2012 Tournament of Books: Judges Wishlist

Well, I thought yesterday’s 2012 Tournament of Books forecast would quench my thirst for Rooster talk, but it turns out it only made it worse.

So, today we’re back with more; this time looking at the judges. Had a good crop of judges last year, but a dragoon of new judges is surely in the offing. Here’s who I’d like to see, using last year's mix as a guide.

Group A: The Morning News Staff

This Year: 
Rosencrans Baldwin, Matthew Baldwin, Andrew Womack

Wishlist for Next Year: 
They get to pick their team here, but I’d like to see them go from 3 slots to 2. Let’s slot the Baldwin brothers in here, if for no other reason than the mental image of Stephen and William Baldwin trying to judge a literary prize.

2011 Tournament of Books: Breaking Down Week One

The first week of the 2011 Tournament of Books has come and gone. While there were no real shockers, that doesn't mean there weren't items of interest.

Here are few match-by-match highlights:

Match 1 Winner

Match 1: Freedom by Jonathan Franzen versus Kapitoil by Teddy Wayne, judged by Sarah Mancuso

Mancuso on Freedom:

"...Freedom focuses on two fully human adults who, despite their history of betrayals, return to each other. When Patty and Walter drive away from the lake house, they complete the book’s convincing depiction of a mature marriage—one that survives serious conflicts and requires serious mercies. It isn’t nostalgia for Walter’s affair that broke my heart; it’s Patty’s forgiveness, and Walter’s forgiveness of her own betrayal, and the reminder that such forgiveness is possible..."

Mancuso reads Freedom's end with considerably more hope than I do. In her assessment of these novels, Mancuso provides compelling textual evidence, but here at the end she abandons direct quotation of the text. To my mind, one paragraph describes the nature of Walter and Patty's reconnection, and it is the reader's interpretation of that paragraph that will determine how positive their reconciliation is. I'll quote at length:

"Her eyes weren't blinking. There was still something almost dead in them, something very far away. She seemed to be seeing all the way through to the back of him and beyond, out into the cold empty space of the future in which they would both soon be dead, out into the nothingness that Lalitha and his mother and his father had already passed into, and yet she was looking straight into his eyes, and he could feel her getting warmer by the minute. And so he stopped looking at her eyes and started looking into them, returning their look before it was too late, before this connection between life and what came after was lost, and let her see all the vileness inside of him, all the hatreds of two thousand solitary nights, while the two of them were still in touch with the void in which the sum of everything they'd ever said or done, every pain they'd inflicted, every joy they'd shared, would weigh less than the smallest feather on the wind" (p. 559).

I find it difficult to call this moment forgiveness. Forgiveness implies a kind of ethical transaction in which wrongs against a moral system are pardoned. Here, the moral system is completely obliterated by "the void." This absence of ethics makes any transgression meaningless, any emotional benevolence null. Their relationship here is cast as a strategic alliance against nothingness--not a turn to each other as subjects of meaning and value.

But that’s me.

Match 2 Winner

Match 2: Room by Emma Donogue versus Bad Marie by Marcy Dermansky, judged by Jennifer Weiner 

Weiner on Bad Marie:

"It’s a world where grownups are savages, and children, even worse. (“Caitlin grinned. Caitlin was happy when she got her way. She seemed to get her way most of the time.”). The men are duplicitous and weak, other women are competition, the sex has more to do with power than affection, and everyone behaves badly."

Weiner on Room:

“Still, the book is, to resort to a cliché, unputdown-able, and it raises fascinating questions: What is a mother’s obligation to her child? How much of her independence must a mother sacrifice for a son, or a daughter’s, well-being? How do you survive hardship? How do you survive joy?”

First, I'm going to preen a little and say I called this in my odds-making for the first round:

“Room is essentially a conservative book, reifying conventional beliefs about motherhood, child-reading, and how freaky men can be. Bad Marie is libertarian: the main character acts on impulse only, and we get very little sense of what she wants at all. I suspect Jennifer Weiner, the judge for this round who writes books with relatively familiar values, will go for Room.”

Second, does Room really raise "fascinating questions" about maternal obligation and freedom? Hardly--those questions require the ability to make choices that the mother in Room doesn't have.

Third, a kid getting what they want most of the time makes them "worse" than savage?

These points show the easy morality of Room, hidden in plain view by the narrative conceit and first-person narration. That’s not to say Bad Marie should move on necessarily; it relies heavily on awe-inducing coincidence. But considerations of form offer can more interesting discussion here.

Match 3 Winner

Match 3: Savages by Don Winslow versus The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobsen, judged by Rosencrans Baldwin

Baldwin on The Finkler Question:

"I read novels for plot, but I don’t need it—but in its place I do need life. Perhaps Finkler’s point is that Julian is not the center of the book. Maybe the point of Finkler isn’t to dramatize events or entertain its readers, but to flay, to scrutinize, to attack."

