Who will win this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? One website has created an algorithm designed to predict who will win and successfully predicted Jennifer Egan’s win in 2011 for her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the weeks leading up to the award’s announcement (April 15), Toonari Post will be reviewing several of the more discussed books from last year and try to see which book, above all others, deserves the award.

Two of the most discussed books this year were The Round House by Louise Erdrich and The Orphan Master’s Son by Adam Johnson, and it is not hard to see why. Both are phenomenal novels, and very likely one of these authors will come away with the award.

The Round House is the story of a rape and the subsequent trial of a Native American woman living on a reservation. Narrated through the eyes of her adolescent son, the novel deals primarily with racial injustice. It is comparable to Harper Lee’s masterpiece, To Kill a Mockingbird, and has become a favorite with the general public.

Ironically, the book’s big success could spell its doom for the Pulitzer: late last year it won the National Book Award, and although it is not unprecedented, books rarely win both awards. The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, published in 1993, was the last book to accomplish this feat. Could the literary strength of The Round House help it break a 20-year curse? It is more than possible.

The Orphan Master’s Son is the about the life of the fictional Jun Do, an orphan in North Korea who slowly rises through the ranks to become one of the most powerful men in the country. It is a brilliant achievement and a break out book for author Adam Johnson, who has previously published a collection of short stories entitled Emporium and the novel Parasites Like Us. Through the horror of the North Korean regime, Johnson is able in his latest book to create a book that is part thriller, part love story, part internal crisis and much more. There is something here for everyone to enjoy.

However, the Pulitzer Prize primarily deals with books that deal with American ideals and citizens. Although part of the book is set in Texas and North Korea is constantly compared and contrasted with the US in the book, it could be simply not American enough to win. There have been exceptions before, though, and the massive scope of the book is comparable to the sprawling plot lines of previous Pulitzer winners, so only time will tell if the judges decide the book features enough American “values” to merit the award.

Stay tuned at Toonari Post for more Pulitzer news and the reveal of the winners on April 15.

Image credit: jenniferegan.com

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Who will win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction? One website has created an algorithm designed to predict who will win and successfully predicted Jennifer Egan’s win in 2011 for her book, A Visit From the Goon Squad. In the weeks leading up to the award’s announcement (April 15), Toonari Post will be reviewing several of the more discussed books from last year and try to see which book, above all others, deserves the award.

In 2009, the winner, Tinkers by Paul Harding, was nowhere to be found on the list on pprize.com. It had received no nominations for other major prizes, and shown up on only a few “best-of” lists.

Today, Toonari Post will be examining dark horse candidates. What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank by Nathan Englander made a splash when it was published, but since then its chances of winning the prize have diminished dramatically. Kind One by Laird Hunt is the opposite: until its nomination for the Pen/Faulkner Award, few had heard of it.

Englander’s book, a collection of short stories, focuses on Jewish life—life as an assimilated American, life as an unassimilated American, life in Israel. As you might expect, religion is present in all of them. Despite this, the stories are all quite different. One focuses on a band of kids trying to get revenge on the local anti-Semite, another on an aging writer and his waning fanbase. The title story is about a wife seeing an old friend from Hebrew school who has since moved to Israel. It is similar, both in its language and in its characters, to the short story that provided the inspiration for its title, Raymond Carver’s famous “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.”

The prose is at times unrefined (“She and Mark ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hassidic, and neither of them will put a hand on the other in public. Not for this. Not to put out a fire”) but full of character; its unrefined nature is the point.

The short story collection would be a worthy winner of the award. If Englander does not win for this book, be on the lookout for future work by him. He is a writer worth keeping an eye on.

Laird Hunt’s Kind One is an interesting, Faulknerian work that will definitely confuse more than a few readers. It is an antebellum, southern gothic tale, told through multiple perspectives. The largest of these sections is from the eyes of Ginny, a girl married off to a lying widower.

At times, characters seem to act not how they would naturally be expected to, but rather how the author needs them to act in order to move the story along. The multiple perspectives also seem overdone towards the end, where characters the reader thus far has never heard from suddenly get to voice their opinions for five pages and are then silenced. After hearing from one voice for a hundred pages, five pages seem a bit superfluous. A bit more editing and playing around with the story could have resulted in a tighter book. Although without a doubt Kind One deserves its nomination for the Pen/Faulkner Award, winning the Pulitzer seems a bit of a stretch for this book.

Stay tuned at Toonari Post for more Pulitzer Prize news and predictions in the days leading up to April 15.

Image credit: Howard County Library System via Flickr.com

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Toni Morrison has long been heralded for her difficult yet beautiful books. Ever since she won the Nobel Prize, Morrison has become a household name most commonly associated with her early books, such as The Bluest Eye and Beloved, and is both loved and hated by high school students everywhere. Her latest book, Home, however, is a far cry from the lyrical works that earned her fame.

