read the National Book Award winners

Philip Roth won the 1960 National Book Award for his first book, Goodbye, Columbus, a collection of five short stories and the title novella. He went on to create an incredible body of work – building on many themes introduced in Goodbye, Columbus – publishing 30 books to date with another on the way.

In the main novella, hero Neil Klugman is home in Newark after two years in the army. He has finished college, is working in the library, and lives with his Aunt Gladys and Uncle Max in the old neighborhood. When Neil falls in love with Brenda Patimkin, the prototypical Jewish American Princess whose family has moved to the suburbs up the hill, Roth begins the examination of American Jewish life that continues through many of his books.

The title is a reference to Ohio State University Seniors saying goodbye to college, goodbye to Columbus, Ohio, but it also signifies growing up and leaving youth behind. Neil and Brenda’s relationship demonstrates the intensity of first love, as well as the disillusionment and emotional tempering that result.

The five short stories that follow vary in force and effect. . . .

Full review posted on Rose City Reader.

Based on a true story, The Fixer is the story of a Russian Jew who, in the early 1900s, is unjustly accused of murdering a Christian boy. Bernard Malamud’s 1966 novel won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

Yakov Bok has a hard luck life as a handyman, or fixer, in the Jewish Pale of Settlement. Although political reforms following the 1905 revolution gave Jews new freedoms and political clout, life in the Pale had not improved. After his childless wife abandons him for a goy, Yakov leaves the shtetl for Kiev, where he ends up working in, and living above, a Christian-owned brick factory. With an assumed name, no papers to allow him to live in that part of the city, and anti-Jewish sentiments on the rise, Yakov is headed for trouble. . . .

(Read the rest of this review on Rose City Reader.)

Mesmerizing, character-driven novel about the Vietnam War.

All the Pretty Horses is the bastard offspring of a mating between Ernest Hemingway and Zane Gray, with some William Faulkner apparent in the DNA. “It was his horse. And it was a good horse. And he rode the horse. When it was night, he hobbled the horse by a stream and both boy and horse drank from the cold water of the stream . . . .” So, maybe that is not a direct quote, but it captures the essence.

Not that it is a bad book. There is plenty of exciting plot to keep it moving along, at least after the plodding first chapter. The story of John Grady Cole’s adventures in Mexico is riveting, involving vagabonds, a lovely senorita, her rich rancher father, Mexican prisons, murder, escape, and lots and lots of horses.

But the characters, with the exception of the fascinating aunt, are one-dimensional. Cole is a particularly wooden hero. It is apparent that McCarthy intended him as an archetype, but his approach of always doing the right thing, damn the consequences, becomes wearily repetitive. By the time he reaches his final soul-searching scene with a sympathetic judge back in Texas, he has become a stoic goody two shoes.

All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award in 1992 and is the first of the three novels in McCarthy’s oft-praised “Border Trilogy,” followed by The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. Hopefully, the later books will keep the same spirit of adventure, but drop the Hemingway parody and add character development.

Despite its title, I was surprised by how myth-centric this novel is. It is the story of a high school science teacher and his student son. It is also a re-telling of the myth of the centaur Chiron who, wounded, gives his life (his immortality) to Prometheus.

This is a book I may appreciate more in the recollection. While reading it, I was distracted by the allegory. Sometimes, the mythical references were too vague or convoluted to catch and I had to refer to the index at the back to make sure I wasn’t missing something important. But at times, the myth is more than allegory (Updike sometimes refers to the hero as Chiron and describes his hooves clacking on the school stairs, for instance) which I found jarring. Also, the hero was annoying, not just to me as a reader, but to his son, wife, and co-workers in the story. I can’t figure out how this ties in with the myth of Chiron.

I just found, at my neighborhood used book store, a 1966 Modern Library edition of Coodbye, Columbus, with a near perfect dustjacket. This puts me in the mood to pursue this goal again. It got pushed to the back burner while I finished the Modern Library Top 100 list. But now that I am almost done with that goal, I am looking forward to a new list. GC will be the first one I read.

