can Chicken to others. The lid is down while it's cooking, so you don't get to see it then, and when it is done, I'm too anxious that I'll pour boiling beer on one of my friends to invite them to witness the de-canning process. But more significantly, Beer Can Chicken has gone from a novelty cooking technique (like say, the Surreal Gourmet's Salmon cooked in your dishwasher) to my standard recipe for roast chicken. I'm sure that a more creative host could come up with a terrific chicken-butt-themed party--if you do, I'd love an invitation.

How to Relax on a Friday night with the Family

1. Get a friend who is a wonderful cook to invite your clan over for dinner.
2. Let the Dad's take charge of feeding the sprogs.
3. Take your lovely plate of food and glass of wine onto a nice deck with a view.
4. Purchase, rather than make, your contribution to the meal.

All four of the above took place yesterday evening and what a nice evening it was for me! Sarah made Beer-Can Chicken, Deviled Potatoes, and a lovely Arugula salad (picked moments before from her copious garden). There was a good bottle of Sangiovese that I seemed to be the only one consuming (everyone else was in a Bell's Oberon mood).

This was my dinner and my view.

And just inside the sliding glass doors there was this dining chaos that I didn't have to deal with:

The kid's table (from left going clockwise): Fiona, Ian, Brian, Kevin, Mike, Maeve, Nicholaus

And hovering just out of photo range were (the other) Brian and Sarah. Eventually, I lured Sarah out to the peace of the deck and we let the Dad's do things like chicken-containment, hotdog holding, and fork-technique lessons, though I did miss seeing Maeve prove her adventurous 3-year-old palate when she ate her arugula salad.

After dinner we went down to the backyard for dessert and kid playtime and we managed to demolish the box of cakes I bought at Shatila bakery.

Ian gave the double chocolate cake his full-face-stamp of approval.

Thanks to a sharp knife and a little sneaky slicing, I managed to taste quite a few of the variety of cakes. My favorite was the least visually impressive: the coconut cake. Just plain moist cake, white not-too-sweet frosting and loads of unsweetened coconut.

Some weekend soon, I'll need to reciprocate and do the hosting so Sarah can enjoy the experience of ending a Friday relaxed well-fed, and with a tired kid who is more than willing to go to bed.

A more gratifying trip to Dearborn

I took the kids and my mom to Dearborn today to visit Greenfield Village. Despite the fact that I didn't get to gorge on my beloved Sheik Mashi at Cedarland, it was still gratifying because I managed to fulfill two obsessions on one trip (and did not have to do endless train-related stuff). Of course, we did have to go on one trip round the Village by old steam engine, but instead of spending hours in the Roundhouse, we saw some other parts of the village including the beautiful new facilities for the craftworks: printing, pottery, tin punching, glass blowing, wool carding and weaving. It was the last two that I was most interested in, though Ian was really fascinated by the pottery works and had to be pried away from watching the master potter at his wheel.

In the Carding Works, we watched how they took this stinky fleece:

and ran it through this carding machine (they also showed us the old fashioned way to hand card. All I gotta say is those frontier women sure had strong forearms.):

And out came soft fluffy roving that could be spun into yarn like this:

They didn't actually have anyone spinning while I was there though I did spot a number of drop spindles. But I didn't really feel the need to watch spinning since I can go visit Lynne-the-intrepid-spinner any time and she often gives me nice snacks too. I didn't take any impressive photos of the weaving but the interpreter did a great demonstration of the 4 different machines (starting in the late 1600's).

And when we were done visiting the craftworks, I rewarded the kids for surprisingly good behavior by taking them to Shatila bakery for ice cream. Saveur magazine listed Shatila as one of the 12 best places to go for ice cream in the US. Pretty impressive, eh? Here was our line up (from front to back): Pistachio, Apricot and Lemon.

Other than the rather lurid color of the lemon ice cream, I heap praise upon them. The lemon really was extraordinary--sour and creamy at the same time, refreshing, but with a kick of richness. The pistachio was jam-packed with nuts and didn't have the excessive, cloying almond-extract taste that some pistachio ice creams rely upon. The apricot was supremely floral with chunks of dried apricots adding a deeper punch. I can't wait to go back and try the Mango, Rosewater and Cantaloupe flavors. And by the looks of it, Fiona can't wait to go back either:

That's my girl! A dedicated bowl licker!