Baldwin makes an interesting point here about the problems of writing compelling satirical novels: they must, perhaps counter-intuitively, have an excess of plot to pull the reader along. Think of the great literary satires: Don Quixote, Candide, Gulliver's Travels---they overflow with narrative. Two reasons for this come to mind. First, story might provide a bulwark against ponderousness and self-importance. Second, the pleasure of compelling narrative might make the reader more receptive to the ideological content of satirical critique.  The Finkler Question's only real defense against preachiness and readerly fatigue is style; as Baldwin mentions, Jacobsen writes some extraordinarily fine sentences. Craft, however, doesn't seem to be enough sugar to help the medicine go down.

Match 4 Winner

Match 4: A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan versus Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, judged by Anthony Doerr

Doerr on A Visit from the Goon Squad:

"One of the things I enjoy most about being a fiction writer is the unpredictability of what each individual reader brings to the work. If I write a story about a character with a stutter, say, a reader with a speech impediment will probably react to the story differently than a reader without one. If Jennifer Egan writes a book about time overwhelming characters and turning them into parents, a reader like me, who feels himself being overwhelmed by time and being turned into a parent, will plug into it in a certain way."

Doerr's judgment was my favorite of the first four matches, and this meditation on affection and timing was particularly insightful. One of the great pleasures of the Tournament of Books is that critical subjectivity provides as much of the fun as the winning and losing. This then allows us to revel in what we already know: that there is no high ground of evaluation, no semi-divine objective consciousness that can "properly" assign value. Like many truths, this is both liberating and frustrating. And devilish fun.
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2011 Tournament of Books: The Brackets

In the pursuit of my eager and vaguely pitiful quest to become the Joe Lunardi of The Tournament of Books, here are some observations on the final brackets for 2011. (Indeed, I am spending so much time thinking about The Rooster that I am sure to be awarded an honorary degree in ornithology).

I still have a handful of the finalists to finish before my full handicapping sheet is ready, but let's have a look at the notable matchups and judge-placements. In no particular order:


1. Most Intriguing First Round Match-Up: A Visit From the Goon Squad v. Skippy Dies

Terrible luck I think for Skippy Dies. (and yes, I am referring to these books as if they were sentient beings. Reason? Skippy Dies has sat on my lap. Paul Murray has not. QED). I thought Skippy Dies had a chance to advance a couple of rounds, but Goon Squad is a terrible match-up, since it is both more formally innovative and just as beloved by readers. I thought it was better than The Finkler Question, but it was seeded as a 3 to Finkler's 1. Note: the winner of this match-up should make it to the semifinals, since I don't think Savages or The Finkler Question will put up much resistance.

2. Award Winners Get the 1 Seeds

There are a lot of tough first round matches for my favorites, mostly because the major award winners were placed in the protected positions; this pushed some books that had considerably more critical and commercial success into the middle of the bracket to duke it out amongst themselves. The upside is that if you are So Much for That and can get out of your first round, then the second round against a one seed is not as tough as it might be. 

3. Best Potential Quarterfinal Match-Up: Freedom v. Room

Veeeeeeeeeeery interesting. Reader darling up against the dauphin of American literature. With the right judge, Room could win this, but Matt Dellinger is a journalist/non-fiction guy and I suspect that Franzen's social commentary will appeal to him more than Donogue's page-turning plot. Plus, there's the gender thing (watch for that as you fill out your brackets. When in doubt, pick the author with the same gender as the judge).

4. Whither Weiner?

Part of me really thought they were going to put Weiner in a position to judge Franzen. I both wanted this and feared it. For good or for ill, though, Weiner gets the Room v. Bad Marie first-rounder, which I expect to go to Room, though Bad Marie presents an interesting opponent. More interesting than the winner here will be Weiner's explanation. 

5. Most Favorable Seed: So Much for That

The right side of the bracket seems much lighter than the left. Super Sad True Love Story seems poised to get to the final, but So Much for That, as a three seed, only has to get through a book about horses, one about a white dude in a mid-life crisis, and a poetry collection to make the semis. 

6. Head-Scratching Judge Placement

There is an excellent chance that the lead-singer of a largely unknown alternative rock band will be the one deciding between Freedom and A Visit From the Goon Squad. This would be like James Salter deciding between The Black Eyed-Peas and Taylor Swift for the Grammy for Best Album. I like having a couple of judging wild cards but not this late in the game. 

7. Applause-Inducing Judge Placement

I really like Audience Judge Catherine George's match. I don't think either of these books is going to do much in the tournament, but these two books are screaming for a struggling MFA to judge them. My sense is that someone who has a draft of something trying to be The Great Canadian Novel in the drawer will be more sympathetic to Bloodroot than The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, but the restraint and polish of Lemon Cake has its appeal. I am disconcertingly fascinated by this. 

8. Zombie Round Chaos

My uneducated guess is that A Visit from the Goon Squad and Room will be the Zombie books. I didn't think about the ramifications of the Zombie round in my earlier observations on the short-list, but the prospect of Goon Squad getting a 1-Up late in the game makes it, to my mind, the sharp's bet to take home the poultry. 

Alright, that's it for now. Back to getting through the whole list before March 6. Let me know if anything else about the brackets caught your eye.
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