Posts Tagged ‘ Pulitzer Prize Fiction ’

2007 Pulitzer: The Road is realistic rendition of a common nightmare

McCarthy, Cormac.(2006). The Road. New York: Knopf.

2007 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

Everything in The Road is reduced to the minimum; the language and writing style are stripped along with the lives of the characters. No linguistic decoration or extraneous description, luxury or sense of comfort. No neat tidy chapters or markers to tell us where we are in the book. No names for the characters.

What happens because of this is that we, like the characters, are forced with an immediacy, an identification with the events and the people. This immediacy creates a strong identification with the characters, and of all the apocalyptic and disaster novels and books in recent memory, this one comes closest to revealing the core of the human spirit. The essence of why life is worth living. Cormac McCarthy creates a poetic rhythm that shows how beautiful language can be used for unbeautiful experiences. W.B. Yeats phrase ” a terrible beauty” comes to mind. And yet the book leaves the reader with an oddly positive view of human nature.

2009 Pulitzer: Olive Kitteridge a study in loneliness and humanity

Olive Kitteridge: Fiction

2009 Pulitzer Prize, Fiction

The most striking this about this novel is its structure: it is a landscape novel with the title character as a running theme or motif as a constant among thirteen stories. This landscape is lonely; each character essentially lives life within him or herself, despite living in a close, small Maine community. The narrative voice is strangely detached, heightening the sense that the characters are separate from one another. The reader is therefore kept at an emotional distance. Death is a frequent visitor to the characters, and marriages are presented as mostly contentious and negative.

A nonlinear, nonchronological narrative structure must be built with extra care so as not to confuse the reader. Strout reveals this as the greatest strength of this work: by keeping the narrative voice simple and clear, she avoids the complexity trap that has befallen so many experimental storytellers. Jumps in time are kept to a manageable number, and are cleverly elucidated.

Of all of the different interpretations of loss and pain that are portrayed, it its Olive Kitteridge herself that, surprisingly, emerges as the most whole. The reader encounters different views of her from various perspectives as other characters give their views of her. We see her argue with her husband, son, and commit childish acts. But it is the revelation of who she is that adds depth and push to stories that otherwise would have a tendency to get sleepy. Olive is the type of character that leaves an impact far greater than her personality or actions might suggest.

The mature, embittered woman encountered early on becomes more so by the end, only the reader comes to understand Olive better by seeing different angles of who she is. Elizabeth Strout achieves the coveted feat of making us like an unlikable character , mainly by showing that Olive Kitteridge is human just like we are.

1923 Pulitzer: One of Ours one of most disturbing war account novels

Cather, Willa (1922). One of Ours.

Another novel that shows the “American Story” of the early Twentieth Century, One of Ours is one of the most disturbing war account novels I have read. The American Dream collides with the horrors of modern warfare with beautiful flashes of poetic insight, tales and descriptions of death, suffering, innocence lost. It is the structure that really makes this a powerful novel– it begins and continues for well over the first half as not a war novel, but in the way that popular novels of the time begin, with the trials and petty tribulations of a young boy growing up in a farming community. He is a dreamer, a thinker. His world view is so limited that he doesn’t know the source of his discontentment. He goes on with his life, and the pain I felt as a reader when he had to give up his schooling to help his family farm business. He takes a path familair to many — marriage leading into a slowing building sense of hopelessness, that his life would just continue on autpilot. So the main character is a man with a sense of the greater held back by his mediocre situation.

The war comes into the book suddenly, and by joining it Claude is able to see the world and meet other people he can relate to. This is the most beautiful and insightful part of the novel, because Claude is able to have the insights about what is possible and beautiful in the world. It took war for him to feel alive.

His death, not unexpected, is cathartic because so much pain, anxiety, loss, destruction is described. The hero is dead; the anxious suspense is over. The narrator and Claude’s mother echo the sense that perhaps he was better off dying while he still had his ideals of nations and beauty, for the ones who survived met with horrible disillusionment, depression, and many killed themselves. Virginia Woolf deals with the same theme in two of her novels, Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway.