Just finished this 1990 winner. I think it has been on my shelf since then, but I was reluctant to read it because I thought it was going to be too depressing and preachy. It was depressing at times, but it was also, well . . . goofy. Very engrossing, even exciting, but a little haphazard. It has a ne’er-do-well hero, multiple plots, exciting adventures—a real sea yarn. I don’t understand that the narrator knew about and referred to things that didn’t happen until decades after the story takes place (he mentions things like time zones and squeegees that didn’t exist in 1830, for example, not to mention philosophical and scientific theories that didn’t develop until much later, such as evolution). But once I decided to let that all flow over me, I enjoyed the book. It certainly packs a lot into its 206 pages.

65 books have won the National Book Award for fiction since it was established in 1950. I’ve read the books in bold and the ones in italics are on my TBR shelf:

2005 Europe Central by William T. Vollmann

2004 Lily Tuck The News from Paraguay

2003 Shirley Hazzard The Great Fire

2002 Julia Glass Three Junes

2001 Jonathan Franzen The Corrections

2000 Susan Sontag In America

1999 Ha Jin Waiting

1998 Alice McDermott Charming Billy

1997 Charles Frazier Cold Mountain

1996 Andrea Barrett Ship Fever and Other Stories

1995 Philip Roth Sabbath’s Theater

1994 A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis

1993 The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx

1992 All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy

1991 Mating by Norman Rush

1990 Middle Passage by Charles Johnson

1989 Spartina by John Casey

1988 Paris Trout by Pete Dexter

1987 Paco’s Story by Larry Heinemann

1986 World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow

1986 Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez

1985 White Noise by Don Delillo

1985 Easy in the Islands (1st Novel Award) by Bob Shacochis

1984 Stones for Ibarra (1st Novel Award) by Harriet Doerr

1984 Victory Over Japan by Ellen Gilchrist

1983 The Women of Brewster Place by Gloria Naylor

1983 The Color Purple by Alice Walker

1982 Dale Loves Sophie to Death (1st Novel Award) by Robb Forman Dew

1982 Rabbit is Rich by John Updike

1981 Plains Song by Wright Morris

1981 Sister Wolf (1st Novel Award) by Ann Arensberg

1980 Birdy (1st Novel Award) by William Wharton

1980 Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

1980 The World According to Garp by John Irving

1979 Going After Cacciato by Tim O’Brien

1978 Blood Ties by Mary Lee Settle

1977 The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

1977 Master Tung`s Western Chamber Romance by Li Li Chen

1976 JR by William Gaddis

1975 The Hair of Harold Roux by Thomas Williams

1975 Dog Soldiers by Robert Stone

1974 Gravity’s Ranbow by Thomas Pynchon

1974 A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories by Isaac Bashevis
Singer

1973 Augustus by John Williams

1973 Chimera by John Barth

1972 The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

1971 Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow

1970 Them by Joyce Carol Oates

1969 Steps by Jerzy Kosinski

1968 The Eighth Day by Thornton Wilder

1967 The Fixer by Bernard Malamud

1966 The Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter

1965 Herzog by Saul Bellow

1964 The Centaur by John Updike

1963 Morte d’Urban by J.F. Powers

1962 The Moviegoer by Walker Percy

1961 The Waters of Kronos by Conrad Richter

1960 Goodbye Columbus by Philip Roth

1959 The Magic Barrell by Bernard Malamud

1958 Wapshot Chronicle by John Cheever

1957 The Field of Vision by Wright Morris

1956 Ten North Frederick by John O’Hara

1955 A Fable by William Faulkner

1954 The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

1953 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

1952 From Here to Eternity by James Jones

1951 The Collected Stories by William Faulkner

1950 The Man with the Golden Arm by Nelson Algren

Of the ones I’ve read, I loved The Shipping News, Spartina, and Paris Trout.

I really disliked A Frolic of His Own and confess that I couldn’t get through it. As much as I am compulsive about my lists and virtually ALWAYS finish a book once I start, that is one of the very few I couldn’t read to the end and don’t intend to. I recall a book I started in high school that I didn’t finish. And I lost Anna Karenina at the gym, so didn’t finish, although I plan to read it again and a new copy is on my shelf. But Frolic of His Own is one I have definitely abandoned. I really hated it. No punctuation. No story as much as I could tell. Pure torture.