I also couldn't resist leaving without a little something. Or a lot of somethings...

Left row (from front to back): coconut cake, chocolate mousse cake, cheesecake, and two double chocolate slices. Right row (from front to back): casino cake, strawberry chocolate cake, vanilla pistachio cake and chocolate roll.

Can you believe this whole box of goodies cost $7? That's less that $1 a piece! I don't actually know what the Casino cake is (front row right), but since it looks like a pressed strawberry roll on top of something insanely creamy and some yellow cake, how bad can it be? I've never actually tried their French-style pastries before because I always buy a big tray of baklava and mamoul. They have fabulous mamoul--try the date-filled kind. Wait, no, try the walnut, or the pistachio. Oh hell, try them all. But the cakes I bought today remind me of my sorely missed Swedish Bakery in Chicago's Andersonville neighborhood (rather than the wall of middle eastern filo-based treats at Shatila, the Swedish Bakery has an equivalent wall of Scandinavian style cookies and breads). I'll be sure to report back whether they measure up to the Swedish Bakery's high standards of sin.

Recovery

I have two intense kids. This became immediately apparent when, 20 minutes after they came home and Brian retired upstairs for a well-deserved nap, they had me running around trying to satisfy their many needs. I had to stop while filling drinks orders and take a deep breath and reassert control over the landscape. One thing to work on with the kids this summer is patience--theirs, not mine.

I'm pleased with the results of the writing weekend; the scene map did not get finished, nor did the character definitions, but I think they are the kind of thing I could work on in the odd hour without needing to be in touch with the creative muse. They are homework, and one doesn't need inspiration or excessive quantities of caffeine to accomplish them.

My next task is to hit up the two grannies for regular writing time. My mom isn't working this summer (though she seems to have a tennis game scheduled every other day) so I'm going to suggest a regular morning date with her grandchildren. Depending on her response, I will then approach Granny Kathy with the suggestion too and see how much writing time I can guilt them into providing me.

Round 2 of Greek composition grading is about to begin. Comp grading seriously cuts into my fiction reading time, so I am making sure to really enjoy my time with a novel before I have to ration fiction-time to the hour or so before bed. I'm on a Shields kick after loving The Stone Diaries. I'm about 1/3 of the way through her last novel, Unless. So far, what I most admire about this book is Shields' ability to avoid sentimentality; it reminds me a little of Atwood, but is less acidic and more sympathetic, yet still very sharp. This story could easily slide into mush territory due to the subject matter (lost daughter told from the mother's perspective), but at least once on each page (and sometimes more often) she has her narrator make some observation that pulls it back from the edge.

Here is an example from Page 47, at the end of the chapter titled "Wherein":
I want. I want. I want.
I don't actually say these last words; I just bump along on their short, stubbed feet, their little dead declarative syllables--while buttoning up my coat and making my way home.

A more sentimental writer would have ended the chapter with "I want. I want. I want." And it would have been a pretty damn good way to end the chapter too, but that isn't Shields--she pulls you back into her character's self-consciousness about her own tendency to dramatize the situation and has her comment on it.

And for those of you wondering about the office color--I bought a gallon of blue. The peach was fine, really nothing wrong with it, but it didn't feel right for the space. And it occurred to me that I have wanted a blue room since I was 7 years old and my father vetoed the idea and made me paint my North-facing bedroom yellow. Yup, yet another pathetic little grudge I hold. So finally I'll get to satisfy my little 7 year-old self and have a blue-room of my very own.

Even more structure

I'm on a structure kick right now. Rosina Lippi had a perfectly timely entry on her Storytelling blog about documenting all the scenes in the novel she is currently working on, Queen of Swords. So I have set myself two projects to begin (and probably not finish) before the rugrats return this afternoon:

1) I will go through my Strange Animal manuscript and document all the scenes with the point of view and current or anticipated length. I'll be doing it on an Excel spreadsheet rather than fiddling with the formatting of my Word document (I'm pretty sure the way Lippi is doing it would facilitate moving back and forth from scene map to text more easily, but I've had some bad experiences with the formatting function in Word and don't want to spend a ton of time undoing autoformatting gone awry).