Somewher in the book is a line that maybe these men had to die and all of this destruction had to happen to awaken America and the world to new ideas. An interesting commentary given all the history and warfare that have followed WWI,what was supposed to be “the war to end all wars.” The only thing ended seems to be the belief that war could be ended, at least that violence could end violence. The 60s flower children /hippie movement felt that happy thoughts and well-meaning people focusing on peace could do it, but many of them became just as dillusioned as the characters in this novel, who were trying to achieve the same goal with weapons.

1918 Pulitzer: His Family, First Pulitzer Novel tells archetypal American story

Poole, Ernest (1917). His Family.

Won first Pulitzer Prize for Novel in 1918.

I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s The Years, but His Family is more personal and slightly less sweeping. The plotting is old-fashioned by today’s standards, but the characterizations are developed and strong. The theme is well executed.

A great document of its time and of New York City in the 1910s. I wish more adults of today would read the book because it shows many of the issues we think of as so contemporary have been with our society for some time. Above all of that, though, this book celebrates family life, kindness, and the idea that with your family around you, you can get through anything.

While the novel features several interesting male characters, it is the females who are most interesting. The work features three kinds of pre-feminist women, although my use of the term pre-femnist here is ironic since the father calls Deborah a feminist at one point. Deborah is a career woman, running a school for immigrant children. She rejects the traditional women’s roles because she is afraid of losing her identity. Edith, her older sister, is the opposite; she is married and has four children, and is pregant with her fifth child. She accepts the traditional, maternal, domestic role of a woman. Laura is the youngest, most carefree sister. She is interested in social activities, games, parties. Laura shows the materialistic woman, and hse married a wealthy man.

These early Pulitzer Prize winning novels show the struggles and hardships that are a part of the uniquely American experience. I think that when they were written part of their purpose was showing that people of all walks of life and personalities have troubles and obstacles in life. While His Family is quite dated in style, it contains some great lyrical passages that transmit the beauty of living and of the passing of generations. For us today, it is an interesting study in the expression, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”

1922 Pulitzer: Alice Adams, thinking about the American middle class

Tarkington, Booth (1921). Alice Adams. 1922 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Left with the thought of the fluidity of the American middle class. People work hard to a certain point, then it can come crashing down. The great opportunities presented by our economy sometimes can be cruel because people are able to prop themselves up artificially. Today we do this with credit and mortgages and all sorts of devices, some of which was different in 1920, but the truth remains in this book because the characters try to pretend to be what they are not (in Alice’s case) or they place social and financial gain above everything else (as in the ase of Alice’s mother), and the book shows that these tactics will not work when they go against the truer desires of life (such as Alice’s father).

The work sets up an interesting paradox: with our culture steeped in romanticism, we don’t believe in doing things against the true “spirit” of our desires, and yet in America so many of us go about reciting that we must sacrifice something to meet our goals and to look good in the eyes of others. The characters in this novel do not want to make that choice, they want both things simultaneously. The culture of the novel, which echoes American culture then and now, is that we are entitled to both.

The books ends on a “realistic” note: mother and daughter find their situation reduced, reality sets in. Alice seems to have learned to accept who she is; this is the most powerful part of the story for me, having been in that kind of revelation several times (and still not sure that I have really accepted myself and all the realities of my life). I relate to these characters because something in me continues ti endure with the American fantasy that I can achieve both the freedom of American ideals and the success in materialism/business/commerce/consumerism. Look at from the point of view of Alice Adams, Perhaps I am foolish and doomed to some miserable fate. But some sort of optimism from…somewhere.. nonetheless permeates the book and my life. Maybe it is just refusal to look at reality that defies the impending gloom and doom. Do the Alices or the Brians ever success in such a quest?

1929 Pulitzer: Scarlet Sister Mary

Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin spoke to me. I related to Mary personally; that was surely part of the intention: we all fail. We are all human. And American stories are always about people who don’t or can’t follow the rules or who do not do things the way others do them. The Gullah culture is interesting, the idea of the overgrown plantation with the Big House, abandoned and decaying; but still there.

Sin, babies, human nature. Mary’s spirit overcoming and really rising above the pettiness and limitations of this rigid church society. Of course this is a 21st century reading. It spoke to me because as I think about my actions and choices I cannot get away from thinking about morals of the past and consequences to society. So many of us today are like Mary but the world we live in does not punish us so absolutely.

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