Set during the 50s, Home follows the story of Korean War veteran Frank Money as he embarks on a journey to reach his home in Georgia where his sister is supposedly at death’s door. Along the way, Morrison explores the lives of those who have left their mark on Frank and his sister, often going back and forth through time to do so.

An examination of racial relations, a theme that carries on throughout all of Morrison’s work, is still present. Absent, though, are the breathtaking narratives that strung together those themes so well.

Frank Money has seen friends die on the battlefield and innocent orphans shot, and when he returns to the United States, he finds himself in a world where just looking suspicious can result in jail time. These horrors are so commonplace and so undeveloped that they lose meaning within the book.  A plot summary might read something like a list of terrors with little else included.

Part of the reason for this is that Home is very sparsely written.  The novel begins, “They rose up like men. We saw them. Like men they stood,” and continues in such a fashion for the rest of the novel. Although this will certainly attract some readers, it is hardly like Morrison’s usual beautiful language. Although many characters have whole chapters dedicated to them, other than Frank Money, none are as fleshed out as they could be and many come off as cliché and boring figures, resulting in the reader feeling apathetic towards them.

Still, the book does have its good points. Some passages—mostly those concerning Frank Money and his past—are quite captivating.  Morrison depicts the veteran without any sugarcoating, showing exactly how the war has changed him. As he watches a drummer get carried away by his fellow band mates, still drumming the air as they take him away, Frank wonders, “Maybe, as with the drummer, rhythm would take charge. Maybe he too would be escorted away, flailing helplessly, imprisoned in his own strivings.”

Upon reflection, many will probably wonder just what the point of this flawed work is. At 150 pages, it is quick and to the point, and yet so many parts seem unnecessary. It is worth a read more because if you do not like it, you will be on the last page before you even realize it.

Image Courtesy of   Angela Radulescu

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The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is one of the United States’ oldest and most prestigious literary prizes. With a cash award clocking in at $10,000, it may not have the biggest monetary prize, but the amount of respect it commands makes any winner enviable, especially when considering that out of the nine US Nobel Laureates in Literature eligible for the Pulitzer, only two did not win the prize before they took the Nobel, and one of those—William Faulkner—went on to win an unprecedented two Pulitzers afterward. Only Nobel Laureate and poet Joseph Brodsky did not receive the honor.

With the revealing of the prize winner and finalists set on April 16, many readers are gearing up for the announcement. One website, using various algorithms, was able to predict last year’s winner, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, and is at it again, compiling a list of 15 likely candidates for the award. In the coming days leading up to April 16, Toonari Post will review seven of these works and judge their likelihood of the award.

First up are two shorter works, both novellas, The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka and Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. While novellas often do not win the award, Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea proves it is not impossible, and both have a shot at the title.

The Buddha in the Attic, Otsuka’s second work, was the recipient of this year’s PEN/Faulkner award, and is a marvelous book that examines the lives of Japanese women brought to America in the 20s and 30s for marriage. Interestingly, Otsuka does not focus on one individual and her experiences, but rather looks at events from the perspective of a group of them. The book is narrated in the plural first person—“On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall.”

The book is poetic and simple, and though there is no character to relate to, it is still easy to connect with the characters. The only problem is the repetitive nature of the work: Otsuka felt it necessary when explaining how one individual woman dealt with a problem to go on to say how the rest of them dealt with it.

For example, when describing their children, the entire chapter consists of ‘We did this. We did that:’ “We laid them down gently, in ditches and furrows and wicker baskets beneath trees. We left them lying naked, atop blankets, on woven straw mats at the edge of the fields.”

The result is a work that at times reads like a list, simply saying what one person did, then another, then another, stretching on occasionally for pages. The beautiful prose at times makes reading these lists easier, but the problem still remains. While the book is definitely worth a read, it may not be worth a Pulitzer.

The next novella, Train Dreams, was originally published in 2002 in the Paris Review, but in 2011 was for the first time put out in book form, making it eligible for the Pulitzer. This western tells the tale of Robert Grainier, a logger out in the American West, as he aimlessly goes through life. The story is not told in a linear fashion and the chapters often jump from Granier as a middle-aged man to a young boy to an old man. It is a neat idea and works really well.

Yet, despite the book’s excitement, it is not particularly memorable. It is a good story, and bits and pieces may stay with you, but within a few days the rest will be forgotten. The book is more than good enough to make you want to read other works by Denis Johnson, but that is all it is: a gateway.

The prose is good, and descriptions of the land are simple but effective: “They hiked over to Grossling’s meadow and waded into it through daisies up to their knees.” Johnson may strike gold and win a Pulitzer—he is a brilliant enough writer—but this is not the work that wins him it.

Stay tuned for more speculation about the Pulitzer Prize in the coming days.

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