From Booker to Strega: diversity and inclusivity in literary prizes
As I was reading, a few weeks ago, the names in the Booker Prize 2020 shortlist, I was caught by a fleeting yet well-defined thought: how depressing can it be to make a comparison between this shortlist and those of the most prestigious Italian prizes for fiction?
The answer is quite simple: very depressing. Not because the literary quality of those English novels which ended up being finalists for the Booker Prize is necessarily higher than the quality those written in Italian and selected by the committees of the Strega and Campiello prizes– I haven’t read them all, I wouldn’t know how to judge – but for the disturbing dominance, in Italian prizes, of the writing phenotype of the “white male”.
Italy saw some mild turbulence in the debate on this topic, when Valeria Parrella, the only woman in the Strega shortlist, reacted in an understandably resented way, when, during her interview on the award ceremony, had to sadly realise that a debate on the relationship between the #MeToo movement and literature would happen between two men: “e lei ne vuole parlare con Augias? Auguri!” (“and you want to discuss that with Augias [editor's note: a man]? Good luck!”, said Parrella to the journalist, manifesting a resentment which would be easily shared by many female writers, or simply many women.
Valeria Parrella’s resentment deserves to be charged with further significance if we look at the names of the finalists in the three abovementioned prizes.
For the Strega, all six writer were white and five out of six were men. The longlist was not more encouraging, if we think that besides Valeria Parrella, there were only two more women, Marta Barone e Silvia Ballestra. For the Campiello, the situation was quite similar: once again, all writers were white, and only one was a woman. Moreover, she was not even a novelist. We are talking about Patrizia Cavalli, an undoubtedly illustrious author, but in truth a poet attempting to turn to prose only now, at a later stage of her career, almost as a form of self-celebration. The Booker Prize, instead, among its six finalists, presents four people of colour of which only one is a man. The longlist was equally widely populated with talented women.
If about racial issues, someone might be naive and object that in Italy most writers are in fact white, on gender issues Italy seems to have no excuses. Contemporary Italian fiction has a panorama abounding in women, with a long- or short-lived career. Female writers with talent and original ideas.
The problem seems to occur with similar practices also in other realities of continental Europe: in France, the Goncourt prize has currently only four women out of fifteen in the longlist.
It appears that anglophone prizes, on the contrary, have decided to invest on the principles of diversity and inclusivity, making sure that their selection mirrors the actuality of the society literature represents. The choices of the Booker committee are well matched with those of the American National Book Award, whose longlist is extremely variegated both in terms of genders and of writers’ cultural backgrounds. Needless to remind that the Pulitzer prize for fiction this year was assigned for the second time to Colson Whitehead, a black writer.
It’s easy to brand these choices as banal and comfortable publicity moves. It is undeniable that they are political choices, but their necessity in undeniable in this historical moment. They act as signals, as messages aimed at a mentality change, which is not only desirable but also compelling. They are signals that must arrive from those who hold the power in publishing and media in general. Signals that other countries, like Italy, persists to give only in a fictitious form, relegating them to a surface level, when to a the duty and the honour to debate female literature is given to a man, in the reassuring certainty that the problem of being politically correct can now be filed, and that we can finally go back - without too many subtleties – to awarding the prize to a male writer.
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020: when literature precedes history
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020: Great American Novels, Black Lives Matter, archetypes and stereotypes
The almost proverbial longtime obsession that American writers have always shown to have for writing the “Great American Novel” (an expression canonised by Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel) seems to have found its perfect embodiment in the finalist trio of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Let’s be honest: not all past Pulitzer winners — let alone just finalists — have managed to contribute to the history of American literature, but this year, the year of Apocalypse apparently, our judges have provided us with a remarkable specimen of thriving American fictional prose.
The victory of The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead (for the second time awarded with the prize, after his triumph in 2017 with The Underground Railroad) could not be more timely: only 21 days before the murder of George Floyd, which initiated the ongoing history-changing wave of protests of the Black Lives Matter movement, on May 4th 2020, a novel whose story revolves around white violence against black boys in an American reformatory, deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize. A prophecy? A foreshadow of things to come? Or perhaps just a signal, a symptom of the growing need for awareness on a social — and ultimately historical — issue that had been simmering just beneath the surface for way too long.
This is not simply an honest, profound, and well-timed novel on the condition of black people in the US. It is — I will be excused the redundancy from now on — a Great American Novel.