2) I will set myself some homework and document all the scenes in a model book, in this case Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries. I chose this book mainly because it follows a woman from before her birth to her death which is what I'm doing with Gert. Shields makes some wonderful surprising detours (like following Magnus Flett to the Orkney Islands--who saw that coming when his character first appeared in the novel?) which could have back fired into irrelevant digressions and instead help the story to transcend the anticipated linear structure. She never forgets that she is writing fiction, not biography, and thus these imaginative flights enhance her project.

Time to make more coffee and start some fun data entry.

The Writing Life

Oh man, this is bliss. Of course I miss the kids, but a couple of phone calls have assured me that they are alive (and stuffed with cookies and lemonade) and it is probably a good thing to miss them. I probably haven't missed them enough in their short lives.

Yesterday I managed to re-organize the entire novel into a chapter structure that I think works far better than the old structure. I also went through the entire thing and cut the stuff that was crap (it's amazing how much more obvious it is to discern what is crap and what is good writing when you haven't seen it for a few years) and transferred the stuff that was decent into the new chapter structure.

The re-structuring is a major accomplishment because it means I can now work on parts of the book more easily for shorter periods of time (say, when I have a few hours free rather than a whole long weekend) and have a sense of where they fit into the whole. Turns out, I'm a writer who needs structure.

Today I revisited the pleasures of writing long-hand. I went out to lunch and brought a pad and paper and while eating I started defining the cast of characters. Up till now, people sort of floated in and out of the narrative. Now I'm deciding how much they should be in there, who will remain minor, who will be one of those vivid, briefly appearing characters, and who will be a main player. I feel like a manager picking a baseball team. I also wrote two short scenes. And writing long hand felt really good; I'm just hoping that I can read my own handwriting when it comes time to put it into the computer.

The progress on my office continues, though I'm having doubts about the color. I primed, painted the ceiling and got the first coat of color on. Sarah drove by and peeked in the window and thought it was a good color; Tracy stopped by and didn't like it. I am having fears that it is a shade too close to creamsicle. I never liked creamsicles and don't particularly want to feel surrounded by one in my office... Thankfully paint is cheap (even cheaper right now since Lowe's has it on sale) so for $15 I can change my mind. I may go with blue instead, though I'll probably wait till Brian gets home and listen to his opinion for once.

Granny to the Rescue!

Let me brag again about what a terrific mother-in-law I have. When she heard that I was really disappointed about the loss of this weekend for a home-bound writing retreat, she offered to go up to the tchotke-filled cabin with Brian and the kids (they are all her tchotkes, after all). So the kids get a weekend being spoiled to death by Granny Kathy (someone who will never say No! unlimited lemonade! cookies as a major food group!) and Brian gets to have his mommy take care of him while he's sick. (He is feeling a bit better; well enough to handle the drive.)

They left yesterday at 6 PM and for the first time in almost 5 years, I have the house to myself for more than a matter of hours. They even took the dog (they left Jonah, the cat, but he's a low maintainence buddy).

I'm a morning writer so yesterday evening, I set the scene for a successful time today at the computer--did a superficial clean-up of the house so the only chaos I have to confront is in my brain, re-stocked the caffeine supply, and then primed the front room. Ok so the last thing falls into the home-improvement area, but Mary Jean reminded me that most writers do not successfully write for 8 hours straight in a day (and for those of you who do, I don't want to hear about it....) so I figured a project that a) needs to be done and b) that I find kind of therapeutic and conducive to brain relaxation would fit the bill this weekend, so I'm painting the front room. Today, I'll take a break after doing some writing to paint the ceiling white and tomorrow the walls get painted this color:

It looks a little glowing and orangy here...trust me it's more a warm sand color.

I thought about painting the room a deep shade of blue since I find blue a calming color for a room and thought that would be good for an office where one is not supposed to freak out and wack the computer when it (or my brain) misbehaves. But it is a North facing room and I was concerned that it would end up feeling gloomy. No, I did not even consider leaving the room white. I grew up with a hospital-architect for a father who considers white (or maybe off-white if you are feeling really bold that day) the only acceptable color. Yes, I am still rebelling against my father at the ripe age of 35...

Enough about home improvements--I had my first cappuccino of the morning and I'm off to face my novel!