Culture Awards

Add Comment

Books

The Five Best First Sentences

1 ‘Windows on the World,’ by Frederic Beigbeder: “You know how it ends: Everybody dies.”

2 ‘The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil,’ by George Saunders: “It’s one thing to live in a small country, but the country of Inner Horner was so small only one Inner Hornerite at a time could fit inside, and the other six Inner Hornerites had to wait their turns to live in their own country while standing very timidly in the surrounding country of Outer Horner.”

3 ‘The Truth About Diamonds,’ by Nicole Richie: “I know some people out there are thinking, Why is this girl writing a book?”

4 ‘The Diviners,’ by Rick Moody (following a portentous foreword titled “Opening Credits and Theme Music”): “Rosa Elisabetta Meandro, in insubstantial light, entrails in flames.”

5 ‘The Almond: The Sexual Awakening of a Muslim Woman,’ by Nedjma: “I, Badra bent Salah ben Hassan el-Fergani, born in Imchouk under the sign of Scorpio, shoe size thirty-eight, and soon to reach my fiftieth year, make the following declaration: I don’t give a damn that Black women have delectable cunts and offer total obedience; that Babylonian women are the most desirable and women from Damascus the most tender to men; that Arab and Persian women are the most fertile and faithful; that Nubian women have the roundest buttocks, the softest skin, and passion that burns like a tongue of fire; that Turkish women have the coldest wombs, the most cantankerous temperament, the most rancorous heart, and the most radiant acumen; and that Egyptian women are soft-spoken, offer kind-hearted friendship, and are fickle in their constancy.”

The Year of Historical Fiction

(Photo: Bettmann/Corbis)

Literature is dead, but genre fiction survives, and in 2005, one particular branch emerged from the pack. Of the five books nominated for the National Book Award for fiction, the most prestigious of the annual awards, four were historical novels. The fifth was set in the eighties—by the standards of television also a historical period. Why would this happen now, of all times, when the present is so thick with occurrence? Maybe American writing has gone into retreat, accepting its role in what George Steiner once called a “museum culture”—one that accumulates the treasures of the past, sifting and weighing and measuring them, while producing nothing on its own. Certainly this would account for the strain of nostalgia that runs through some of these novels: They really wrote books, these books say, in Greenwich Village (Rene Steinke’s Holy Skirts) and on the Lower East Side (Nicole Krauss’s History of Love).

But America itself is not currently in retreat. Across the world in 2005, you could hardly go outside without being strafed by an American Black Hawk.

No, the efflorescence of historical fiction is an imperial phenomenon. It is the extension of one’s dominion in time as well as space. E. L. Doctorow has always written historical fiction, but his The March appears in a new context: We can now imagine General Sherman, like an Iraqi villager, just minding his own business, when along comes Doctorow in a gleaming new F-16 and just blows his little house down. How depressed one has to be to resurrect Carthage, Flaubert said after resurrecting Carthage during the Second Empire; but also how hungry, how greedy, how large.

The past, too, will prove not inexhaustible. What will be left for 2006, when we have established bases throughout all the Asian republics and extracted all the oil and written novels about all the major and minor figures of the past, especially in Greenwich Village? The historical novel will have to seek a more recent time frame and a narrower canvas. It will have to become memoir. Just as there was a second Gulf War, so there will be a second coming of the memoirs; some people will have to write more than one.
—Keith Gessen

The Industry Award

Ann Godoff, Penguin Press
Most denizens of the besieged publishing industry felt awfully sorry for Ann Godoff when she was fired from Random House in 2003 for failing to meet the behemoth’s new bottom line. But the veteran editor quickly parlayed her impressive list of authors into a new largely nonfiction imprint at Penguin, called the Penguin Press—taking dozens of writers with her and signing others on in short order. In her heady first year—2004—five books became best sellers, including Ron Chernow’s stocking-buster Alexander Hamilton and Steve Coll’s CIA history Ghost Wars, which won the Pulitzer. This year’s list made those accomplishments seem almost quaint: Sean Wilsey, Jeffrey Sachs, and John Berendt won the house equal parts prestige and profits. And out of the paltry fiction list—one or two a season—came Zadie Smith’s major literary comeback, On Beauty. These days, the imprint is one of Penguin’s more profitable. In other words, her bottom line is doing just fine, thanks.
— B.K.