I quote from the Wikipedia page for GAN: “The term Great American Novel (GAN) refers to a canonical novel that is thought to capture the spirit of American life. It is generally regarded as being written by an American and dealing in some way with the question of America's national character. The Great American Novel is considered America's equivalent of the national epic.”
The Nickel Boys, though not canonically “epic” with its 215 pages, does indeed capture in a robust way the spirit of contemporary American life. Despite the fictional character of this novel, older and recent history has proved that the events narrated in Whitehead’s last book — the brutality of the violent and multiform abuse against (even young) black people — are facts that permeate everyday American (and not only) society and corrode its foundations. The question of black lives is, therefore, a question of America’s national character, and Whitehead’s powerful writing immortalises it in a way that few other writers (and I’m thinking of Toni Morrison above all) have been able to do so far: this is a profoundly personal, single, individual story that has the strength to turn itself into the archetype of a universal human condition of suffering, abuse, violence, and discrimination. Creating archetypes is indeed what good writing should normally bet able to do, whereas mediocre writing fills its pages with fragile and dull stereotypes. This is why, if one of the two winners of the Man Booker Prize 2019, Girl, Woman, Other, by Bernardine Evaristo, merely offers us a rather banal tracking shot of poorly written cliches (stereotypes, precisely!) on black women (and does not, therefore, portray a reality a reader can fully grasp), Whitehead, on the contrary, creates a fictional world that, in its uniqueness, makes the real world aware of its flaws, and resonates with archetypical strength. This is how it becomes epic too, and most resolutely deserves the title of Great American Novel.
What further enriches the literary scenario of this year’s Pulitzer Prize is the incontestable truth that the other two contenders also notably had all the characteristics of great American novels.
The Topeka School, by Ben Lerner, is a refined and sophisticated novel depicting a certain bourgeois cross-section of American society: the protagonists are a family of psychotherapists, whose young son is a champion of public debate. The narration is polyphonic not only thanks to the multitude of voices (mother, father, son), but also to the author’s choice of alternating the first and third-person speech. The narrative technique is wise, as the secretly hidden story of a boy called Darren — that touches tangentially yet significantly the lives of the protagonists — unwinds throughout the chapters without being ever explicitly told. This is potentially a great American novel, not only because it is beautifully written and masterfully orchestrated, but also because it tackles tactfully a number of hot themes of contemporary American society. Public speech and eloquence — persuasion and its danger —, above all, feminism, mental health and psychotherapy, but also and quite remarkably the critical role of education. This pastiche of themes could have easily risked creating yet another collection of stereotypical cliches, but Ben Lerner appears to know better than this, and chooses to give his novel a vigorous framework within which these problems interact naturally and vividly, and therefore can aim at universality.
Finally, we have The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett, perhaps the most traditional of the three novels: a family saga. The plot, somehow a modern and harsh rewriting of the fairytale of Cinderella, is that of two siblings (a brother and a sister, of whom the brother narrates the story), who are, on the one hand, the victims of the tragic destiny of their family (abandoned by their mother, kicked out from their family house by the second wife of their late father), and, on the other hand, the victims of their own violent obsession for the Dutch House. The house is the sumptuous place where they grew up — the materialisation of their father’s American dream, the dream of an ambitious and stubborn man, decided to substantiate his scaling of the social ladder through the possession of a dream house, the same house that will lead his wife to folly and escape.
The obsession of the two protagonists for the house will accompany them until old age and death, and will be inherited by future generations. If the plot is fundamentally simple, the feeling it conveys is undoubtedly epic: a blind, insistent, stubborn search for the evidence of the actuality of the past; a desperate chase of roots; a morbid yet rational attachment to the material possession — the house — which provided those roots; the physical and tangible component of memory.
By narrating these sentiments, universal yet so strongly connotated as typically American (isn’t in the big house, after all, the American dream?), Ann Patchett builds an epic novel, whose emotional strength is at times excruciating, whose simplicity describes folly, torment, resignation, family love, and a vast plethora of human emotions and actions. This is, in sum, a great (and in this case also traditional, though universal) American novel.
Ultimately, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2020 amazes for its foresight and for the brilliance of choices, but most remarkably teaches how literature, at times, precedes history, how the big human and social questions often surface on the written page before action takes place. How great American novels (and hopefully great universal novels) can be a driving force to action and thought.
